Transcript for the Piece Audio version of "THE WORKING STIFF -- THAT'S WHO!"

He died 20 years ago this month .. .Harry Bridges, one of the past century’s most remarkable leaders …the co-founder and for 40 years president of the San Francisco-based International Longshore and Warehouse Union … the ILWU ...one of the most progressive and influential organizations in the world.

Twenty years. But I can still see him … tall, wiry, gray-haired. hawk-nosed. I can see him pacing behind the podium at ILWU meetings . . . nervously twirling a gavel, puffing incessantly on a cigarette … calling on union members … white, black, Asian, Latino, in the broad accent of his native Australia. I hear him actually encouraging debate and dissent.

Harry Bridges was not in it for money. His salary as union president was far less than he would have made had he remained a working longshoreman. Bridges was in it because of his unswerving belief in the rank-and-file, as he once told me– “the working stiff, that’s who! Can you understand that?”

I understood. Eventually. And though I and others sometimes questioned Bridges’ specific notions of what was needed by working people, no one could legitimately question his incredible commitment, skill and integrity.

Bridges saw his life work as shifting the wealth of the world from the rich who own it to the workers who create it, He began that task in 1934, when he led his fellow longshoremen in a strike aimed at winning true collective bargaining rights from West Coast shipowners.

As Bridges’ biographer Charles Larrowe recalled, “The shipowners said no… said it with tear gas, vigilantes and billy clubs wielded by cops who thought they were in the front lines against a communist takeover,” The waterfront,” said Larrrowe, “was turned into a battlefield.”
Police bullets killed 10 men during the three-month-long strike that also prompted a four-day general strike in San Francisco. But in the end the longshoremen got what they had demanded… most importantly, an end to the notorious system of job allocation known as the “shape-up.”

Previously, jobs were parceled out by hiring bosses in exchange for kickbacks from the longshoremen who lined up on the docks every morning clamoring for work. But after the strike, job assignments were made by an elected union dispatcher at a union-controlled hiring hall, using a rotation system that spread the work evenly among longshoremen. The victory was downright revolutionary, and had a profound impact on workers and employers nationwide.

Within two years, Bridges joined forces with Lou Goldblatt , the brilliant young leader of the warehousemen who worked with the longshoremen on the docks, They put together the ILWU …Ultimately, the new union extended its jurisdiction to virtually all waterfront workers on the Pacific Coasts of the U.S. and Canada … . and to workers on the waterfront and in a wide variety of other occupations in Hawaii.

Bridges and Goldblatt used their base to lead drives by the Congress of Industrial Organizations – the CIO – that helped spread unionization from the waterfront to many other areas in the West ,

For the ILWU, Bridges and Goldblatt drafted a constitution that’s still exceptional in the control it grants members. It guarantees that nothing of importance can be done by the union without a direct vote of the members.

Thanks in large part to Bridges, the ILWU also was one of the first unions to be thoroughly integrated racially. And it has otherwise been probably the country’s most socially conscious union.

The ILWU helped set important precedents that enhanced the civil liberties of everyone, thanks to the union’s strong opposition to those who tried to deny constitutional rights to Bridges and others by labeling them as Communists. The ILWU’s efforts included an eight-year battle against attempts to deport Bridges to Australia. The battle ended with a Supreme Court ruling that enabled Bridges to finally become a U.S. citizen.

The ILWU under Bridges was one of the very few unions to oppose the Vietnam War. .. .and frequently challenged oppressive regimes abroad by refusing to handle cargo bound for or coming from their countries.

Closer to home, the ILWU used its pension funds to finance construction of what it accurately describes as “affordable, integrated working-class housing” in San Francisco.

Harry Bridges led the way to that and much more which benefited the working stiffs to whom he devoted his life – and many, many others. As a newspaper that once reviled Bridges as a dangerous radical said on his death, “He sought the best of all possible worlds. This one is much better due to his efforts.” Boy, is it.

This is Dick Meister.

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