Bill Ward: 65 Years with the ILWU

The Dispatcher, July 1998
Edited byE Harvey Schwartz

BILL WARD

My dad, Fred Ward, identified himself in support of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was never a member, but he had great respect for their organization. He was raised in Kentucky in a miners’ locale, left there just prior to World War I, and hitch-hiked and rode the rails around the country.

I was born in 1927. My recollections come in about 1933. We were living in Compton, California. My dad got a fill-in job on the Pacific Electric, a commuter railroad in Los Angeles. He also got waterfront jobs on the shape-up for American-Hawaiian Steamship Company. Their berths were close to one of the railroad’s maintenance stops. By early 1933 he was in the longshore union, the old International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 38-82 that is now ILWU Local 13.

My dad got into a Dollar Line gang and stayed with it into the latter part of 1933. He also sometimes was a “floor runner.” That’s what they called a clerk who did the tallying work on the docks. A group of people in the ILA longshore local then were organizing the clerical workers. My dad supported them, preaching unionism and organization. Since he was one of their first organizers, when the marine clerks got their ILWU charter later as Local 63, they gave him Book No. 1.

Before the 1934 strike longshoring was all heavy, hand-handled work, and the men were fighting the speed-up at every turn. After those 12 and 18 hour shifts some longshoremen would go to the Robel Inn, a transit hotel in San Pedro where I used to deliver papers. They’d be completely exhausted. They’d sleep eight, ten, 12 hours. It was usually a day and a half or two before they were ready to go again. One time I went down there to deliver my papers and five or six longshoremen were getting rubdowns. They had hot steam towels they’d wring out and put on. Their legs were all sore and bruised.

In December of ’33 we moved to Wilmington. We went through the ’34 strike and got a house in San Pedro late that year. During the strike I used to sell papers at the scab compound, hear things the scabs were talkin’ about, and tell my father where I thought these people were gonna be the next day. This allowed the union to know where to demonstrate with a great amount of vigor. One day the scabs or the Pinkertons started giving me false information. So my cover was blown. Finally they wouldn’t let me back in there anymore.

I really didn’t realize what the hell was going on until after the shock of the killing of longshoremen during the 1934 strike. That was a clear recollection I could identify with. I knew many longshoremen. Their kids were in my age group and we hung around together. So that was an impact that really started me to be aware of what my father was up against.

My dad was a marine clerks’ local officer through the 1930s and 1940s. When World War II came, he got me a couple of jobs on the waterfront, but I was in the Navy for most of the war. From 1948 to ’50 I was a marine clerk. During the 1948 longshore strike we had a committee for procuring food. We used a boat I had to catch fresh fish that we distributed through Local 13’s food distribution service.

President Truman stopped the ’48 strike under the new Taft-Hartley Act. During the injunction period you did just enough to stay on the payroll. The discipline in the ranks was such that a dock gang of six men would load these old-time plasterboards. A jitney driver would pull these three boards on three trailers from the dock or out of a boxcar to the ship’s gear. The cargo would be hoisted. Then that jitney driver would bring those empty boards back to the dockside for more cargo—and only three loads an hour would be hoisted. The trick was to pull that all day and stay on the payroll.

The ’48 strike had historic significance that nobody realizes yet. We won, and we went back to work with a dignity and a pride that we’d taken on this shipowners’ industry and beat ’em. Our dispatch hall—the employers had attacked it—was intact. Now we could prove to em how good we were. We kept tellin’ the employers that come 1951 we’re gonna get what we didn’t get in ’48 and more. That wasn’t just common to L.A. either. That was happening in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Coos Bay and everywhere else.

In ’51 the employers rolled over on us. They tried to hide behind the flag and the Korean War, but in ’51 we got added holidays, more vacation, real benefit in the pension plan, and a welfare plan that was vastly expanded over the original one that came about in the ’40s.

By 1950 I’d discovered I wasn’t interested in the pencil side of the industry as much as the physical side. So I transferred to the longshore local. From 1950 until I became a CLRC member in ’63 I was a Local 13 longshoreman. In those years everything was break-bulk cargo.

Borax sacks, for example, came in 100 pound units. That was tough work because you were picking up a dead weight confined in a very small area. Two of you would have to throw that thing anywhere from three to six or eight feet to get it stowed properly. You’d put in eight or ten hours; in those days there was a ten-hour and then it went to a nine-hour shift. You knew you’d put in a day’s work—you didn’t have any trouble sleeping, either.

The days of loading hand-stowed cargo were a lot harder or a lot more detailed than what the words “hand-stowed” say. Visualize a Grace Lines vessel going to South America. They had upward of 26 ports of call on every voyage. There had to be block stowage of cargoes for 26 different ports. That means the cargo has to be stowed to make the ship seaworthy, but at the same time you had to have that cargo available for discharge when you reach each port.

The second thing that went into hand-handling of cargo was the art of building bulk heads—corners, so-to-speak—of cargo that were masterpieces of work that longshoremen learned through experience. Whether it was cartons, bags, sacks, loads of lumber, whatever, you learned how to intermingle the ends or the corners of those loads so that while the ship rolls at sea, that cargo’s not going to shift.

The bulkhead and the face that you built would look much like the pattern of a brick building. Then there were longshore carpenters who would put a wooden barrier up all the way to the upper deck. It would be nailed and wired into place sometimes with cables that reached to the ribs of the ship, and were held in place by sea clamps. You’d tighten that up with a turnbuckle after you put up a wood fence. So the hand stowing of cargo was a lot more than just picking the cargo off a pallet board and putting it on the skin of the ship. All this changed with the coming of containerization and the M & M Agreement of 1960, where we allowed the employer to introduce new labor-saving machinery in exchange for security for our members. We said we’re not going to lose a member in this transition. Everybody’s going to be taken care of. As it worked out, everyone was taken care of, and some of those guys are still living on pensions today.

Matson Navigation Co., with its vessel Hawaiian Citizen, set the stage for change. They introduced their operation in 1959. It gave the longshore worker an opportunity to see what mechanization was all about, even in the crude way it was done then, taking an existing vessel and raising the gear off so you’d have room to put nothing but containers on deck. There were specialized cranes that were built specifically for Matson’s operation. Well after the worker saw that, or read about it in The Dispatcher, it didn’t take long to sink in that this was the coming way the cargo was going to be moved.

I voted against the first M & M Agreement in 1960 along with nine of the ten Longshore Caucus delegates from Local 13, and went down and talked against it on the basis that I wasn’t opposed to the concept, but I was opposed to the amount that were settled upon. After I got over my mad at not having enough money, I went to work on the basis that we needed this type of a contract to survive and grow, and that whether we kept the old contract or got this new one, the changes were going to come on the waterfront rather rapidly.

There were a lot of people in the Local Caucus level that wanted the status quo to continue. There was good reasoning for that with a slingload limit and the make-work practice that had developed up and down the coast as a means of security. All that was going to be wiped out. Some people were leery that there wasn’t enough protection in the agreement as presented at the Coast Caucus level to preserve those long-standing conditions we’d gained that were based on informal “hip pocket rules.” But by and large the ranks had accepted the idea, and that showed up in the vote even in the first M & M Agreement that Local 13 turned down. The rest of the locals, or the majority of the workers, passed it.

Probably the biggest objection to both the 1960 and the 1966 M & M Agreements came when we had not really done our homework on the safety end. That’s when we finally got around to putting in the onerous workload safeguard and the contract language that said, in effect, that you don’t have to work when you, the worker, believe it’s not safe, and there would be no penalty.

This is the second installment of a new three­ part oral history series on the West Coast waterfront. William T. (“Bill”) Ward, our focus here, was a Longshore Local 13 Business Agent and then Labor Relations Committee (LRC) member during 1957-1961. He served as a Coast Labor Relations Committee (CLRC) member between 1963 and 1983.
Ward was interviewed in the 1980s by the ILWU/­UC Berkeley Oral History Project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He was taped again this year for a project sponsored by the CLRC. In excerpts taken from both interviews, Ward reflects on his father’s pioneer organizing in 1933, the ’34 and ’48 strikes, break bulk longshoring, the Mechanization and Modernization Agreements (M & M) of 1960 and 1966, and the ’71 strike. His comments also reveal his outstanding contributions to Longshore Division pension, welfare, and safety programs during his remarkable 20-year career as a CLRC member.

When you are an Administrative Trustee, there’s certain things that come up over a period of time that you just can’t cover in writing out a trust agreement. The philosophy of the parties in the ILWU and the employers’ organization, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), was that everyone who had qualifications—and these were very lenient, by the way—was entitled to a pension. Now, PMA and the waterfront employers didn’t have any records that went back through World War II even. Various companies had some records, but a lot of them had none at all. So we had a job there of verifying that certain longshoremen were here in those years.

What the parties had agreed to was that if longshoremen could prove they worked in the industry in those years prior to, I think it was 1942, then that was enough to grant them credit. Pension payments were made for the first time in 1951. All those people who qualified with 20 years went back to ’31. So quite a few of ’em had to have sworn statements that were notarized that said, “Yes, I remember John Doe. He was here in 1932 or ’33 or whatever.” We went to a great deal of trouble to make sure that all these longshoremen had their day in court, and when you look back on our track record of that original charter member pension plan, 99 percent of the people entitled to a pension got one. That included people who were still retiring in 1963 and all the way up into the ’70s where they had to have credit for years that were way back prior to World War II. As for the one percent, the reason we never got them was because they never raised the issue—we never heard from them.

Now, as to welfare coverage, the goal of the Longshore Division has always been to have absolutely no out-of-pocket expenses for members in health plans. We pretty much achieved that. We’ve cut down on a lot of the out-of-pocket expenses for the optional program. Our main thrust has always been that we have a program that makes the longshoreman’s wages truly his income, meaning that he’s not going to have to put out money for dentists and doctors. It’s still the union’s goal to have those costs completely taken care of.

By 1971 we hadn’t had a confrontation where we faced down the employer since 1948. The ’48 strike was on a principle of saving the dispatch hall. Wages weren’t a problem. But in 1971, we had just gone through two five-year M & M Agreements that changed the whole atmosphere of the West Coast. A lot of people did not think the employer was giving them enough on the bargaining table. In the minds of the majority of the workers, even though we’d had a good contract offered to us, there was more there and let’s get more.

For any strike I’d been involved with in the ILWU before ’71, we always wanted something that was going to be a permanent part of an agreement. The ’48 strike and the efforts made prior to World War II sought to build in certain safety precautions. In 1971 there was a departure from that. There were several issues—the steady man question existed, but it wasn’t the catalyst. The prime emphasis was more money, not some condition that was going to be an integral part of upcoming contracts. A lot of us found that to be a flaw in the thinking of the people advocating the strike. So when the strike was over, in effect, what we had done is go out for 134 days for 10 cents.

In 1974 I was appointed to the committee that was formed by the Department of Labor (DOL) in Washington, D.C., to put together safety standards for marine terminals. I served about nine months. There were two people from the ILA. I was the only one from the ILWU. There were employers from the East, West, and Gulf Coasts, and some representatives of the public.

The employers were quite apprehensive of any changes. The first four months of sessions were taken up with the representatives of labor and the public lobbying the employer members to loosen up. We said, “There’s no tragedy in some of these regulations, like having marked thoroughfares for vehicles on docks, having guard rails adjacent to cranes where they are run on a track so that people can’t walk into ’em, and having marine-type stretchers available and safety things that we’ve had on the West Coast for ages.” But in a lot of places in the Gulf and the South Atlantic, that was pretty foreign to most of those employers.

To be fair, there were a few times we introduced things that were in the Pacific Coast Maritime Code that we had been enforcing out on the West Coast and in Hawaii for years. But trying to have that put into the national code wasn’t something those employers were prepared to do. A lot of times that meant modifying our position to get something into the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) standard code. But this didn’t usurp our protection because that is covered under the ILWU-PMA longshore contract. We still have our marine code here on the West Coast. It is better than OSHA’s in some instances.

The terminal safety code that resulted wasn’t complete by any means, but it was a great improvement. There had been some very unsafe practices, especially in bulk-loading terminals where machinery was antiquated and not electric-proofed and there were sparks on practically a daily basis. Once you got enough dust in the elevators, with the right amount of cool air or hot air as the case may be, you had an explosion. So that was taken care of because all these elevators had to change over to spark-proof machinery.

I stepped down from the Coast Committee in 1983, went back to longshore clerking where I started, and then served briefly as interim CLR Committeeman in 1990. Today I can look back and compare things to when I came on the docks the first time in 1943 as a high school student. The only thing I took home was a straight-time wage, with overtime after six hours.

Now when registered longshoremen leave the docks after a day’s work, they take home a very high wage and benefit credits toward pensions, holidays, vacations, and medical coverage for them and their families. They have a fair dispatch system. They have the freedom of a 40-hour week. They can make themselves available for work just one day a month if they wish—that doesn’t guarantee ’em the benefits, but it does guarantee ’em a job. Is that a great union or what?