Work in The Coast Seamen's Union
The Coast Seamen's Union was formed while Furuseth was at sea, but he joined within three months of its formation, on June 3, 1885. Less than two years later, in January 1887, he was elected to the union's highest office: the secretary-treasurer. In 1889 he returned to sea but was reelected to the position of union secretary in 1891. It was during this term on July 29, 1891 that Furuseth merged the Coast Seamen's Union with the Steamship Sailor's Union to create the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, a union which is still active today. With the exception of a two-month period when he shipped out as a fisherman, he was the head of the SUP until 1935.
Furuseth was an important backer of the successful legislation known as the White Act of 1898, which among other things abolished corporal punishment on American-flag ships and abolished imprisonment for desertion in American ports. Together with Walter MacArthur, secretary of the Coast Seamen's Union, Furuseth compiled and published the so-called "Red Record", an inventory of the various brutalities and oppressions practiced upon seamen by officers and shoreside thugs.
One of many examples was in 1897, when the British four-masted ship Gifford was lying at Port Townsend, Washington, about to depart to round Cape Horn. Her master contracted with the keeper of a Tacoma boarding house to recruit sailors for the voyage. The boarding house keeper tricked the sailors into boarding the Gifford with promises of shore leave afterwards. The ship's mates locked them on board, paid the boarding house keeper $40 per man, which they then deducted from the men's salaries (on the false claim that they owed the money to the keeper). When the men refused to work, the ship's officers cut off food and water until they gave in. Beatings and other inhumane treatment were also common in other cases, and continued well after the supposed abolition of such brutality.
Less than a year after the birth of the ISU, Furuseth was involved in a meeting in Chicago, Illinois in which a federation of maritime unions called the "National Union of Seamen of America" was created. In 1895, this federation affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and was renamed the "International Seamen's Union of America" or (ISU). Furuseth was chosen as the ISU's president in 1897 and served in this position until 1899.
He took part to the founding meeting of the Asiatic Exclusion League in May 1905, which was almost immediately successful in pressuring the San Francisco Board of Education to segregate Asian school children.
In 1908, he was again elected to the ISU's presidency and served in that office until 1938.
Read more about this topic: Andrew Furuseth
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