1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike - Background

Background

Longshoremen on the West Coast ports had either been unorganized or represented by company unions since the years immediately after World War I, when the shipping companies and stevedoring firms had imposed the open shop after a series of failed strikes. Longshoremen in San Francisco, then the major port on the coast, were required to go through a hiring hall operated by a company union, known as the "blue book" system for the color of the membership book.

The Industrial Workers of the World had attempted to organize longshoremen, sailors and fishermen in the 1920s through their Maritime Workers Union. Their largest strike, in San Pedro, California in 1923, bottled up shipping in that harbor, but was crushed by a combination of injunctions, mass arrests and vigilantism by the American Legion. While the IWW was a spent force after that strike, syndicalist thinking remained popular on the docks. Longshoremen and sailors on the West Coast also had contacts with an Australian syndicalist movement that called itself the "One Big Union" formed after the defeat of a general strike there in 1917.

The Communist Party had also been active in the area in the late 1920s, seeking to organize all categories of maritime workers into a single union, the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), as part of the drive during the Third Period to create revolutionary unions. The MWIU never made much headway on the West Coast, but it did attract a number of former IWW members and foreign-born militants, such as Harry Bridges, an Australian-born sailor who became a longshoreman after coming to the United States.

Though militants published a newspaper, "The Waterfront Worker", that focused on longshoremen's most pressing demands: more men on each gang, lighter loads and an independent union. While a number of the individuals in this group were Communist Party members, the group as a whole was independent of the party: although it criticized the International Seamen's Union (ISU) as weak and the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), which had its base on the East Coast, as corrupt, it did not embrace the MWIU, but called instead for creation of small knots of activists at each port to serve as the first step in a slow, careful movement to unionize the industry.

Events soon made the MWIU wholly irrelevant. Just as the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act had led to a spontaneous explosion in union membership among coal miners in 1933, thousands of longshoremen now joined the fledgling ILA locals that reappeared on the West Coast. The MWIU faded away as party activists followed the mass of West Coast longshoremen into the ILA.

These newly emboldened workers first went after the "blue book" union, refusing to pay dues to it and tearing up their membership books. The militants who had published "The Waterfront Worker", now known as the "Albion Hall group" after their usual meeting place, continued organizing dock committees that soon began launching slowdowns and other types of job actions in order to win better working conditions. While the official leadership of the ILA remained in the hands of conservatives sent to the West Coast by President Joseph Ryan of the ILA, the Albion Hall group started in March, 1934 to press demands for a coastwide contract, a union-run hiring hall and an industrywide waterfront federation. When the conservative ILA leadership negotiated a weak "gentlemen's agreement" with the employers that had been brokered by the mediation board created by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bridges led the membership in rejecting it.

The sticking point in the strike was recognition: the union demanded a closed shop, a coastwide contract and a union hiring hall. The employers offered to arbitrate the dispute, but insisted that the union agree to an open shop as a condition of any agreement to arbitrate. The longshoremen rejected the proposal to arbitrate.