Maritime Strike Spurs Warehouse Organizing in Early Days of Local 6

The Dispatcher, January 1995
Edited by Harvey Schwartz

HOWARD SHIRLEY

‘There were too many men that wanted a job.’

In 1932 I started to work at Encinal Terminals. They told me to come down and wait out front. When they could use me they’d let me know. They called that the shape-up system. Sometimes there’d be 100 men. Sometimes there’d be 20 or 30. When there was work along the terminals they’d come out and make up a gang at the front of the dock. If trucks came in that needed unloading they’d get you for that. As rail cars showed up they’d build gangs to unload the rail cars with pineapple or whatever. When they needed longshore gangs they’d pick gangs for that. Of course, there were a lot of experienced men there. Kids like ourselves would only get picked last.

I weighed 145 pounds, but I was physically fit. You had to be. We used hand trucks with so-called monkey boards. That’s a V-shaped board that went under the blade of the hand truck. When you loaded up your truck with canned goods, you could extend the load on it. You’d put one case on the bottom and criss-cross eight more on top for a total of nine cases. Then you’d break the truck over and wheel it. You had from 500 to 650 pounds on a monkey board. There was a high pace of work. When you got through at the end of the day you knew it. You had to get the work out. If you didn’t, particularly in the days of the shape-up you didn’t last. There were too many men out there that wanted a job.

When the ’34 strike took place, I used to go down and visit with the longshoremen and sometimes get them some coffee or doughnuts. They knew I’d worked at Encinal. I wanted them to be sure I was out there because some of the fellows stayed in during the strike. So I wanted to be sure they saw me, and that’s why they gave me a ’34 strike clearance card. It came in very handy because it was quite hectic after the strike. I was walking down the dock after the ’34 strike, and some longshoremen came down and beat the hell out of someone. Fortunately for me a guy said, “Don’t touch him, I know him, he was out there with us.” And I had that strike clearance card, too.

When we started the wages were 50 cents an hour around the clock. After the ‘34 strike they were $1 an hour and $1.50 overtime. And that’s when we began to make good money.

JOE CHAMBERS

‘I didn’t make any bones about wearing a button.’

In 1930 I did standby work at Encinal. You’d stand out in front of the joint; it’s the old shape-up crap. The work essentially was loading and unloading cars, to and from the docks. Car to ship was stevedoring. They never paid anything. See, in Frisco the scale was 90 cents an hour. Here, you’d work from 9 o’clock until 10 or 11, and he says, “Well, that’s all, come back tomorrow and see what’s doin’.” You’re neither here nor there; you work and you starve anyhow. It paid four bits an hour in 1930. Later I got 40 cents an hour.

They were signing them up in ’33. Most of them at Encinal signed up in the longshoremen’s union. Oddly enough, you had a higher percentage of clerks in Encinal that were strong union men in the ’34 strike than you did anywhere else. It was the degree to which you were paid, or the way you were treated.

When the terminals were first organized there was a tremendous bone of contention. But it became like a cast-off deal. Harry—the longshoremen—dropped contention for the terminals of the East Bay and left them to the warehouse locals. The terminals had a definite waterfront flavor. Very early on there was even a little friction against anybody who wasn’t off of there. I’m talking about the other places, like Haslett warehouse. Ray Heide and his brother Paul—they were early organizers—come from Haslett’s.

In 1933 I went to the University of San Francisco and played football, but I quit on May 9, 1934, the day the strike started. I went to the beach to hang out with the guys. They could tell who was missing—the son of a bitch might be scabbing. Alameda wasn’t that big of a community. They had brought in scabs. They used an old sailing vessel, The Star of Finland, as sleeping quarters.

After the strike I went to work at Plant 48 of California Packing Corporation near Encinal Terminals. The organizers were coming over to follow up on Encinal. Jack O’Conner, an organizer, come walking by. I was working in a car. He said, “When the hell are you guys going to join the union?” I said, “When the hell are you coming in here? When are you gonna sign us up?” So O’Conner come in and says, “How many of you guys want to sign up?” We didn’t want to do it in the open, but we signed them up. I didn’t make any bones about wearing a button.

There had been very little growth from the ’34 to the ’36-37 strike (there were strikes in longshore and warehouse during 1936-37). Mostly it was near the waterfront or tied to it. Crockett was the same as us. In ’36 it took off as an inland march. We were picking up people in the ‘36 strike. I think we went in a few hundred people; we come out of there, well hell, you couldn’t count ‘em. We had grocery warehouses paraffin—they had 300 or 400 warehousemen alone out there.

PAUL HEIDE

‘We signed up all kinds of people all over the place.’

I went to sea a little over six years. During the last trip I was on I shipped out a month before the longshoremen went on strike in 1934 and then it became a maritime strike. The ship owners cut off the news after a little while because they didn’t want to agitate us. They kept us on the East Coast in a milk run route. They wouldn’t send that ship back to the West Coast for fear that it would be tied up. I was the ship’s delegate for the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union. I guess I became the ship’s delegate because I was the most vocal of the bunch.

I got to Oakland at the end of August 1934. My brother Ray was working for Haslett Warehouse Company part-time. I just shaped up along with the other men and I would be picked now and then. I was making an average of $10 a week. Later my brother and I acted as high-pilers at Standard Warehouse, a place Haslett had leased. The wage for an eight-hour day were $3.50. That figured about 43 cents an hour. They would generally give people who showed up some work so they could keep a larger group of men hanging around than they actually needed. That’s how they would maintain the shape-up—by giving everybody a little bit.

I got active and was hired to organize on commission in January of ‘36. In the middle of ‘36 I became a combination organizer and business agent, which I had been anyway; I had already typed contracts—we didn’t have any office workers then. To organize we’d simply contact the people on the jobs at their lunch time or whenever they were free, or put out a leaflet and have a meeting set up at a nearby location. We never had any difficulty in those days. It was still the aftermath of the maritime and general strike of ’34; the employers were not anxious to get into trouble.

One of the first places we organized was El Dorado Oil because we already had the El Dorado Terminal organized. So, it was logical that the El Dorado plant in Berkeley should be organized. There was an older worker, probably the oldest person who worked there—a big, tall white guy in his late 50s or 60s. There was just one question he wanted answered when we had the organizing meeting in an old vacant store by the plant: that was if we took in everybody without discrimination. When we said, “Yes,” he said, “Okay, folks.”

When we were organizing, if there were black people working, they came into the union just like anybody else. At Colgate it was a little different because all the black members worked on the clean-up crew. There were several black workers on the East Bay marine terminals, so we always had black members because the terminals were the first to be organized.

At Albers Milling in Oakland there were women working filling lines and men doing warehouse and operator’s jobs. We just signed up the men at first. Then it became crazy that we would have a place organized but a number of the workers—just because they were women—would not be organized. So we signed up the women. At first we had separate meetings, just for a short time; then we had meetings all together.

During the ’36-37 strike we did a lot of organizing. There was a volunteer organizing committee, and we signed up all kind of people all over the place. The warehouse union grew from 800 to over 3,000 when the strike ended. When the ’36-37 strike started we had $10,000 in the treasury. When it ended we had $30,000 regardless of the fact that we had given $10,000 to the longshoremen. We gave to any labor group that was fighting to get organized or to win a strike. We helped them all out.

During the L.A. Spring and Wire strike of 1936 we organized the warehousemen and they served as a way for the United Auto Workers to organize the production people because we shut off the loading and unloading. There were times when other unions would be organizing and they would have trouble with the employer—he’d fire somebody and they would put up a picket line. A lot of times we’d just clear the hiring hall—everybody would go out on their picket line. They could always call on us.