The ILWU Oral History Collection contains over 300 unique interviews and other recordings of union members and associates.   The genesis of the collection was a 1981 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to interview veterans from five representative bargaining units in California, Oregon, and Hawaii.  The NEH-funded project included workers in longshore, warehousing, agricultural, and maritime industries.  These recordings focused on rank and file unionists, although ILWU officers were also interviewed.

Since the initial NEH-funded project, ILWU Oral History Curator Harvey Schwartz has continued to conduct and collect oral history interviews at the behest of local or national ILWU officers and the Pacific Coast Pensioners Club.  In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Dispatcher newspaper sponsored a series of oral history profiles based on the interviews in the collection.  These were ultimately gathered into a book, Solidarity Stories: an Oral History of the ILWU, published by University of Washington Press in 2009.

The interviews included in the collection are full life histories that cover a broad spectrum of workers’ experiences.  In addition to examining traditional activities such as union organizing drives and strikes, the interviews emphasize questions on the subjects’ youth, on-the-job experience, race, ethnicity, and gender, and family life.  They thus paint a broad picture of the ILWU workforce and working culture.

In 2017, the ILWU digitized the oral history collection for the purposes of preservation and access.  Please contact the ILWU Library for further information and access.

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This site contains transcripts to several of the ILWU oral history interviews.  These were previously published in The Dispatcher newspaper.  In addition, we have a page of links to ILWU-related oral histories in other repositories.