Blue Book dominance from 1919 to 1933 provided an effective tool for stifling the men's complaints, wiping out any traces of independent collective bargaining, and maintaining the employers' un- challenged control of the job. In other ports-principally Seattle and San Pedro-employers used their decasualization schemes to the same ends. No small part of the bitterness that erupted in the summer of 1934 flowed from the employers' almost total denial of the longshoremen's claim to be heard.

The Waterfront Employers Union signed three five-year agreements with the Blue Book union and met once a year with Bryan to fix wage rates for the following year. The employers gave him a "complete closed shop," Plant said. "If Bryan didn't have the men, he'd go out and rustle them up .... And his contract was inviolate; he had an incipient strike [in 1923] among the barley handlers [at Port Costa] and he hired strikebreakers and broke it himself.... [He] fired the men who went out on the wildcat strike and they never worked on the front again." Looking back later, Plant summed up: "I think we can refer to the fourteen years that followed as fourteen years of peace. "