Representing the Union:

Introduction by Harvey Schwartz

SAM KAGEL

Edited by Harvey Schwartz, Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

In the 1930s there were lots of warehouses in San Francisco. The city was a big distributing center. You had public warehouses and warehouses in grocery, drug, hardware and coffee. All of them were part of the waterfront, really. Right after the 1934 strike most were still unorganized. But soon there was a conscious decision to move off the ’front and on to the warehouses. And for good strategic reason. They were easy pickings, too, because they were paying 45, 55, 65 cents an hour with hardly any other conditions. Those wages were low even for the Great Depression.

Eugene Paton was one of the San Francisco warehouse organizers. He was an extraordinary guy. I remember how Pat got recognition at this one warehouse that specialized in packing fancy Italian olives and stuff like that. Pat had the workers organized, but the employer wanted to go to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election. Congress had recentl” This guy wants a vote. Okay, we’ll give him a vote.”

I went to the plant with Pat. He asks the guy, “You want a vote?” The guy answers, “Yes.” Pat says, “Well, come on out to the gate.” Off we go. Pat has the steward with him. He turns to the steward and says, “Tell the guys to come out.” They start coming out, and Pat tells the employer, “Count ’em.” That was the vote—the whole company! There must have been a hundred persons working there. They didn’t stop work. They just walked out and walked right back in. The employer had his “vote.” He recognized the warehouse union quickly all right.

At most other places where the people were organized shortly after the 1934 strike, the employer either knew it and accepted it or, once in a while, asked for a card count. There was an “atmosphere” for union organizing in those days. People were eager to sign up and many employers got it. But this guy was so adamant that it had to be a formal vote under the Wagner Act that Pat got a little pissed. So he said, “I’ll really give him a vote.”

The public warehouses were the first employer group that we sat down to negotiate with. Wes Howell headed a key company in that group and he represented the employers. It had taken us a long time to get an agreement to meet. It was a real touchy deal. I can still see Wes Howell sitting on one side of the room across from Pat, myself and the people from the union. Well, there had been a movement within the warehouse local at the time that there should be an audience of workers. So we had an audience about two or three rows back.

I was the economics guy with the proposals. Therefore I started the meeting. All of a sudden one guy in the audience stands up. He says he wants to say something. Everything stops. He starts, “My wife passes the Roos Brothers clothing store on her way to work. She sees all the wonderful clothes in the window and she believes we should have enough money to buy them.” The place was stunned ’cause this guy was not part of the negotiating committee and he was not an officer.

Finally the guy sat down. With that, Wes Howell said, “I don’t think we should continue with this meeting.” It took another four or five weeks to get back into negotiations. Thereafter, we didn’t have an audience. We had a negotiating committee that represented the warehouse persons in a particular plant and any officers of the union who wanted to be present. Pat and I would keep away from guys who were constantly making what I call “speech 84b,”too. We had a job to do. The job was to organize and to get a contract that was acceptable to the persons affected by it, period.

Once a place was organized the employer would sit down and negotiate seriously or we’d have a strike. In those days we had a lot of strikes going all the time, and not only in the warehouse industry. There were strikes on at Safeway, department stores, hotels. During the whole period between ’34 and 1937, ’38, there was hardly a time when there weren’t four, five or six strikes going on. All of this union activity, of course, was inspired by the longshoremen winning the 1934 strike. That victory gave backbone to a lot of people to organize.

For example, how come the department store clerks got organized? Well, around 1937 the longshore union’s new warehouse local went on strike at Woolworth’s dime store in San Francisco. One of the clerks working there was a young woman named Marion Brown, later known by her married name as Marion Sills, labor leader. She was talking to the warehousemen who were on strike. From that she got an idea of what the hell a union was all about. Ultimately that led her to call a lot of people working in the big Emporium store and they arranged to have meetings at night. Bingo! You’ve got an organization going.

I was involved in an important labor dispute at the Santa Cruz Fruit Packing Company in 1935. The wage rates at Santa Cruz Packing were around 35, 45 cents an hour with no other conditions. With the conditions so poor at Santa Cruz, getting the people organized into the warehouse union was easy. I didn’t speak to the people directly or sign them up, but I helped the organizers with the planning.

Santa Cruz was an outfit that canned food and sent it around the world. Some of the workers there came to the union and asked to be organized. A lot of people who were working in various places did that after 1934. The demand was made upon Santa Cruz to enter into collective bargaining. In this case we wanted to get the company certified under the new Wagner Act.

A lawyer named Paul St. Sure represented Santa Cruz. He was the guy who headed the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) in the 1950s and negotiated the famous longshore Mechanization and Modernization Agreement (M&M) of 1960 with Harry Bridges and the ILWU.

Paul took the position that Santa Cruz was not covered by the Wagner Act because less than 50 percent of its product went into interstate commerce. Since the constitutionality of the act was based on its covering industries that affected interstate commerce, St. Sure thought he had a workable argument. I was not a lawyer yet, but the regional NLRB took the position I took and the union took, that the act still applied since interstate commerce was affected.
The case went through the court of appeals. We won. A couple of years had passed by then. I’d been dealing with Paul St. Sure on many cases involving many unions. He was a straight-on guy. We had a great relationship and rarely needed to go to arbitration. Of course, when it came to the Santa Cruz case, Paul—being an attorney—went through all of the steps right up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1938 St. Sure went back to Washington, D.C., to argue before the high court. The attorneys for the NLRB were there. When Paul came back from Washington he called me up. He said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” I asked, “Why do you say that?” He says, “Because of some of the questions these people asked me.” I said, “Well, congratulations, I’m glad to hear that.”

Paul was right. The majority of the Supreme Court justices held that Santa Cruz’s business did affect interstate commerce. Thereafter the Santa Cruz judgment was considered, in legal language, a “leading case,” because it decided an important element of the statute in question. One result was that it widened the overall application of the Wagner Act.

In the early organizing years, 1935, ’36, ’37, there were two basic issues that always came up. This was all part of the “march inland,” when everybody was organizing—hotel workers, grocery clerks—not just our warehousemen. One issue was that the unions wanted to have the right to arbitrate discharge cases. The employers wouldn’t agree to that. The other issue was the unions wanting to have the closed shop, which was legal in those years. A closed shop meant that only union members could be employed in a plant.

One day while there was a grocery strike going on, “Navy” Bill Ingram called me up. Ingram was the football coach at U.C. Berkeley who had his players scab on the longshoremen during the 1934 strike. He’d been dumped as coach and had been appointed head of labor relations for Safeway. He wanted to know what this closed shop thing was all about. Obviously, his background was not in labor relations!

I knew Ingram didn’t care about the union’s point of view. You think he’d be happy with the idea that the union wanted to be secure so it could beat the ass off the employers every year? Of course not. So I told him a union was like his business. You had to have a certain amount of money to survive. You’ve got rent, secretaries and so forth. He listens and listens. Then he says, “I can understand that.” Well, that grocery strike finally ended and we got the closed shop.

During a lot of other strikes, including warehouse ones, I would make speech 84b until I was blue in the negotiations. There would be no progress. Eventually I would say, “Listen, why don’t you call up Bill Ingram and discuss it with him?” I can tell you now that Bill Ingram settled more closed shop provisions for the unions than we ever got by economic strength.

About the discharge deal, well, we finally got it through the employers’ heads that if you don’t have some kind of internal machinery to settle these beefs, the unions would have to strike every time there was a discharge or a suspension. Many of the employers could ultimately see that, ’cause it made sense. That’s how we got arbitration clauses written into so many of the early contracts.

As is generally known, the ship owners tried unsuccessfully to bribe Harry during the 1934 strike. I even cited a Matson Navigation Company source on this in a memoir I wrote. Still, in my experience there were actually very few underhanded efforts to end labor disputes in those early days, or even after. Our area of the country was always pretty clean.

One time, though, I was in a San Francisco saloon called The Streets of Paris. This was 1937, ’38. I was waiting to meet with a guy who was coming from a union meeting. It was after ten o’clock at night and there was hardly anybody in the place. I was sitting there reading the newspaper when three guys came in. One was a little short stubby guy. The other two were great big monsters. They walked straight up to me.

I looked at these two big guys, who were what we called “goons” in those years. They were dressed in long black overcoats called “bennies.” I said, “What can I do for you?” The short guy answered, “I’m here to settle the strike with Owens Illinois Glass.” At the time I was representing the warehouse union in negotiations with that firm. I came back, “I have no authority to settle that strike. What is your interest in it?”

He said, “They used to supply me with bottles during Prohibition.” I asked, “What’s your name?” He said, “Waxie Gordon.” So I’m looking at this guy who I now realize is a notorious Chicago gangster. I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. I offered, “Do you want me to arrange a meeting with the union?” No, he didn’t. “Well,” I said, “I’ll be in my office tomorrow if there’s anything you want.” And they left.

I immediately telephoned Jack Shelly, then the secretary of the San Francisco Labor Council. He said, “I’ll take care of it.” He called the chief of police, whose men visited Gordon at the St. Francis Hotel, where he was staying. They asked him what he was doing in town. He said he was there to introduce a new cleaning process.
The police then saw that he went out to the airport. They put him on a plane headed East. He indicated he was going to stop off at Reno, so they alerted the Reno cops, who wouldn’t permit him to get off the plane. So off he went. That was the end of my experience with the gangster Waxie Gordon.

A little later, in August 1938, there was a big industry-wide lockout of all the Local 6 ILWU warehouse employees in San Francisco. By then the West Coast longshore and warehouse workers had left the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which they were affiliated with from 1934-1937, and formed their own new union, the ILWU. Most of the city’s 6,000 warehouse people were now covered by Local 6 contracts.

The contracts in different groups in the industry—the grocery houses, coffee houses, and so forth—had different termination dates. We used to go from one group of employers to the next trying to get a better deal in each set of negotiations. This was called “whipsawing.” The employers finally decided they wanted one “master contract” in the whole industry to stop the whipsaw.

So the employers as a whole locked out all the Local 6 workers in the city by moving a boxcar containing non-union products from warehouse to warehouse. That car became famous around town as “the hot boxcar.’’ Local 6’s members wouldn’t work its contents. The whole industry remained down for two months with the local insisting it would not give up the whipsaw or accept a master contract. That lockout was front page news for weeks in San Francisco.

I used to discuss the situation daily with Pat, who was now president of Local 6. We always got the early editions of the San Francisco Chronicle to read Paul C. Smith’s blasts at us. Smith was the editor of the newspaper. He had not been an unreasonable, anti-union guy before. Finally we decided we would write him a letter asking him to be mediator. He accepted.

Paton and I knew that when we got into mediation we would end up with a master contract. There was no way we were going to get the employers to agree to permit us to whipsaw. But we didn’t sit around and say, “Hey, they won.” You don’t do that. You suddenly come to the realization that, “Are we going to stay out another 60 days with nothing happening and we’ve got our people not working?”

Interestingly, Harry thought we should take the master contract all along. He sided with, for christsake, Adrien Falk, one of the main employers. We had a public meeting with the world there and both of them were arguing for the master contract. We used to call them, in fun, “the Bridges/Falk Axis” after the Hitler/Mussolini Axis. Anyway, from the beginning Harry said, “You guys are going to have to agree to a master contract.” And so we did. We also got some decent concessions in the arbitration proceedings that settled the details of the master contract in 1939.
Around this time the ILWU boycotted the export of scrap iron to Fascist Japan to protest that country’s invasion of China. I participated in the picket lines down on the waterfront. My point here is that this boycott was not related to negotiations or contracts. The ILWU was always socially minded, and not just the ILWU.

The union movement never said, “All we’re interested in is how much money we’re getting today,” because labor by its very history was part of a social movement. It always asked, “Who the hell got schools? The eight-hour day? The five-day week? Who was concerned about children working?” Despite all the contracts, that’s what it was all about. It was about concern for all people. That’s why the ILWU boycotted the scrap iron and I was on the picket lines, protesting what the Japanese were doing to the Chinese.