In April the San Francisco ILA membership suspended its president, Lee Holman, for dragging his feet in preparations for the strike. Holman had asked national ILA president Joe Ryan to cancel all union meetings on the coast in hopes of stopping the strike. Instead, the members dumped Holman. In his place they created a new leadership structure: a fifty-member strike committee, chaired by Harry Bridges. On May 9 the longshoremen in San Francisco, and in every port on the coast, walked off their jobs. The war-like tone for the strike was set that first day when one hundred police officers on motorcycles and horses rode into a crowd of two hundred picketers, indiscriminately clubbing and arresting the men.

By the middle of May the ranks of the striking longshoremen were swelled by the addition of all the seafaring unions, each of which, inspired by the longshoremen’s action, struck for its own demands. But for the first time in decades, it wasn’t a case of “every union for itself.” Quickly the unions formed joint strike committees in each port, and the longshoremen and the sailors agreed that no one would go back to work unless every union was granted its demands. In another key demonstration of solidarity, the Teamsters unions—first in San Francisco, then in Oakland, Los Angeles, and Seattle—voted to boycott the waterfront: drivers refused to transport goods to or from the struck companies on the docks.