New book offers insights into union struggles, triumphs

Gov. Chris Gregoire earlier this year proclaimed 2009 as a year to recognize Washington State’s labor heritage. It is a history of hard-fought battles that gave us many of the rights to freedom of speech and association we often take for granted today.

One of these battles occurred in July of 1934 in the midst of our last great depression.

Dock workers from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California shut down the West Coast ports. They demanded decent wages, hours and conditions of work, and an end to degrading “shape up” hiring system. They also asked employers to recognize and bargain with their union.

Police and company thugs attacked strikers, killing six union members. The violence came to a peak on “bloody Thursday,” on July 5 in San Francisco.

A mass funeral in the streets and a general strike finally forced the companies to yield. That battle gave birth to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), whose success in 1934 spurred union organizing efforts across the country.

Seventy-five years later, the ILWU is holding its international convention in Seattle this week. It brings together a diverse group of workers with a unique culture of union democracy and rank-and-file activism.

The union and its famous leader, Harry Bridges, survived the red-baiting of the McCarthy era and emerged stronger than ever as mechanization changed the nature of work. ILWU members continued to engage in solidarity actions with workers in South Africa and other parts of the world and joined the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999.

The ILWU remains part of a global labor movement under the union’s credo, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” a powerful force in the ports of the West Coast, Hawaii and even at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland.

Now we have an extraordinary account of this extraordinary union. “Solidarity Stories,” written by Harvey Schwartz, has just been published by the University of Washington Press.

Based on more than 250 interviews conducted over 25 years, Schwartz has produced a short, eminently readable book of history as told by the people who lived it. Their oral histories provide gripping and inspiring accounts of hard times and harsh conflicts, of sorrow and triumph.

“Solidarity Stories” gives us a rare glimpse into the working world. It includes accounts by Tacoma’s own Phil Lelli and Isaac Morrow, both of whom (along with many others) helped to make the Port of Tacoma the great enterprise that it is today.

Morrow, an African American, and others in this book provide dramatic accounts of how struggles for union rights and racial and gender equality intersect.

Why should we care about this history? One only needs to read today’s headlines to know that workers and unions are again in a time of great peril.

We need to know how rank-and-file working people in the past overcame hard times with hard work and even harder organizing.

What does labor solidarity mean? This book tells us. These oral histories are a great starting point for anyone trying to understand how unions, when inspired and led by working people themselves, can help to improve the human condition.

Michael Honey is Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma, and held the Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies at the University of Washington from 2000-2004.

Meet the author

Harvey Schwartz will read from and sign his book at 6 p.m. Monday at the University Bookstore at South 19th and Pacific Avenue in downtown Tacoma.