Harry Bridges - Political Battles

Political Battles

Bridges hewed to the Communist Party line throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed in 1939, the party attacked Roosevelt and Churchill as warmongers and adopted the slogan "The Yanks Ain't Coming", Bridges denounced Roosevelt for betraying labor and preparing for war. John L. Lewis, the head of the CIO, responded in October 1939 by abolishing the position of West Coast director of the CIO, limiting Bridges' authority to California.

Bridges continued opposing the Roosevelt Administration, belittling the New Deal and urging union voters to withhold their support from Roosevelt and to wait to see what Lewis, who had now also split with the Roosevelt administration, recommended. That position proved highly unpopular with the membership; many locals had already endorsed FDR for a third term and several locals passed motions calling for Bridges to resign. He refused, noting that the union's constitution allowed for a recall election if fifteen percent of the membership petitioned for one. The ILWU executive board gave him a vote of confidence.

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bridges urged employers to increase productivity in order to prepare for war. When the CIO later adopted a wartime no-strike pledge, Bridges supported the pledge and proposed at the highpoint of the Communist Party's enthusiasm for unity—immediately after the Teheran Conference in 1943—that the pledge continue after the end of the war. The ILWU not only condemned the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Employees union for striking Montgomery Ward in 1943—after management refused to sign a new contract, cut wages and fired union activists)—but also assisted it in breaking the strike, by ordering members in St. Paul, Minnesota to work overtime, to handle overflow from the struck Chicago plant.

Bridges also called for a speedup of the pace of work—which may not have been inconsistent with the ILWU's goal of controlling the way that work was done on the docks, but which sounded particularly strange coming from the leader of a union that had relentlessly fought employers on this issue and which was rejected by many ILWU members. Bridges later joined with Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, which represented sailors on the East Coast, and Julius Emspak of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to support a proposal by Roosevelt in 1944, to militarize some civilian workplaces.

Bridges' attitude changed sharply after the end of World War II. While Bridges still advocated the post-war plan for industrial peace that the Communist Party, along with the leaders of the CIO, the AFL and the Chamber of Commerce, were advocating, he differed sharply with CIO leadership on Cold War politics, from the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine's application in Greece and Turkey to participation in the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Those foreign policy issues became labor issues for the ILWU in 1948, when the employers claimed that the union was preparing to strike in order to cripple the Marshall Plan. Emboldened by the new provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, which required union officers to sign an oath that they were not members of the Communist Party, outlawed the closed shop and gave the President authority to seek an 80-day "cooling off" period before a strike that would imperil the national health or safety, the employers pushed for a strike, hoping to rid themselves of Bridges and reclaim control over the hiring hall. As it turned out, their strategy was a failure and the employer group reached a new agreement with the union after replacing their bargaining representatives and enduring a ninety-five day strike.

At the same time, Philip Murray, Lewis' successor as head of the CIO, had started reducing Bridges' power within the CIO, removing him from his position as the CIO's California Regional Director in 1948. In 1950, after an internal trial, the CIO expelled the ILWU due to its communist leadership.