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By Root 1672 0

Coast employers, no lambs by nature, by means of two general strikes and a sound sense of power and bargaining strategy. He had also fought off several attempts by the American government to deport him as an alien subversive. He was then in the process of reluctantly supervising the euthanasia of the Pacific waterside workers by negotiating the substitution of container and tanker technology for manpower, against ample lifetime pensions for the union members whose jobs disappeared. The union was still strong, and Bridges’ revolutionary convictions, expressed in an Australian accent that made few concessions to half a lifetime as an American union leader, were undimmed. He still dreamed of a general strike of the world’s dockers that would bring the capitalist system to its knees, for in the minds of watersiders the great oceans are bridges between continents, not barriers. Not that he had much time for seamen, all of whom, he thought, were ‘bums’, because they lacked the staying-power of a union on terra firma like the longshoremen, held together by families and regular communities. Nor, as a good Australian, had he much use for pommies. In his youth as a seaman he had once, he told me, kept company with a docker’s daughter in the port of London. This had given him a permanent contempt for the forelock-tugging acceptance of their social inferiority by British workers.

As it was 1960, we discussed the presidential election. Jimmy Hoffa of the teamsters (truck-drivers), the target of Bobby Kennedy and the FBI, was thinking of throwing his union’s vote behind Nixon rather than Kennedy. The teamsters’ goodwill was essential to both labour and capital in California, but Hoffa’s reputation was bad. Bridges, who felt no loyalty to either ‘bourgeois party’, saw this as a purely pragmatic choice. Was Hoffa not, I asked, in the hands of the mob? ‘He may work with the hoods,’ said Bridges sternly and from experience, ‘but he is a stand-up guy and so far as I know he has never sold out his members. What he skims off comes from the bosses, not the workers.’ Nobody ever accused Bridges of either becoming rich or selling out his members. He died not long after I met him, as San Francisco was moving far away from the city of Bridges and Sam Spade. I recall him with admiration and emotion. His union certainly knew about the mob. One afternoon its organizer, who later moved into the academic sphere, gave me what amounted to a seminar on negotiating with the Mafia, with which the IL WU had to coordinate its activities, since, though the Pacific port unions were clean, the mob controlled the unions on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Dealing with the Mafia, it seemed, rested on two basic assumptions and a knowledge of its limitations. The first, mutual respect, could be taken for granted. Both parties operated on the waterside, which was not a children’s playground. They knew its rules, the most important of which was that you didn’t snitch. Stand-up guys didn’t have to trust one another, but they could talk. The second was that no favours, however minor or symbolic, must be accepted from the Mafia, because that would automatically be interpreted as establishing dependence. So, there were always polite but firm refusals to suggestions that the two unions might get together to decide questions of common interest – say, a single date for ending contracts – in an agreeable location such as Vegas.

On the other hand, the knowledge of the Mafia’s limitations gave a politically hip organization like a red union the possibility of demonstrating what to the mob must have looked like power worthy of serious respect. Of course the IL WU had no power, even though, one suspects, the Representatives and Senators from Hawaii treated its views very seriously. It merely had strategies, national political horizons, committed and knowledgeable intellectuals, and it knew how to operate on Capitol Hill. On the other hand, in the experience of the IL WU, the mob’s economic perspectives were short, its political horizons local. ‘They talked to city aldermen and mayors