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Reviewed by:
  • New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks
  • Jason Stanley
William J. Mello, New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2010)

With this book, William J. Mello offers a fascinating account of rank-and-file rebellion among East Coast dockworkers in the post-war era. The docks of Manhattan might be overrun by condominiums and urban parks today, but Mello’s account brings to life a very different portside world, one where tens of thousands of longshoremen struggled to make a living and to gain some measure of control over their working conditions. As Mello’s detailed historical work makes clear, these struggles led rank-and-file workers into confrontations not only with their employers and political élites, but also with corrupt officials in their own union, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ila).

Drawing on the archives of rank-and-file newsletters, oral histories of water-front activists, several interviews, and a range of secondary sources, Mello homes in on the three decades following the end of World War II. The book asks two questions: “First, what were the limits imposed by business elites and political authorities against rebellious dockworkers? Second, what was the longshoremen’s political capacity to succeed given the limits to class action?” (1)

In responding to these questions, the book moves gingerly between the distant and the local. Mello describes the ways in which the general climate of anti-communist McCarthyism pervading the United States in the post-war era created challenges for dockworkers fighting for greater control over their working lives, not least by provoking employers’ use of investigative agencies and loyalty programs aimed at disarming rank-and-file activists. He speaks in particular about the barriers thrown up by the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959, both of which ushered in new institutional constraints for unionists. Along the way, the Bi-State Waterfront Commission was created, altering historically entrenched hiring procedures and shifting decisions about the waterfront labour process away from the employer-union nexus, thereby reducing workers’ capacity to intervene. [End Page 317]

To this we can add the host of difficulties workers encountered in their own organization, where union officials often worked hand-in-hand with employers and politicians to silence rank-and-file militancy. This was the case in 1939, for example, when union thugs murdered Pete Panto, an outspoken leader of the Brooklyn Rank and File Committee, which was demanding changes to corrupt hiring procedures. It was also the case when the American Federation of Labor (afl) cooperated with government officials to spearhead a campaign to replace the ila with an equally conservative and violent afl-affiliated union.

Amidst all of these challenges, rank-and-file activists were hardly docile. Though gangsters took the life of Pete Panto for his activism on the docks, their threats had not stopped the formation and growth of the Brooklyn Rank and File Committee, nor that of similar groups. Between 1945 and 1947, these efforts contributed to an explosion of wildcat strikes as longshoremen challenged their lack of control over working conditions and their union. Mello’s excellent documentation of these wildcats and the rank-and-file organizing that underlay them puts to rest the notion that East Coast dockworkers were a conservative lot.

This activism led to some important victories for East Coast longshoremen, including the establishment of a Guaranteed Annual Income for workers. However, the overarching story revealed in this book is one of evaporating space for rank-and-file militancy. In the first phase of this history, immediately following World War II, workers responded to high levels of coercion emanating from informal alliances between union officials, political élites, and employers by engaging in highly disruptive wildcat strikes. As it became clear that the ila was incapable of keeping the rank-and-file in line, these alliances broke down. Beginning in 1947, with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, the second phase of this history saw employers and political élites work to introduce regulatory measures that limited worker and union involvement in decision-making over the waterfront labour process. By the...

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