On October 12, the federal arbitrators unveiled their decision. The longshoremen were granted nearly everything they wanted: a thirty-hour week, six-hour day, coast-wide bargaining, and ninety-five cents per hour (they had asked for one dollar). On the critical issue of the hiring hall, the arbitrators imposed a hall jointly administered and funded; but they gave control over naming the job dispatcher to the union. Since the dispatcher determined who worked where, the union in effect ran the hiring hall.

The sailors had to wait until early 1935 to receive their decision, and they didn’t like what they got. The arbitration board ruled that hiring would remain in the hands of the shipowners. But for months the sailors had already enforced hiring of union men on West Coast shipping by a simple act: whenever a nonunion sailor was brought on board they stopped work until he was escorted off again. Now they weren’t about to let a government pronouncement prevent them from maintaining a union shop.

The shipowners were furious, but there was little they could do against the united sailors. It was as if the eighty-three-day strike had been a school in industrial warfare for the seamen. They were disciplined and effective. Besides breaking down the resistance of the owners, the sailors’ direct action tactics also finished off the old SUP officers. Furuseth, ailing for years, died in 1938, but he and the men around him had been left behind by the events of 1934. In their place rose a new generation of young leaders headed by Harry Lundeberg, who understood the power of instantaneous rank and file action and felt free to utilize it whenever and wherever necessary.