Online Book Reader

Home Category

The Box - Marc Levinson [170]

By Root 927 0
P. Larrowe, Shape Up and Hiring Hall (Berkeley, 1955), p. 126. Andrew Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York, 2001), emphasizes the importance of spatial location in the maintenance of longshore unions’ power; although he specifically discusses the ILA, his discussion is equally applicable to the ILWU. A list of forty-eight “hip-pocket rules” in the port of Los Angeles, presented by the Pacific Maritime Association, appears in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Study of Harbor Conditions in Los Angeles and Long Beach Harbor, July 16, 1956, p. 14. The special importance of work rules to unions in an industry that relies on casual labor is emphasized by Hartman, Collective Bargaining, p. 41. For examples of the many rules in West Coast ports, see Hartman, Collective Bargaining, pp. 46–72, and Lincoln Fairley, Facing Mechanization: The West Coast Longshore Plan (Los Angeles, 1979), pp.16–17.

11. “Working Class Leader in the ILWU, 1935–1977,” interview with Estolv Ethan Ward, 1978 (Berkeley, 1980), p. 803.

12. J. Paul St. Sure, “Some Comments on Employer Organizations and Collective Bargaining in Northern California since 1934” (Berkeley, 1957), pp. 598–609.

13. Louis Goldblatt, “Working Class Leader in the ILWU, 1935–1977,” interviews by Estolv Ethan Ward (Berkeley, 1977), p. 784; Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher, “Conflict on the Waterfront,” Atlantic 183, no. 3, (1949): 17.

14. St. Sure, “Some Comments,” p. 643, claimed that Bridges carefully avoided calling a strike or letting the ILWU contract expire to avoid jurisdictional challenges. See also Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 352. Bridges’s testimony and much other information about the state of the Los Angeles port appears in the record of the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee hearings, Study of Harbor Conditions in Los Angeles and Long Beach Harbor, October 19–21, 1955 and July 16, 1956.

15. Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 352.

16. The formal committee statement is in “Report of the Coast Labor Relations Committee to the Longshore, Ship Clerks and Walking Bosses Caucus,” March 13–15, 1956, in ILA District 1 Files, Collection 5261, Box 1, Folder “Pacific Coast Experience.”

17. Herb Mills, “The San Francisco Waterfront—Labor/Management Relations: On the Ships and Docks. Part One: ‘The Good Old Days’ “(Berkeley, 1978), p. 21; Fairley, Facing Mechanization, p. 48; Hartman, Collective Bargaining, pp. 73–83.

18. Jennifer Marie Winter, “Thirty Years of Collective Bargaining: Joseph Paul St. Sure, Management Labor Negotiator 1902–1966” (M.A. thesis, California State University at Sacramento, 1991), chap. 4. In one well-known incident, the permanent labor arbitrator in the port of San Francisco was called to a ship to deal with a safety grievance and found only four workers on the job, sitting in the hold, drinking coffee. The rest of their gang, he was informed, had gone to a ball game and would come to work at midnight. See Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 352. Hartman, Collective Bargaining, pp. 84–88; ILWU, “Coast Labor Relations Committee Report,” October 15, 1957.

19. Hartman, Collective Bargaining, pp. 87–89; Sidney Roger, “A Liberal Journalist on the Air and on the Waterfront,” interview by Julie Shearer (Berkeley, 1998), p. 616.

20. Fairley, Facing Mechanization, p. 64, discussed how the six-hour day was “perverted” by subsequent practices. For details on the vote, see Hart-man, Collective Bargaining, p. 91. The leadership’s difficulty convincing members on this issue is evident from a cartoon appearing in the Dispatcher, the ILA newspaper, showing a tombstone with the epitaph “Here Lies young Mr. Overtimer—Survived by a Loving Family Who Wishes He Had Worked Less and Lived Longer.” See ILWU, “Report of the Officers to the Thirteenth Biennial Convention,” Part I, April 6, 1959, p. 11.

21. Longshoreman comment from interview with Bill Ward, then a member of ILWU Local 13 in Wilmington, CA, in ILWU-University of California at Berkeley Oral History Project. Warning about automation appears in ILWU,

Return Main Page Previous Page Next Page

®Online Book Reader