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hard-nosed stance led to a year of intense debate among centralizers and decentralizes within the ILWU. In a surprising speech to the union’s caucus in April 1957, Bridges demanded that locals abide by contract language and improve productivity. Opposition, though, was still too strong to overcome; automation issues were referred to the Coast Labor Committee for further study. The committee, consisting of Bridges, one member from the Northwest, and one from California, reported to another union caucus in Portland in October that shippers were increasingly demanding to pack their own cargo into pallets, vans, or other loads that would be handled as single units on the docks. It estimated that up to 11 percent of longshore work hours could be lost as these practices spread. “There is nothing, except our willingness to handle them, that prevents a very considerable increase in unit loads, made up by the shipper,” the committee wrote. It painted a stark choice: “Do we want to stick with our present policy of guerilla resistance or do we want to adopt a more flexible policy in order to buy more specific benefits in return?”18

The report opened the way to a remarkable debate among rank-and-file members at the caucus. For the first time, men from up and down the coast had a chance to learn in detail about the changes under way in the shipping industry. “Every longshoreman started talking about what can be done under mechanization and still maintain jobs and income, benefits, pensions, and so forth,” recalled a labor journalist who was on the scene. Delegates from Los Angeles and Long Beach, where practices such as needlessly unloading and reloading pallets were most entrenched, opposed any compromise. “Perhaps we have the most to lose of any local on the coast,” one Los Angeles delegate complained. Delegates from Bridges’s home local in San Francisco led the support for negotiations over automation, arguing that the union should make sure that members shared the benefits of new methods of work rather than trying to stop them. After two days of debate, a voice vote backed Bridges’s proposal to begin informal negotiations about automation. On November 19, the union wrote the Pacific Maritime Association offering to discuss new methods and elimination of work rules, with the desire “to preserve the present registered force of longshoremen as the basic work force in the industry, and to share with that force a portion of the net labor cost saving to be effected.”19

Again, the employers were less than enthusiastic. “Many of them felt that this was a form of bribing the men on the job to do the job they were hired to do in the first place,” St. Sure explained. Bridges and St. Sure, who had developed a close working relationship, decided that the automation issues were too complex to resolve before the contract expired in June 1958, so they put their immediate focus on one very fundamental change in the contract. The union had won a six-hour workday in 1934, but an unwritten rule prohibited an employer from calling a halt after six hours if loading or unloading was not finished; although the contract guaranteed a minimum of only four hours’ pay when a longshoreman was hired, a “normal” shift was nine hours—six at straight time and three at time-and-a-half. The contract Bridges and St. Sure negotiated in 1958 turned longshoring into regular, full-time work. Longshoremen were guaranteed a full eight hours’ pay each day—at straight time. This benefited some men but hurt others, because the loss of overtime hours paid at 150 percent of base wage meant less income for many workers. Only 56 percent of ILA members voted to ratify the contract.20

The start of Matson Navigation’s West Coast-Hawaii service in 1959 made negotiations about automation urgent. “There were specialized cranes that were built specifically for Matson’s operation,” a former Los Angeles longshoreman recalled. “Well, after the worker saw that, or read about it in the Dispatcher [the ILWU newspaper], it didn’t take long to sink in that this was the coming way the cargo