Don't raze hall where it all began-Bay Area ILWU Longshore Locals Call For Defense Of Labo

Don't raze hall where it all began-Bay Area ILWU Longshore Locals Call For Defense Of Labor Landmark

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Don't raze hall where it all began

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

We the longshore unions of the Bay Area would like to clarify a number of issues concerning the proposal to tear down our founding headquarters at 113 Steuart St. in San Francisco. Federal, state and city laws protect significantly historic sites such as 113 Steuart St.


This nationally important historic site must be preserved for the working people of San Francisco and the United States. On the 75th anniversary of the West Coast Maritime and San Francisco General Strike, which shook the world, developers are proposing to demolish our birthplace.

It was from this union hall that Harry Bridges and the Maritime Strike Committee organized, led and won the battle for union rights and recognition. This hall was the center of the three-month Waterfront Maritime Strike. It was ground zero on Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, when police and deputies, following orders, shot scores of union members, and where Howard Sperry was martyred (in front of the adjoining building).

The bodies of Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise lay in state in this hall for four days. The huge funeral procession of the International Longshoremen's Association martyrs on July 9, 1934, started from this hall, went up Market Street and across San Francisco. As the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1934, "This is war, boys, and Steuart Street between Howard and Mission is one of the warmest spots American industrial conflict ever saw."

The unprecedented mobilization and general strike, for which this building, virtually unchanged today, was headquarters, united labor unions across the city of San Francisco and changed the consciousness of working people throughout the United States and the world.

We are at a historic moment, when working people are again under unprecedented attack. We join other labor unions and cultural historians across this country in demanding that the redevelopment of 113 Steuart Street should incorporate the ILA Hall as a designated Landmarked Labor History and Education Center.

That living history is a prologue to our struggles of the future, demanding good union jobs in projects that restore our cities and serve the needs of the people who live in them.


Submitted by Rene Ducroux, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 34, San Francisco; Melvin McKay, president of the ILWU, Local 10, San Francisco; Brian McDonald, president of the ILWU, Local 91, Oakland; Allen Fung, secretary-treasurer of the ILWU, Local 34, San Francisco; Adam Mendez, secretary-treasurer of the ILWU, Local 10, San Francisco; and Brian McWilliams, a former San Francisco port commissioner and former president of the ILWU.

'34 General Strike laid base for counterculture
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'34 General Strike laid base for counterculture
Fred Glass
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

These days, when San Franciscans of a certain age respond to the visitors' (or their grandchildren's) query, "What made San Francisco different?" they tend to think culture. Beat poets, flower power and Castro Street are instantly recognizable tropes reflecting the city's historically tolerant attitudes and liberal politics.

But these iconic San Francisco moments and movements are actually more the lucky heirs, rather than ancestors, of what is uniquely San Franciscan. Although one might argue that the city's identification with things progressive arrived with the Gold Rush, its modern incarnation took form 75 years ago in an event now fading from living memory: the great San Francisco General Strike.

The strike established the right of working people to have a voice in the workplace, play a role in city politics and lead lives of dignity on and off the job. And it laid down the economic and political foundation on which the city's various countercultures could flourish.

On May 9, 1934, 10,000 longshoremen went on strike up and down the West Coast, protesting below-subsistence wages and the humiliating daily hiring experience known as "the shapeup." In this exercise in employer absolutism, workers gathered early in the morning on the foggy docks along the Embarcadero, competing with one another in a desperate race to the bottom of the Depression wage scale. Once at work, the worker might remain there for 10, 12, 16 or more hours. Injuries accumulated faster than cargo on the dock because of the frantic pace of the work. And should they imagine complaining, there were always more workers waiting to take their place.

One who refused to take it was Australian immigrant seaman Harry Bridges, who began working the San Francisco docks in 1921. Patiently organizing his fellow workers, Bridges and like-minded dockworkers reached out to the other maritime unions in May 1934, and within weeks, 40,000 workers were on strike, shutting down almost every West Coast port. Employer associations, supported by San Francisco government officials, police and the commercial media, responded with major organized violence. Police and the employers' armed thugs sent hundreds of strikers and sympathizers to hospital emergency rooms.

Bloody Thursday

On July 5 - what became known as Bloody Thursday - police bullets killed World War I veteran and longshoreman Howard Sperry and marine cook Nick Bordoise a few feet from the longshore union hall on Steuart Street. Their bodies lay in state in the building before being moved to the front of a enormous, silent funeral parade.

The Chronicle story noted that alive, the two men "wouldn't have commanded a second glance ... but in death they were borne the length of Market Street in a stupendous and reverent procession that astounded the city." The discipline of the marching workers created solidarity among other crafts and trades, inspired an outpouring of sympathy in a previously wavering middle class, and scared the bejesus out of San Francisco's ruling elite.

The conflict escalated into a four-day, mostly peaceful (at least, compared with what preceded it) citywide general strike. The work stoppage brought virtually all industrial and commercial operations of San Francisco to a halt. Although the San Francisco Labor Council assumed leadership of the general strike, its heart was the maritime worker unions' headquarters. After this display of determined collective power, the maritime workers gained union recognition, substantial increases in wages, and control over their hiring halls.

The San Francisco General Strike had enormous ripple effects beyond the Bay Area. Events similar to these took place across the country in 1934. General strikes rocked Minneapolis-St. Paul and Toledo, Ohio. The textile industry suffered a walkout of hundreds of thousands of workers. In each of these struggles, workers were killed. It became obvious that enforceable rules were needed to govern and resolve workplace conflict, and to protect the right of workers to organize.

With the San Francisco General Strike cited as Exhibit A, the National Labor Relations Act became law in 1935. It served its purpose for a time, extending a measure of the promise of American political democracy for workers to the economic realm.

But one of the greatest impacts of the San Francisco General Strike took hold behind the stage of everyday life in the city itself. Longshoremen, formerly the maritime employers' doormat, rose from casual labor force to working-class participants in what is commonly but mistakenly called "the middle class." With a powerful union as their entry card (or battering ram), longshoremen became upstanding citizens, homeowners, and - as one worker poet put it - "lords of the docks."

After the general strike, the longshore union expanded into warehouses along the Embarcadero and around the bay. Dockworkers brought tens of thousands of workers in the Bay Area's commercial supply chains into the union fold, and their families into a new prosperity. Their actions filled the word "solidarity" with meaning, as when waitresses were organizing, and maritime workers drank six-hour cups of coffee in shifts until recalcitrant employers recognized the women's union.

The images' substance

Today, resistance to oppressive conditions, the right to rebellion, and access to the good things of life have become co-opted staples of advertising cool, ripped off the aesthetic traditions of San Francisco's countercultures. Largely disappearing in the mists of time are the sweaty and bloody workers' struggles that gave original substance to the images.

The connection between economic struggle and a culturally rich San Francisco was once clearer. The earliest psychedelic dance concerts in the mid-'60s took place at the Longshoremen's Hall, and the Sailors' Union of the Pacific union hall hosts concerts to this day. These are signs of a larger but mostly hidden picture: a prosperous unionized working class capable, through its collective wealth and organized power, of sustaining and innovating a city's institutions and traditions. That flowering couldn't have happened without its root: the 1934 San Francisco General Strike.

Fred Glass is the communications director for the California Federation of Teachers.