International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union

INTERNATIONAL LONGSHOREMEN’S AND WAREHOUSEMEN’S UNION. Heir to a long tradition of waterfront unionism and Left politics, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) by 2020 represented some 45,000 workers in the western United States and Canada, predominantly longshoremen, warehouse workers, inland boatmen, and workers in agriculture and the tourist industry in Hawaii. San Francisco longshoremen first unionized in 1853. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) appeared in most Pacific Coast ports by the early twentieth century, when influences of the Industrial Workers of the World were strong among some longshoremen. An unsuccessful strike in 1919 destroyed most western ILA locals. By the mid-1920s, longshore unions had largely disappeared from Pacific coast ports.

In the early 1930s, western longshoremen revived ILA locals and demanded a coastwide contract. When waterfront employers refused, the ILA struck all Pacific Coast ports in May 1934. Other maritime unions also struck with their own demands. During the strike, six workers were killed and hundreds injured. The Communist Party gave strong support to the strikers and advocated a general strike. Following a four-day general strike in San Francisco employers agreed to arbitration.

After the 1934 strike, the ILA sought to unite West Coast maritime unions into a Maritime Federation of the Pacific, whose newspaper, the Voice of the Federation, provided strong advocacy for Left causes. A strike by the federation in 1936–1937, however, revealed serious conflict between the ILA and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. Concurrently, the ILA began a “march inland” from the docks to warehouses. Despite successes in northern California, most warehouse organizing elsewhere was blocked by Teamster opposition.

Conflict with the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, the Teamsters, and ILA national officers coincided with an ideological attraction among West Coast ILA activists to the recently formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In 1937 the Pacific Coast District of the ILA voted to enter the CIO and was chartered as the ILWU. Harry Bridges became ILWU president. The ILWU constitution prohibited discrimination based on political beliefs, and Communist Party members came to hold key positions in the ILWU. Leftists promoted a strong role for the union rank-and-file and opposed racial discrimination. Organizing drives east of the Rockies produced a few warehouse locals, but efforts to organize Gulf of Mexico longshoremen were unsuccessful. During World War II, the ILWU joined other Left unions in encouraging maximum productivity, and Bridges promoted a no-strike pledge. Louis Goldblatt (ILWU secretary-treasurer, 1943–1977) protested the wartime relocation of Japanese Americans.

Late in the war, ILWU leaders decided to organize in Hawaii from the docks up the chain of production to sugar and pineapple field-workers; the ILWU became the first union to achieve lasting success in organizing agricultural field-workers. As Hawaii’s economy moved to tourism, the ILWU organized hotel employees and tourism workers. Since the 1960s, Hawaii claimed a large portion of ILWU members.

In 1950 the CIO expelled the ILWU as Communist-dominated. Bridges was tried repeatedly in an effort to prove Communist affiliation and was jailed briefly for urging an end to the Korean War; Jack Hall, ILWU leader in Hawaii, was tried under the Smith Act. Among the unions purged by the CIO, only the ILWU maintained most of its original membership, jurisdiction, and contracts. The Fishermen and Allied Workers Union joined the ILWU in 1949, and the ILWU became a refuge for other victims of anticommunism. In 1959–1961, San Francisco longshoremen elected Archie Brown, an announced Communist Party member, to local office, violating a Taft-Hartley prohibition; in U.S. v. Brown (1964), the Supreme Court ruled the prohibition unconstitutional.

Ironically, Cold War attacks on the ILWU came as longshore labor relations were improving. In 1948 negotiators refused to bargain with the ILWU so long as Bridges was president. After a three-month strike, the waterfront employers fired their negotiators and created a new employers’ organization, the Pacific Maritime Association; since then, longshore labor relations have been generally smooth, characterized even by cordial cooperation.

The “new look” after 1948 laid the basis for successful adaptation to mechanization. After extensive rank-and-file discussion, the ILWU negotiated the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement in 1960. Also in 1960, the ILWU and Teamsters began joint negotiations for northern California warehouse workers, ending their jurisdictional disputes.

Since the 1950s, the role of Communist party members had diminished in the ILWU, coinciding with the Party’s general decline, but ILWU politics remained well to the left. ILWU officers strongly supported civil rights activities in the 1950s, and the union first called for US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1967. However, the same years saw Communist Party attacks on the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement, and a lawsuit that alleged racial discrimination against eighty “B-men,” provisional longshoremen. Bridges had long worked to integrate the ILWU despite opposition in some locals, and he denied the charge; the lawsuit was decided in favor of the union.

Strained relations between Bridges and Goldblatt contributed in 1975 to a requirement that ILWU officers retire at age sixty-five; both men retired in 1977. James Herman’s election to the ILWU presidency brought little change to the ILWU’s politics. In 1988 ILWU members voted to join the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) by a three-to-one margin. ILWU presidents were elected by the full membership, and with Herman’s retirement in 1991 the ILWU witnessed two successive closely contested elections for the presidency. In 1991 David Arian won with a campaign that focused on his militancy and Left politics, but in 1994 he lost to Brian McWilliams amid charges that Arian’s organizational changes had threatened rank-and-file democracy. Arlen was first succeeded by James Spinoza in 2000, Robert McElrath in 2006, and finally William Adams, the first African American president, in 2018. The ILWU, meanwhile, dropped its affiliation with the AFL-CIO in 2013. Politically, the ILWU continued to stand well toward the left among major unions, engaging in exemplary solidarity walkouts of 10,000 members in 2008, to protest the ongoing Iraq War, and 38,000 in the summer of 2020, to protest the police murder of George Floyd.

The union continued to aggressively advocate for its members and defend its jurisdiction in the face of increasing automation and the establishment by container operators of enlarged container ports outside of California. As in the case of other unions, the ILWU continued to lose membership, while struggling to rebuild via the unionization of warehouse workers. It also successfully organized 300 workers at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland in 1999. The union faced, in recent days, an existential financial threat, because it had been found liable for losses supposedly suffered from by an employer in a past dispute. If successfully pressed, this suit could bankrupt the ILWU.

Fairley, Lincoln. Facing Mechanization: The West Coast Longshore Plan. Los Angeles: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, Los Angeles, 1979.

Kimmeldorf, Howard. Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Larrowe, Charles P. Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1972.

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

Oral stories of Germaine Bulcke, Louis Goldblatt, Norman Leonard, and Henry Schmidt. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Schwartz, Harvey. The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934–1938. Los Angeles: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, Los Angeles, 1978.