Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU (review)

Over a period of 75 years, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has earned an enviable reputation - certainly on the Pacific Coast of the United States and Canada - as an exemplary union, one that fights for the rights and interests of its own members while joining in concrete expressions of solidarity with embattled trade unionists worldwide. The ILWU was founded in 1937, but its roots are in the "Big Strike" of 1934, a coastwide walkout of maritime workers that won union recognition, and much more, for the longshoremen. In 1934 they were members of the AFL International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), but three years later they left the ILA and affiliated with the new and dynamic Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which was evolving into a rival trade union federation. In San Francisco, in particular, the leadership of the ILWU was proudly left wing; the union's key founder and long-time president, the Australian immigrant Harry Bridges, was widely known as "Red Harry."

There have been many studies of the West Coast longshoremen, but few if any comprehensive studies of the ILWU's diverse workforce and its role in founding and shaping the union. In Solidarity Stories, Harvey Schwartz tries to remedy this gap in the literature. An oral historian who has been a close observer and warm supporter of the ILWU since his days as a graduate student at the University of California Davis, Schwartz's first book, The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934-1938, was published in 1978 (and reissued by the union in 2000). For decades thereafter, Schwartz has collected the stories of men and women who played a key role in the ILWU's development. Solidarity Stories is their testament.

Nearly half of the book's 300 pages of text focus on the recollections of longshoremen. But there are substantial sections on warehouse organizing, on the emergence of unionism among cotton compress workers in California's Great Central Valley, even on white-collar workers at Powell's Books in Portland who joined the union in the late 1990s. Appropriately enough, there is also a long section on Hawaii, where the ILWU became a kind of one big union, organizing not only the longshoremen, but also agricultural workers on the islands' vast sugar and pineapple plantations and hotel and other service workers in the burgeoning tourism industry. There appear to be three overarching themes in the oral history testimony: first, the union's long record of success in winning good wages, benefits, and job security for its membership; second, the left-wing politics of many of the union's leaders; and finally, a strong and consistent commitment to racial equality. This commitment served the union especially well - on the San Francisco waterfront, among warehousemen in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, among cotton compress workers in rural California, and in Hawaii, where the black-white racial divide was largely absent but the employers tried to exploit and magnify divisions among a plantation workforce that included Japanese, Filipino, Native Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, and Portuguese workers.

Solidarity Stories does not include a systematic analysis of any of these issues; and throughout the book the tone is mostly uncritical, even celebratory (often rightly so). But what gives the book its undeniable power is the colloquial eloquence of the rank-and-file voices that fill its pages. Thus, San Pedro longshoreman Al Langley recalled that "after the ['34] strike there wasn't a job in the world to equal longshoring, although it was hard, hard work." Thousands of miles to the North, in the port of Seattle, Jerry Tyler declared, "I guess I was one of the luckiest guys that ever pulled on a pair of pants when I joined the ILWU." Now, as a pensioner, Tyler affirms that "every time I go to the hospital, or up to the clinic, or have to get some medicine, I think, 'Thank God for Harry Bridges and the ILWU.'" (125) Charles (Brother) Hackett worked...