The dock workers’ strike — The STAND

By CAL WINSLOW
(25 June 2024)

Excerpt. Read the full article.

On the morning of May 9, 1934, the newly formed International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) went on strike in the west coast ports, paralyzing all shipping between Bellingham (WA) and San Diego.

That morning, about 1,500 Seattle dockworkers walked off the job to confront a number of hostile shipowners who had banded together to maintain an “open shop” and the “Fink Hall” in Elliott Bay, as well as hundreds of strikebreakers who reported for work on the city’s piers. Seattle was the second-largest port on the coast, the hub of a dozen coastal and Puget Sound ports, and second only to San Francisco in the volume of goods passing over its piers.

In Tacoma, a smoky industrial city thirty miles south of Seattle, dockworkers also walked, as did men in the other ports along the strait and coast. Tacoma was the only Pacific port where the ILA survived the 1920s unscathed, the union’s only stronghold. The long 1920s had taken their toll on the union, and it was by no means clear that the Seattle men would prevail. In the first few days after the strike began, hundreds of strikebreakers were still on the job, and the employers evidently had plans to hire more. Tacoma dockworkers considered the situation “shaky,” and no one wanted to see shipping continue in Elliott Bay, least of all the senior workers. and the dockworkers themselves; a defeat in Seattle would undermine the strike everywhere.

On May 12, after an early secret meeting, the Tacoma leaders sent out a call. At 8:30 a.m., a thousand dockworkers from Tacoma and Everett and the smaller ports showed up at the McCormick Piers to join the Seattle strikers and to drive out the strikebreakers from the These strikers and their supporters, led by Tacoma’s “Flying Squad,” marched from pier to pier, tearing down barricades and The company’s guards were overwhelmed and quite a few were thrown into the bay.

When strikebreakers came off the ships, they were forced to walk by “gauntlets,” crowds of hundreds of jeering strikers shouting abuse. At the same time, the offshore unions, the seafarers and the captains, helmsmen and pilots turned the dockers’ strike into a seafarers’ strike. The seafarers moored their ships when they Harbor. On the shore, rank-and-file Teamsters joined the masses of Seattle strikers and refused to break through the ILA picket lines.

Others joined the dock workers. A striker expected that “1000 unemployed people would come and support us… they remained until not a single strikebreaker was left working on the Seattle waterfront.” And among them were the radicals of the time, “outsiders,” lumberjacks and sailors, IWWs (Industrial Workers of the World) and communists. The sight of these men in particular shocked the city’s elites; it was all too reminiscent of 1919, when workers city ​​and held it for five days. The mayor announced that “a Soviet of dock workers dictates what can be done on the waterfront.” The Seattle Just led by “Soviet Rules Seattle”.

Overall, it was an astonishing demonstration of working-class solidarity and strength in a year of extraordinary strikes.

Cal Winslow is a longtime union activist, educator, and author of Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919. Read his full article on the 1934 longshoremen’s strike online.