We have been hired off the streets like a bunch of sheep, standing
there from 6 o'clock in the morning, in all kinds of weather; at the
moment of 8 o'clock, we were herded along the street by the police
to allow the commuters to go across the street from the Ferry Build-
ing, more or less like a slave market in some of the Old World coun-
tries of Europe.

That, as Harry Bridges knew it, was the shape-up that took place
daily, rain or shine, on the sidewalk across the street from the Ferry
Building on San Francisco's waterfront. For hundreds oflongshore-
men, newcomers and old-timers, star gangs and casuals, the shape-
up was the historic core of waterfront work-an intermittent, tenu-
ous link with their industry and their worklife identity. It had be-
come a basic element in the system of labor relations maintained
and intensified since the employers had driven independent unions
from the docks and took total control of the jobs. The format of
the systems in the major ports of the Pacific Coast differed nomi-
nally, but they shared the inequity, the insecurity, and the indignity
that led to the explosive summer of 1934.