The following history is based on a brief talk given by Harvey Schwartz at the Bloody Thursday Memorial presentations, Local 10, ILWU, San Francisco, July 5, 2019
Longshore Local 10 hiring hall, San Francisco, 1946. Winning a union dispatch was one the great gains of the 1934 strike.
Bloody Thursday—July 5, 1934—marked the turning point of the great West Coast maritime strike of 1934. The reasons for this “Big Strike” had been seething for many years. For starters, an old San Francisco longshore union had been broken in 1919. The long nonunion period that followed lasted until 1934. These were the pre-container years of heavy, hand-worked cargo. Even when workers could get jobs handling “break bulk” cargo, as it was called, hiring was discriminatory, the pace of labor was inhumanely fast and unsafe, and work shifts sometimes lasted 12 to 16 or more hours.
The waterfront employers created and maintained divisions among longshore workers when it served their purposes. To speed up longshore operations and increase productivity, they frequently goaded work gangs of different nationalities or races to compete against each other at a reckless pace. The accident rate on San Francisco’s waterfront was notorious, with three to six serious injuries for every eight-hour shift of 2,000 workers. The San Francisco employers even sponsored a company-controlled “union,” known as “The Blue Book,” but it existed only to keep real unionism out. You had to join The Blue Book to get most jobs. Its control was enforced by intimidation.
In recorded interviews from the large Oral History Collection housed at the ILWU International, union founder Harry Bridges and others described the corrupt “shape-up” in pre-1934 hiring. At the shape-up each morning, men gathered in front of the Ferry Building to beg for jobs or to pay bribes, called “kickbacks,” just to get a day’s work—a jug of wine, a bottle of whiskey, and sometimes even sexual favors from a wife or woman friend. Things got significantly worse when the Great Depression started in 1929. Jobs were scarce and people were desperate.
If you got hurt on the job, you didn’t apply for workmen’s compensation for fear of being “blacklisted,” or denied future employment. This was because compensation claims could increase an employer’s insurance rate. When Bridges broke his foot in 1929, he limped around on the job for two or three days instead of making a claim for injury. Workers worried, too, that if you took time off for illness or injury, another hungry worker might take your place on the waterfront for good.
Bridges also recalled how San Francisco longshoremen had to go to waterfront bootleggers during Prohibition (1919–1933), when liquor was illegal, to cash company-issued payroll medallions called “brass checks.” Bridges said:
“Near the shape-up, there were bootleg joints, bookmaking joints, and poolrooms. We used to cash payroll brass checks at Paddy Hurley’s. Hurley did business with the company union, cashing brass checks. There were other guys that used to cash in brass checks and take a 20% payment.”
Bridges added that at Hurley’s you had to buy drinks before the bootlegger would cash your brass check. The many grievances reached a boiling point by 1934. When the Big Strike began on May 9, the union made several demands. Bridges listed them in his recorded interview:
“We’d deal only as a district. We wanted a six-hour day, a thirty-hour week, one dollar an hour, and the union hiring hall. We wanted the union hiring hall because of the shape-up.”
The union won the six-hour day to share the work during the Depression but gave it up years later in contract negotiations. Bridges’ condition regarding a “district” deal referred to the 1934 demand for a coast-wide contract. As he explained:
“When one port is on strike, and the ship can move a few miles away and be worked by members of the same union, it’s ridiculous. That’s why we wanted to have an agreement covering all ports.” The union achieved its demand for a hiring hall through a decision by the strike’s federal arbitration board that each hiring hall dispatcher must be a union member.
The union also won the all-important coast-wide contract. The strike arbitration board awarded longshore workers a ten-cent increase in wages to ninety-five cents an hour. This was the equivalent of eighteen dollars an hour in 2019. But wages were a secondary consideration compared to the issues of dignity on the job and union control in hiring.
During the strike, Bridges bid successfully for the support of San Francisco’s African American community. In return, he promised that the union would adopt a policy of “no discrimination” in hiring if it won the strike. The San Francisco African American community agreed. Employers were unable to recruit African American community members to cross the union’s picket lines, and Bridges kept his promise when the strike ended.
The Big Strike lasted for 82 days, from May 9 to July 30. The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP) and several smaller marine crafts joined the walkout. In an effort to defeat the strike, the employers used “scabs,” or strikebreakers; they baited leftists for being “red”; and they formed alliances with coastal police to suppress the strike. Bridges described the situation in San Francisco: We’d get out there with our flag, our union banner, and I think we had a couple of drums to march along. Then the cops would move in and beat the shit out of us.
On July 5, Bloody Thursday, the employers tried to force open the San Francisco port by running scab trucks with police escorts through the longshoremen’s picket line at Pier 38. A great battle followed. The police used tear gas, clubs, and guns on the unarmed strikers. At least 100 strikers and their supporters were injured.
Three workers were shot by plainclothes police outside the union’s headquarters at Mission and Steuart Streets. One worker, Charles Olsen, survived. Two others, Howard Sperry, a longshoreman and a World War I veteran, and Nick Bordoise, a union cook and strike supporter, were shot in the back and killed.
Along the Pacific coast, four more workers were killed during the strike: longshoremen Dick Parker and John Knudsen in Los Angeles and longshoreman Shelvy Daffron and SUP member Olaf Helland in Seattle. SUP member Bruce Lindberg was killed by a scab in Hong Kong.
A massive, dignified funeral parade for Sperry and Bordoise marched up Market Street in San Francisco on July 9. Henry Schmidt, an early longshore activist, reported that 50,000 people lined the street to watch. That day, public opinion turned in favor of the strikers. The massive shift in support following the death of the two workers may well explain why the board arbitrating the longshore strike eventually conceded to the union’s key demands.
Between July 16 and 19, city and regional workers participated in the historic 1934 San Francisco General Strike to protest the killings. More than 40,000 Bay Area unionists walked out that July. Sam Kagel, who worked for the longshore union in 1934 and later became the longshore industry’s long-serving coast arbitrator, described the General Strike in his oral history:
“I can still see it and feel it. It was an exhilarating moment. I looked up Market Street and there was nothing moving.”
Ultimately, winning a coast-wide longshore contract and a union dispatcher in 1934 provided the foundation for the Longshore Division and guaranteed the entire union’s longterm security.
Bordoise and Sperry and the other five workers killed in 1934 died as martyrs to a great cause. That is the legacy we commemorate on July 5 in San Francisco and wherever there are ILWU members and supporters.
– Harvey Schwartz
Author Harvey Schwartz is Curator of the ILWU Oral History Collection, which consists of more than 300 interviews conducted since 1981. The collection is housed at the international headquarters of the ILWU. He is the author of The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934–1938 (1975; reprint, 2000); Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU (2009); and Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Workers’ Oral History (2015).