Representing the Union:

Introduction by Harvey Schwartz

Edited by Harvey Schwartz
Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

About 1906 my father, Hyman Kagel, came to San Francisco to avoid the Czar’s Army and to get his butt out of rural Russia where the Jews were being slaughtered. He knew my mother, Zelda, who was from a Russian village some miles from his. When she first got to this country my mother worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York. That was where they had the huge fire in 1911 that killed so many women who had been locked inside by the factory owners. Fortunately, my mother left for San Francisco a few years before that happened.

My father’s first job in America was on a hog farm in Colusa, California. He went there from San Francisco, but soon returned to the bay city where he married my mother. I was born in San Francisco in 1909. When I was about five we moved to the East Bay and settled in Oakland, where my parents bought into a small grocery store at the corner of 4th and Harrison. That was part of a poor working-class neighborhood then. When I was in the sixth grade at the Harrison Street School I used to collect stale bread from a local sandwich maker so we could feed the kindergarten kids.

At our house we had a little shed where my father piled newspapers to sell. My chore was to bundle them. I became a speed-reader by racing through the comic strips. Even before high school I read Jack London, who was from our Oakland neighborhood. Eventually I got to Frank Norris, Emile Zola, Anatole France and Upton Sinclair. Those guys were basically sociologists who turned out to be great writers. Zola wrote a fantastic story about coal miners. He also opposed discrimination in France during the famous Dreyfus case.

As a kid I worked loading watermelons into horse-drawn wagons for the local fruit sellers. My father drove one of those wagons. We had a fruit stand in the produce market. When the watermelons came into Oakland on trains I would drop a few off for the Wobblies who rode the rods. The Wobblies, as they were known, were members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW.

The Wobblies would talk with me generally in their economic terms, although we never had any great or long conversations. I knew about them though. Six blocks from our house there was an IWW reading room. About 1923 I saw a bunch of guys dressed in army uniforms trash the place. They threw the Wobblies’ typewriters, furniture and books out into the street. This was part of the post-World War I “Red Scare” of the early 1920s.

I also remember a couple of guys coming to our house around the same time. They wanted my mother to turn the minutes of the Workingman’s Circle over to them. She was the secretary of that group, which was an organization of Jewish people whose primary interest was supporting strikers. My mother wouldn’t give these guys the minutes. She was not even an American citizen at the time. I thought that was very brave of her.

In the mid l920s I went to the University of California, Berkeley. I paid my way working in the produce markets and passing out towels in the Harmon Gym. My senior year I was hired to read examination papers in economics. I graduated in 1929 and became an economics graduate student and a teaching fellow. Then I met Paul S. Taylor: the prominent labor economist, who was at Cal. He got me two jobs. One was a short-term appointment with the California Department of Industrial Relations. The second was with the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau.

I took the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau job on a temporary basis in 1932 and stayed for ten years. The Labor Bureau was part of a New York outfit. Our Pacific Coast office was set up in San Francisco by Henry Melnikow, who had been representing the typographical union in negotiations and arbitrations for a year or two when he hired me as an assistant. Melnikow was a brilliant statistician and economist. He really knew how to present witnesses and how to cross examine, too.

I couldn’t have gotten a better teacher than Melnikow. When he had an arbitration case I would do the research and help put together the exhibits. Remember, this was the Great Depression that started in 1929 and the employers were cutting wages. Usually the question was how small the cut was going to be. In increases you were talking about two or three cents an hour. When we got that, we’d go out and get drunk.

Of course nobody knew what was going to happen during the following nine or ten years. Between ’32 and ’41 or ’42 we had what I would consider 50 years of labor experiences all smashed into this short period. What a lucky guy I was, because I was right in the middle of it all.

When the unions began to stir in the 1930s, the Labor Bureau was the only place they could come to. Lawyers were not in the collective bargaining field yet. We only used lawyers when we got arrested. Generally the lawyers didn’t get into collective bargaining until the U.S. got into World War II (1941-45). When the War Labor Board was set up with millions of regulations, then the unions “got the shit in their neck, ‘ as we said on the waterfront, and the employers likewise. Then we all ran to our lawyers.

In 1932 the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau had a small office in Room C on the mezzanine of San Francisco’s Ferry Building. The Ferryboatmen’s Union, the Masters, Mates and Pilots (MMP), and the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association (MEBA) were all in the Ferry Building too. Our office had glass windows facing the Bay. I saw the Bay Bridge being built from the first hole to the weaving of the last cables.

I started to get acquainted with the longshoremen around 1932. That’s about when I met Harry Bridges. This was before the San Francisco longshore local was actually set up. On occasion the longshoremen would come around and talk with Clyde Deal of the Ferryboatmen’s Union. Then they would talk with us or with me particularly because that’s what I was assigned to do. Harry wasn’t a big name with us at first. He was just another longshoreman among several who wanted to get rid of the company-dominated Blue Book union.

Once Section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) came into force in 1933 things changed fast. Section 7A said workers could join real unions, although there wasn’t statutory enforcement until the Wagner Act passed two years later. Still, under Section 7A Matson Navigation had to put back longshoremen they had fired for union activity. That was a big deal. As Harry said, that was the end of the Blue Book.

Our Labor Bureau office developed a union petition and gave copies to the active longshoremen who went up and down the waterfront signing everybody into the Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). The union didn’t become the ILWU until 1937.

In 1934 the longshoremen demanded a coastwise agreement, a union hiring hall that would get rid of the fink halls at the other ports and the morning “shape-up” for jobs in San Francisco, a six-hour day to spread employment around and some increase in wages. Once the ’34 strike began and the other maritime unions went out too, the longshoremen expanded their original demands to include the requirement of a settlement for everyone.

I discussed all these things continually with Harry. These demands were solely what the longshoremen up and down the coast said they wanted. They were all pure “pork chop” issues. They were not designed politically by Communists, Republicans, Democrats or anybody else, despite the employer charges at the time that the ’34 strike was a Communist uprising.

Five weeks into the strike Harry became Chairman of the Joint Marine Strike Committee (JMSC) set up then by all the maritime unions. For all intents and purposes he was the Committee. There were other outstanding guys on the JMSC, like Randolph Meriwether, who headed the MEBA, but Merry did whatever Harry wanted to do and whatever I advised.

I actually became a member of the JMSC because of Meriwether. I represented his union and worked with him on everything. We became close friends. When they said to pick guys to represent the MEBA on the JMSC, Merry said he wanted me as one, even though I was not a member of his union per se. But I was made an honorary member in June 1934.

It was all very exciting. Here I was for God’s sake, a young guy in the midst of an event I knew was of major concern. I knew that because I already had this background in labor economics and history. I was full of piss and vinegar too. Hours and days meant nothing to me. We would go day and night, weekends included. There was no such thing as regular hours.

I lived in Berkeley, but could get to San Francisco easily because the ferryboats were not on strike. Sometimes, when it got late, I would stay overnight in this wonderful old hotel near the waterfront. It was right across from the Southern Pacific Building. I think it was called the Terminal Hotel. They charged a dollar a night. Sometimes, when it got very late, I just slept on my desk at the Labor Bureau. But I never felt put upon. This was part of the job. I was representing unions and I was a member of the JMSC. I wasn’t there for the fun of it.

Then came the battle on Bloody Thursday, July 5, when the employers tried to force open the port. I saw a lot, although, thank God, I didn’t see the guys getting shot in the back. I was in my office in the Ferry Building when everything started. You could smell the fumes from the gas and from whatever else the police were shooting, and you could hear shots. I left my office and watched the battle as it moved up and down the waterfront. The mounted cops tried to break up the crowds of strikers by using their horses’ rumps to move in and separate people. And I saw guys getting clubbed.

During the middle of Bloody Thursday, Archbishop Edward J. Hanna, who later served on the board that arbitrated the strike, got me on the telephone. He wanted to meet with people from the JMSC. The only other member I could get at that moment was Ed O’Grady of the MMP. We went to see the Archbishop. He wanted us to do something to stop the rioting. He was very worried about it. I said, “Hey, so is everybody else. People are getting killed!” I pointed out to the Archbishop that what was going on was beyond our control. It was the police who were using tear gas and live ammunition.

Despite the violence, federal mediation hearings were ongoing during the strike. I had to testify for the MEBA on July 9, the day of the great funeral march up Market Street for the two workers the police killed on Bloody Thursday. I cut the mediation proceedings off at the end so I could join the funeral procession. Nobody said anything while we marched. Except for the low music and the shuffling of shoes there wasn’t a single sound. We just got in line and walked.

I can still see the San Francisco general strike of July 16-19 held to protest the killings. I can still see it and feel it. It was an exhilarating moment at the beginning. I looked up Market Street and there was nothing moving. It was like in the movies where something happens and all of a sudden the film shows blank. But it was short-lived, as it had to be. It was really a sympathy strike that was ended before it could completely unravel.

We had Harry testify before the National Longshoremen’s Board appointed by President Roosevelt to arbitrate the longshore strike. Harry had been on the waterfront for years, had worked all type of cargo, and had been a member of a “star gang,” which was a kind of pre-strike steady gang that was really a form of favoritism. We knew he was articulate because we had been dealing with him, and his name was “the name” in this event. So what better witness do you want to describe the conditions on the waterfront? Harry was made to order.

We didn’t want to put on a lot of witnesses. There was no point to that. So we just used Harry. I worked with him for hours getting him prepared for the testimony. He and I used to sit in our office at the Labor Bureau, work hard, and drink Old Quaker, which was one of the earliest whiskeys that came out after Prohibition ended in 1933.

I remember how Harry spoke publicly in those days, and afterwards as well. He wasn’t given to impassioned speeches. He just explained what the situation was on the waterfront, what the longshoremen wanted and why they wanted it. He never got excited when we met with the JMSC or the federal mediators or when he appeared as a witness in the arbitration proceedings. Harry just knew where he wanted to go and how he was going to get there, and it was no big excitement.

Harry’s testimony to the National Longshoremen’s Board was outstanding and the union got its basic demands satisfied in the ’34 strike arbitration award. One thing the award did not cover was conditions like sling load limits. In those pre-container days the hand-worked cargo was moved to and from ships in slings. Before 1934 the loads were too heavy and were dangerous. So once the longshoremen were back to work they undertook by “job action,” or quickie strike, to cut down on the size of the loads. The employers screamed bloody murder about these work stoppages.

There was an arbitration system set up after the ’34 strike under which the Secretary of Labor selected arbitrators for the longshore industry. The first arbitrator, Judge Max C. Sloss, who had been on the California Supreme Court, decided some early cases against the union, including these work stoppage beefs. He called me at least twice to complain since Melnikow and I were representing the union. Sloss said the longshoremen were not obeying his work stoppage decrees.

I told Harry about this. He said, “Look, I tell the guys to cut it out. That’s the best I can do.” Finally he went to his membership. They took a vote and decided to seriously observe the Sloss awards. But in the meantime the sling loads were reduced in practice. There was some slowing of the cargo hook as well, which meant that the pre-strike “speed up” was eliminated.

Looking back, Harry’s great achievement was in setting up a democratic union that was exactly the opposite of the kind of autocratic union then in existence on the East Coast under ILA president Joe Ryan. Harry was the guy, there’s no question about it, and it wasn’t the Communists who did it. Harry was accused of copying the Communist line, which is crap. Of course, the Communists were very active in the 1930s and they were looking for credit wherever they could get it, but they didn’t have anything really important to do with running the ’34 strike or Bridges.