National Maritime Union

NATIONAL MARITIME UNION. From the time of its founding in 1937 until it purged its left wing in the late 1940s the National Maritime Union (NMU) was one of the most radical labor unions in the United States. It was described in its prime (by one of the NMU’s founders, Robert McElroy) as a “militant, class-conscious, racially integrated, rank-and-file controlled, revolutionary union of the seamen and waterfront workers.”

The NMU demonstrably lived up to that combative reputation in its early years. Sit-down strikes were called at sailing time—occasionally involving every ship in port—in order to put pressure on individual shipping lines. A pioneer in integrating the East Coast shipping industry, the NMU fought and won the right of Black seamen to work at every job on the ship—previously, Blacks had been restricted to working in the stewards’ department. These gains were contested not only by shipping companies, and individual officers aboard the ships, but by some of the union members themselves, as well as the local authorities in many of the southern ports where NMU ships docked.

Rank-and-file democracy was a fiercely cherished ideal of the NMU, which had come into existence in reaction to an undemocratic, racket-ridden predecessor, the International Seamen’s Union. NMU members had the right to address union membership meetings, and access to the letters column of an unusually literate union newspaper, the NMU Pilot. Efforts were made to involve all members in union affairs. Union meetings were mandatory—one couldn’t ship out without proof of attendance, and every ship’s crew elected a representative to attend biannual conventions. Contract negotiations were watchdogged by rank-and-file oversight committees—and every union member had the right to demand an impromptu union meeting, right in the shipping hall, when and if violations of the union constitution occurred.

Internationalism was another NMU hallmark. The union was philosophically committed to lending assistance to working-class struggles all over the world, a rare quality among American trade unions. Honoring longshore picket lines in foreign ports was one example of this. A more spectacular example is the heroic role the NMU played during World War II, carrying supplies to Russia, Europe, and the Far East. (Merchant marine casualties were higher, proportionally, than casualties in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.)

An NMU “leadership school” was established to teach new members a theory of imperialism and colonialism to place in context the exploitation they were seeing in South American and foreign ports. NMU crews even conducted a sit-down strike in Saigon harbor, in 1945, to protest US shipment of war supplies to the French during their phase of the Vietnam War.

The Communist Party was the moving force behind the union for most of its early history. A “concentration unit,” to organize marine workers, was formed in 1928, evolving into the Marine Workers Industrial Union in 1930, which, in turn, was liquidated in 1935 in order to “bore from within” the American Federation of Labor’s International Seamen’s Union, the shell from which the NMU emerged. Great Depression-era shipping was so slow and East Coast seamen so atomized that many founding members say the NMU could not have been organized without Party discipline.

The Communist Party’s strategy for the labor movement as a whole, however, may ultimately have been the union’s undoing. The union’s proud boast of rank-and-file democracy did not extend to Trotskyists and Wobblies. Excessive rigidity on the part of the overwhelmingly Communist leadership of the union (more than three-fourths of the top union officers by 1947, promoting such unpopular issues as noncooperation with the Marshall Plan) caused a backlash that resulted in a clean sweep out of office of all officials affiliated with the Communist Party.

In 1948–1949, NMU president Joseph Curran, having broken with the Left, and backed up by phalanxes of New York City policemen, volunteer muscle from Mike Quill’s newly purged Transport Workers Union, and goons recruited from far-flung ports (Phil Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, provided funding) proceeded to expel from the union virtually all the founding members who had been in any way radical. The purge was completed in 1950, at the time of the Korean War, when the US Coast Guard declared hundreds of Communists, ex-Communists, and many who were simply principled trade unionists “national security risks” and took away their seamen’s papers.

The union drifted in the 1950s into “pork-chop” unionism and degenerated badly in the 1960s—with money scandals, inflated salaries for union officials, and every pretense of rank-and-file democracy stripped away. Down from a wartime peak of over 100,000 members, the NMU in the 1980s had less than 15,000 members and a fraction of that many jobs. The NMU merged with the Marine Engineers Benevolent Association in 1988.

Boyer, Richard. The Dark Ship. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947.

Kempton, Murray. Part of Our Time: Some Monuments and Ruins of the Thirties. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.

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

Maritime Workers and Their Union. Waterfront Workers Project. University of Washington.
http://depts.washington.edu/dock/maritime_intro.shtml