May 18, 2004
ILWU Oral History Project Volume VII, Part III
Introduction by Harvey Schwartz
This is the last of a three-part series featuring veteran longshore workers from the Pacific Northwest. Phil Lelli, the focus of this month’s oral history, was Local 23 president almost continuously between 1966 and 1985. Today he is a legendary ILWU figure. Among his many accomplishments, he organized and negotiated contracts for dozens of people working near the Tacoma waterfront, port rail track and dock maintenance personnel, railroad intermodal yard employees, mechanics, even office staff.
As his oral history reveals, Lelli worked tirelessly with Local 23 business agent George Ginnis and port officials to attract cargo and jobs into Tacoma. In 1977 Lelli became the first longshore worker elected president of Tacoma’s mainstream Propeller Club. That organization honored him later as Tacoma Master Mariner for 1982.
Lelli spearheaded the Local 23 project that produced Ronald Magden and A. D. Martinson’s invaluable book, “The Working Waterfront: The Story of Tacoma’s Ships and Men” (1982).
This success led to another excellent Tacoma history, Magden’s “The Working Longshoreman” (1991). Lelli also served on the planning committee for the Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies at the University of Washington, founded in 1992.
Tacoma’s waterfront history is unique. Several longshore strikes on the West Coast between 1916 and 1923 ended in disaster. Of all the major coast ports, only Tacoma retained worker-controlled unionism from the early 1920s to 1934. In 1937, three years after the re-emergence of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) coastwise and the victory in the Big Strike, Harry Bridges led most of the region’s waterfront workers out of the ILA and into the new ILWU. Tacoma, with its heritage of survival within the ILA, was the only major port that did not enter the militant new organization.
Tacoma joined small units at Anacortes and Port Angeles in staying with the ILA. The three areas became know as the Northwest’s “exception ports.” William T. (Paddy) Morris, Tacoma’s long-term leader, feuded bitterly with Harry Bridges in the late 1930s. As an ILA loyalist, Morris felt Bridges was too radical. Tacoma did not enter the ILWU until 1958.
Over the years the independent-minded Tacoma longshore unionists developed their own distinct approach to getting things done. Phil Lelli became Local 23 president shortly after Tacoma joined the ILWU. In office he guided Tacoma’s adjustment to its new international affiliation while preserving the core of its proud tradition. I interviewed Lelli near Tacoma in 2002.
PHIL LELLI
Edited by Harvey Schwartz, Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection
My father’s parents came from Italy, my mother’s from Germany. They were first generation here. I was born near Tacoma in 1929, when the ethnic groups were all still divided, the Italians in one section of town, the Germans in another. It was remarkable that my parents ever got married. They were both Catholics. That kind of brought them together.
My German grandfather was a blacksmith. He came west to Tacoma with the railroad. When he was 75 he dropped dead at his forge. That’s the reward you got for working a lifetime for somebody in those days.
My Italian great grandfather came to this country as an indentured worker bound to the coal mines of southern Illinois. After his indenture time ended he came out here.
My folks lived in a little farm town near Tacoma called Edgewood. Dad formed a small grocery store in 1931, during the Depression. He was kind of the caretaker of the community. He had credit on his books and tried to live his life treating people as they needed to be treated to live.
A lot of the longshoremen from Tacoma could not make a good living during the Depression. They migrated to little farm areas like Edgewood, worked one or two days a month as longshoremen, and tried to raise a cow and a few chickens as supplements. There were quite a few of these longshoremen in Edgewood, and I grew up with their kids. Since my dad had the grocery store he knew most of the longshoremen and their families.
I graduated from Fife High School in 1947, worked on the railroad for three years and played a season of football on a scholarship at Pacific Lutheran College. Then I became a union asbestos worker. But I’d gotten married, didn’t like the travel and started hearing stories about how unhealthy asbestos was. I also didn’t appreciate the competitiveness in the building trades, where the guy you were working with didn’t care if you got fired or not.
In 1955 this longshoreman friend of my dad’s asked me, “Do you want to try longshoring?” I said, “Yes.” I’d already worked a few times as an extra longshoreman. It was kind of a macho job at that time. You picked up heavy sacks and timbers. There was no automation whatsoever. But I was big and strong, so the work that was hard for one guy was easy for me.
My first waterfront job was with Roy Johnson’s gang in 1948. It was carrying 180 pound wheat sacks down at Sperry’s dock. At first it was tough even for me to carry those things, but as soon as I learned how to handle them I was pretty good at it.
I used to show how strong I was by carrying one sack on top of the other. That’s 360 pounds. There weren’t many guys who could do that. The longshoremen admired people that were strong. When they saw a strong young kid, they treated him differently than they would a guy they thought they might have to carry. I was well accepted in 1955 as what we then called a “permit man.” A year later I got my full union book.
Doing your share of the work was something to those longshoremen. The guys that were heroes on the Tacoma waterfront were the hard workers. I’ll tell you where I think that attitude came from. In 1916 the Tacoma longshoremen went on strike and lost. They didn’t lose their union, but they lost control of dispatching. The union men thought, “The only way we’re going to get our control back is to outwork the finks.” Those were the strikebreakers who were getting dispatched to lots of jobs. The union men did outwork those guys, and the employers couldn’t pass up the fact that they got more tons a day out of the union members.
After a year or so the union men captured their work back. Now the productive gangs the employers wanted had all union guys in them. From the early 1920s until the 1934 strike, we were the only ones that had union-controlled dispatching on the West Coast. All the later West Coast union dispatch halls took Tacoma as the example.
In 1961 I became a steady gear locker man. Longshore work was intermittent. I had four children. It made it difficult to budget your money on a day or two’s work a week. One day I was down on the waterfront welding up my old boat trailer. This guy said, “Do you know how to weld?” I’d taken welding in high school. I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Would you like to come in here for a couple of days?” I said, “Sure.” That’s how I went to work in a gear locker. My work there was interrupted a few times at first, but I ended up staying as a gear locker man for 31 years.
As a gearman before containers you built the hoisting equipment. You decided what kinds of slings you needed. To some degree you were a rigger. You did the splicing and a little welding. You do less of that stuff today because it doesn’t take much of a guy to rig a container. Sometimes I spent every day for a week splicing cable just to keep up with what the longshoremen were doing.
During the mid-1950s, before we were in the ILWU, the ILWU locals around us in Seattle and Olympia let us travel to them for jobs. This was important because at the time there wasn’t a lot of work in Tacoma. Then the ILWU cut us off. They said, “If you came into the ILWU, you’d still be able to travel.”
We were then affiliated with a new AFL group called the International Brotherhood of Longshoremen (IBL). This dated from 1953, when our old group, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) got kicked out of the AFL for being ridden with gangsters. Well, there was a larger faction all the time in Tacoma that wanted to work through the ILWU. They were willing to sacrifice the IBL and did so in 1957 when they cut off paying the IBL per capita tax. Now there had to be a vote, and the majority by far voted to join the ILWU, which we did in early 1958.
There were some guys that never came back to union meetings after that. They said, “I’m not admitting that we should have been in the ILWU.” Some resisted because Bridges was branded a communist. We’d been here all by ourselves, too, with this Paddy Morris syndrome. I certainly didn’t quit going to union meetings or anything, although I voted for us to be independent. I’d seen how the AFL worked through the building trades and I didn’t want a centralized union telling me what to do.
I thought being independent we could achieve the best of everything. I would have said to the ILWU, “We want to travel, and we’ll give you benefits if you want an alliance with us. If you have a problem, we won’t work your ships.” We’d be kind of an empire of our own.
That really is the way Tacoma was. Even though we’d been in the IBL, the AFL and the ILA, we were still independent because we were so far from them. After we got in the ILWU, we didn’t look to San Francisco either. When George Ginnis and I were in charge of the local for 20 years we made our own decisions. I was usually the president. George was the business agent. We told the Bridges faction, or whatever you want to call them, what we thought was best for Tacoma and how we wanted to operate.
Actually, I think Bridges endorsed us. This was because, like us, he had a fair work ethic. I was told by people who knew him when he was young that he was a good worker himself. In line with our own work ethic, George and I did something in Tacoma that nobody else did. We put together a package where we wouldn’t draw money under the Pay Guarantee Plan (PGP) set up after the 1971 strike. We passed a rule in the 1980s saying if there was any work in Tacoma, you had to take it or you couldn’t qualify for the PGP wage guarantee. Since there was always grunt work, the guy who wouldn’t do any had as his penalty that he couldn’t sign up for PGP.
This was one way we retained the Tacoma work ethic that existed when I came here. If you were a crane driver today, tomorrow if there was just shoveling ore in the hold of a ship, that’s the job you took. You weren’t on top of no mountain anyplace. One day you were the guy in the hold, the next day you might be driving winch and the following day you might be humping sacks in the warehouse.
George Ginnis was probably the hardest working guy the Tacoma waterfront has ever seen. His basic philosophy was the same as mine: work hard, get a lot of work into Tacoma and we’ll produce more opportunity for ourselves. We carried that to the employer too. We had a unique situation in Tacoma. The port was entirely owned by Pierce County. It turned out that you could work with the people who ran the port to try to get more cargo and more opportunity onto our waterfront.
George ran the local on a day-to-day basis. I was more involved with the port as a political thing. I was never a full-time paid president, although I was offered the job several times. I always opposed the idea. Instead, I had my own little domain over at the gear locker. There was more union stuff in that gear locker than there was gear locker stuff.
The company never said anything to me though. I ran the show the way I wanted. For example, T.A. (Tiny) Thronson, who was a 1934 strike veteran, used to sit me in the corner of the gear locker and talk the philosophy of the union to me at length. “Do a hard day’s work,” he always preached, “and you’ll get rewarded with more opportunity.” Tiny became a stevedore company manager, but his heart was truly with the working guy.
I’ll tell you the kind of man Tiny was. The day the Tacoma longshoremen cleaned the scabs off the Seattle waterfront in ’34, Tiny went in on the first dock. At the bottom of the gangplank, the mate shoved a rifle in his stomach and said, “Try to come aboard and I’ll blow your guts out.” Tiny says, “Go ahead. These guys will take care of you.” The guy put the gun down and the longshoremen went aboard and routed the scabs.
So that’s the kind of guts and the kind of leadership Tiny offered. He gave me a five-year education before he retired in 1970. I was getting paid my wages, and it probably cost the company money. But they ended up making money because we produced opportunities for that company and for everybody else.
E. L. (Roy) Perry also learned a lot talking with Tiny. Roy Perry was the Tacoma port manager from 1964 to 1978. He got there at the right time, when the waterfront was changing from the pier concept to container terminals. Here we were, a little chicken-shit port that didn’t have nothing but a lot of land. Perry got federal money to subsidize the building of terminal complexes. He hired the right people, had the right work ethic, modernized the port and worked closely with us.
Our cooperation with Perry started with a raw rubber project he promoted in the mid-1960s. We never had rubber before. It’s a dangerous, difficult commodity to handle. The longshoremen worked their asses off, but were only producing 11-12 tons of discharged rubber an hour. We weren’t going to be able to survive because other ports were producing 18-20 tons an hour with the same amount of men. So we got together with Perry to consider what to do.
As a result, the longshoremen sent three or four people around the United States with two or three people from the port to study the different places handling rubber. They went to the Great Lakes and to Hampton Roads, Virginia. When they came back the port bought new equipment and improved the system of processing rubber through the warehouse. In eight or nine months we were producing 24 tons an hour, four tons better than most ports. Before we were done Tacoma was the number one importer of rubber in the United States.
Here’s another example of how we cooperated with Perry, this time in the late 1960s. Perry was not afraid to come to our union meetings to speak. That’s not normally done by a port manager. He got a contract for Panasonic electrical products to come through the Port of Tacoma. Before the first shipment, he came to a Local 23 meeting and said, “If you guys see things you want, steal like hell off the first Panasonic ship, because it’ll probably be the last.”
When he left the meeting we hired the best damn police force the waterfront has ever seen—the longshoremen themselves. If you monkeyed with anything on a Panasonic ship, you were told by the guy next to you, “Put it back. Don’t open the box. You’re screwing with our jobs.”
Soon we had 100 people working on Panasonic stuff. We developed a container freight station just for Panasonic. In eight years we only lost one transistor radio. Panasonic changed their whole distribution system and made Tacoma one of their key places in the entire United States, all because there was no pilferage here. We had all this Panasonic work until the 1990s when they restructured distribution again.
We got all these jobs, of course, because of a cooperative attitude on the part of Perry and the Port of Tacoma and because the longshoremen wanted to increase their work opportunities. I even started to estimate the amount of man-hours it took to work certain products. Then Ginnis would tell the employers, “We want this kind of cargo.” He had ’em going out lookin’ for cargo that would produce us more man-hours. I don’t know whether anybody else ever done that, but that’s what we did.
I retired in 1993, but for three years before that I chaired a coastwise safety committee made up of port officials and longshoremen. My kid, Ross, was killed in a waterfront accident in 1989 and I wanted to do something about it. I ended up being really vehement about trying to protect longshoremen. I did get the Port of Tacoma shook up bad enough so they put a guy on the International Safety Organization (ISO), a clearinghouse for safety ideas for big equipment.
When Harry Bridges died in 1990, they had a big memorial in San Francisco. I was no longer Local 23 president, but I held a memorial simultaneously at our hall in Tacoma. I was also the emcee. We had a real large crowd, and the last place in the world you’d think they’d have a large crowd is in Tacoma, because a lot of the old-timers didn’t particularly care for Bridges.
Some people were always loyal to Bridges though. One guy, Ernie Tanner, was prominent for that. He was the only Black worker on the Northwest Joint Strike Committee in 1934. He had to be 125 percent, and he thought Bridges was the right guy. During the mid-1990s I lobbied to name the University of Washington, Tacoma, Labor and Ethnic Studies Center after Tanner.
In my case, I realize that without the ILWU I wouldn’t have a pension, medical benefits and stuff like that. There are several ILWU people I credit. Bridges was the top leader, but there were a lot of other people who also pushed the right buttons and did the right things. Once I even told the union here in Tacoma—I said it at an ILWU convention, too—that if I had it to do over again, I would’ve voted to go into the ILWU, realizing now that the things I feared in 1957 didn’t exist.