Harry Bridges - The Albion Hall Group

The Albion Hall Group

The ILA renewed its efforts to reestablish itself on the West Coast, chartering a new local in San Francisco in 1933. With the passage that year of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which contained some encouraging but unenforceable provisions declaring that workers had the right to organize unions of their own choice, thousands of longshoremen joined the new ILA local.

At the time Bridges was a member of a circle of longshoremen that came to be known as the "Albion Hall Group", after their meeting place. It attracted members from a variety of backgrounds: members of the Communist Party, which was then trying to organize all longshoremen, sailors and other maritime workers into the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), as a revolutionary, industry-wide alternative to the ILA and other American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions; former IWW members, and others with no clearly defined politics.

This group had acquired some influence on the docks through its publication The Waterfront Worker, a mimeographed sheet sold for a penny that published articles written by longshoremen and seamen, almost always under pseudonyms, that focused on workers' day-to-day concerns: the pace of work, the weight of loads, abusive bosses, and unsafe working conditions. While the first editions were published in the apartment of an MWIU member on a second-hand mimeograph machine, the paper remained independent of both the party and the MWIU.

Although Bridges was sympathetic to much of the MWIU's program in 1933, he chose to join the new ILA local. When the local held elections, Bridges and fellow members of the Albion Hall group made up a majority of the executive board and held two of the three business agents positions.

The Albion Hall Group stressed the self-help tactics of syndicalism, urging workers to organize by taking part in strikes and slowdowns, rather than depending on governmental assistance under the NIRA. It also campaigned for membership participation in the new ILA local, which had not bothered to hold any membership meetings. Finally, the group started laying the groundwork for organizing on a coastwide basis, meeting with activists from Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and organizing a federation of all of the different unions that represented maritime workers.

Under Bridges' leadership, the group organized a successful 5-day strike in October 1933 to force Matson Navigation Company to reinstate four longshoremen it had fired for wearing ILA buttons on the job. Threats also issued from Longshoremen at other ports to refuse to handle Matson cargo unless the company rehired the four men.

(In 1994, Harvey Klehr published evidence from Soviet archives, suggesting Bridges was a member at one point of the Communist Party USA and served on the party's Central Committee for a time in the 1930s; there is no evidence he was a Soviet agent, though Klehr's The Soviet World of American Communism indicates that any member of the CPUSA's Central Committee was operating at the direction of Moscow.)