National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards

NATIONAL UNION OF MARINE COOKS AND STEWARDS. The Marine Cooks and Stewards of the Pacific was organized in 1901, representing cooks and stewards on passenger ships and cargo ships on the Pacific Coast. Originally part of the International Seamen's Union (ISU), an affiliate of the American Federal of Labor (AFL), it became moribund during the 1920s but revived during the 1934 Pacific Coast maritime strikes and then became part of the Maritime Federation of the Pacific (MFP). After the MFP strike of 1936-1937, as the ISU was falling apart, the members of the Marine Cooks and Stewards voted to join the CIO. Chartered in 1937 as the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards (NUMCS), it was one of the smallest CIO unions, claiming around eight thousand members. The NUMCS stood to the left within the CIO, usually following the lead of its larger West Coast ally, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).

Communist Party members and sympathizers took prominent roles in the MCS, and played leading roles in breaking down the racial and gender barriers that had characterized West Coast affiliates of the ISU. By 1950, nearly half of MCS members were African American and another 15-20 per cent were from other ethnic minority groups. The union also included significant numbers of gay members. It was sometimes said that the union was one-third black, one-third red, and one-third queer, but those were overlapping categories.

NUMCS president Hugh Bryson helped organize the Independent Progressive Party in California and campaigned actively for Henry Wallace in 1948. In 1950, the CIO expelled the NUMCS as Communist-dominated. Bryson signed the Taft-Hartley non-Communist affidavit but was charged with perjury and imprisoned. After the expulsion, both the CIO's National Maritime Union and the AFL’s Seafarers International Union (SIU) began raids on the NUMCS. The ILWU tried to take the NUMCS under its wing but lost to the SIU through a National Labor Relations Board ruling in 1955. Simultaneously, a federal screening program kept Party activists from working aboard ships. Some NUMCS members found a new home in the ILWU, including future ILWU president James Herman.

Bérubé, Allan. "No Red-Baiting! No Race-Baiting! No Queen-Baiting!" Online at http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/no-baiting/red-race-queen.

Marine Cooks and Stewards, part of the Waterfront Workers History Project, University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/dock/marine_cooks.shtml.

Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Record, Jane Cassels. "The Rise and Fall of a Maritime Union." ILR Review 10 (1956): 81-92.