by
Fred Glass
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The cotton strike lasted more than three weeks. Its impact was felt not only in higher wages for the workers but also in the formation of the Associated Farmers the following year, a growers’ organization opposed to farm worker unionism. The CAWIU continued to organize until 1935, when much of its leadership was found guilty in a high-profile trial in Sacramento of criminal syndicalism. Several Mexican CAWIU leaders, including John Diaz and Francisco Medina, were deported. Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker served time in prison. Chambers became the unwilling model for one of the main characters in John Steinbeck’s fictional portrayal of farm labor strife, In Dubious Battle. In real life, after prison, he worked quietly as a union carpenter.
Like cotton workers, these women shared the recent heritage of the Mexican Revolution. While their relationship to the politics of the revolution varied, they understood collective resistance to oppression. Many had eagerly followed recent events in the garment industry in the eastern United States, and knew, if incompletely, of the NRA. They readily responded to Pesotta’s attention, like these employees of the Clare Dress Company.
“We want a strike,” said Carmela, a tiny creature with flashing black eyes. “We want to picket our shop.” “Have you ever been on strike before?” I asked. “No, but if others can go out and win, like the Philadelphia and New York dressmakers, why can’t we?” “They say the NRA is back of us—what is the NRA anyway?” another wanted to know.
Without officially issuing a strike call, Pesotta marshaled her forces. The two hundred member “organization committee” met in the hall the evening of October 11. The activists were told to report the next morning at 5 A.M. to receive flyers to distribute. When they arrived, they found the flyers were headlined, “Dressmakers’ general strike declared today!” They took their bundles to their shops and the strike began. Instead of reporting to work, more than three thousand workers walked to the union hall and registered for their strike cards. Another thousand simply refused to work. Nearly the entire Los Angeles garment industry was shut down.
ON MAY 9, 1934, SAN FRANCISCO LONGSHOREMEN got tired of waiting. They had waited patiently for negotiations to produce an acceptable agreement. They had postponed striking when President Roosevelt asked them to, even though they had voted for a coast-wide walkout by an overwhelming 6,616 to 699. They had waited for a government-appointed mediation board to come up with a reasonable resolution to their differences with the waterfront employers.
Since they had been waiting for fifteen years, they figured they could wait a few months longer. But when all their other options failed, twelve thousand longshoremen from every major port along the West Coast walked off their jobs.
This was the beginning of an eighty-three-day struggle. By the time it was over forty thousand maritime workers had joined in a remarkable display of solidarity and courage. Several workers had been killed and hundreds injured. Close to a thousand workers, supporters, and innocent bystanders had been arrested. But shipping had been brought to a complete standstill along the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts. Most astonishingly, San Francisco workers staged a four-day general strike, shutting down the entire city, to protest employer and government-sponsored violence against working people. As a result industrial unionism took root in California and the entire West Coast.
An organization called the “Longshoremen’s Association of San Francisco and the Bay Area” issued little blue books to longshoremen. To get work on the docks, you had to belong to the “blue book union.” (The books were blue to distinguish them from the red books issued by the old ILA Riggers and Stevedores union.) The trouble was, the so-called Longshoremen’s Association wasn’t a union at all. Created by gang bosses during the 1919 strike and run by the employers, it existed to prevent the formation of a real union.
Harry Bridges attended one meeting. He reflected, “It became obvious to me that it was a company controlled union and a racket.” Bridges, born in Australia in 1901 to a Catholic family, went to sea at fifteen and was shipwrecked twice. His exposure to sailors’ conditions and a general strike in Australia during World War I began his union education.
In San Francisco, a handful of waterfront Communists, a few ex-Wobblies, and fed-up rank and file longshoremen—including Bridges—had been producing an occasional mimeographed newsletter. The Waterfront Worker enjoyed a wide readership among the frustrated dockworkers because the ideas in its pages resonated with their experience. It urged longshoremen to create a militant industrial union that would not only stand up for them but act in solidarity with other maritime workers too.
The publication also insisted on democratic unionism, arguing that rank and file workers should debate policy and vote on all major decisions. The Waterfront Worker helped focus the attention of the ILA’s new rank and file members on a few key demands: sharing the available work equitably through a union-controlled hiring hall, a dollar an hour wage, coast-wide bargaining, and a six-hour day and thirty-hour work week.
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.
But this was just the beginning of the employers’ assault and the strikers’ response. In San Francisco a thousand or more strikers would gather daily on the Embarcadero, the street running the length of the docks, and march quietly behind the American flag and union banners. On May 28 hundreds of police suddenly and without warning attacked the marchers with clubs, tear gas, and finally bullets, shooting one striker in the back.
One of the police captains presiding over the attack justified his actions on the grounds that the strikers were “led by Communists.” His lieutenant vowed that “If the strikers come back for more, you’ll find some of them in the morgue after the next time.” Both of these men were later dismissed from the force in disgrace for corruption. But for the time being their comments were widely and approvingly reprinted in the newspapers.
National ILA president Joe Ryan flew out from New York and quickly signed an agreement with the employers. The expensively dressed Ryan, a close friend of business leaders and government officials in the East Coast, didn’t have a clue about the desires of West Coast longshoremen. They had been developing a perspective of solidarity with the other maritime unions, best summed up in the old Wobbly slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” They had also created a democratic coast-wide union structure with rank and file representatives elected from all the docks.
Ryan didn’t care about workers in other unions, and even less for union democracy. Accustomed to running his New York local and the national ILA as he pleased—often enforcing his will with gangs of hired criminals—Ryan viewed rank and file participation in union policies as “communistic.” (Twenty years later Ryan went to prison for using the union treasury as his personal bank account.)
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Meanwhile, Harry Bridges was rising fast as a leader, due to his fearlessness, grasp of strategy, and a brilliantly direct speaking style. He was elected to chair the coast-wide Joint Marine Strike Committee of all ten unions. He later explained to a government-appointed mediation board the reasons why the longshoremen rejected Ryan’s agreement. “If we do not control the halls the unions can and will be destroyed by discrimination and blacklisting, and the men who took part in this strike would be driven out of the industry. We can’t permit a fink hall.” Emphasizing the solidarity of the different groups of workers, he added, “We don’t intend to repeat our former mistake of one group settling without the other. The maritime workers will go back to work only when all of their controversies are settled.”
Ryan’s peevish last words, before he returned to the East Coast: “Bridges does not want this strike settled. My firm belief is that he is acting for the communists.”