The Peoples School for Marxist-Leninist Studies™ will host a class with the Labor United Educational League on Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024. The class will be held at 8PM Eastern, over Zoom (Click for meeting link)
Who was Harry Bridges?
Harry Renton Bridges (1901-1990) became world famous for leading thousands of longshoremen, sailors, and other marine workers to victory in 1934 in the monumental strike that revitalized unionism on the West Coast. As the oral history passages excerpted here reveal, Bridges and his followers made some extraordinarily shrewd decisions between 1932 and 1934 that guaranteed the Pacific Coast longshore union’s initial survival, early growth and spectacular success in the big strike.
In the long run, though, Bridges became a legendary figure because of what he stood for as much as for what he accomplished as a tactical union leader. Bridges was renowned for his militant stance and his scrupulous honesty. When the shipowners tried to bribe him during the 1934 strike, they found that he was not for sale. Instead, they learned of his uncompromising devotion to his union and his faith in the ultimate wisdom and triumph of his organization’s rank and file.
Bridges, it also became clear, was rigorously committed to the principles of union democracy. The ILWU traditions of direct election of officers, referendums on contracts and other major issues, and even open microphones at meetings, for example, all date back to the Bridges years.
The longshore leader also pushed the idea of working class unity on the broadest scale whenever and however he could. This was reflected in the union’s support of united fronts with other labor organizations in the 1930s and 1940s. It can be seen in the widest sense as well in the union’s historic slogan borrowed from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, that proclaims, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Finally, it can be seen in the goal of international solidarity that Bridges advocated and the union still pursues.
By the late 1930s, Bridges was already a legend. He had come to symbolize his union’s victory in the great maritime strike, its expansion, or “march inland,” into uptown warehousing and distribution, and its inspiration and direct aid to a generation of workers along the West Coast that was organizing into unions outside of the ILWU’s immediate jurisdiction.
In the mid-1940s, Canada’s Pacific Coast longshore workers joined the ILWU, making the union truly international. At the same time, the ILWU organized thousands of sugar, pineapple and allied workers in Hawaii and helped to democratize what had been close to a feudal social, economic, and political system in the Islands. Again Bridges seemed to symbolize his union’s ongoing success.
Even on the traditional trade union front Bridges “delivered the goods.” In the 1930s he promised the longshoremen pensions, health and welfare benefits, and a number of other gains at a time when such things were unheard of for workers. He had his critics and disbelievers at first, but eventually his predictions proved correct, and his legend was enhanced all the more.
Bridges was also an early and outspoken opponent of discrimination. It was known to all that he worked especially hard to make equality of opportunity a reality in his home port of San Francisco. He made sure, too, that the ILWU’s International Constitution contained clauses that clearly condemned discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin or political belief.
The longshore leader was famous in the mid-1930s as well for his staunch anti-fascism. He and his union made headlines years before World War II boycotting scrap iron shipments bound for Imperial Japan. Between 1936 and 1939, too, Bridges and the union backed the Spanish Republic in its bitter struggle against the fascist legions of Francisco Franco.
An Interview with Harry Bridges – Labor United Educational League
Peoples School for Marxist-Leninist Studies
The Peoples School for Marxist Leninist Studies was initiated by and is sponsored by the Party of Communists USA, but it is not the Party School, which allows a wide variety of perspectives to be brought forward and discussed which don’t necessarily reflect the party line. If you’re interested in the Party of Communists USA, please click the button below and visit their website! Many PCUSA members attend our classes and have a wealth of knowledge and experience to learn from.
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Labor United Educational League
Labor United Educational League (LUEL) is a nationwide caucus of union and non-represented workers. Our mission is to unite the working class to fight against the power of transnational capital. Currently only 11% of the U.S. workforce is organized into unions. Most of these workers are employed in the public sector, and are legally denied the right to strike. The most militant of these workers are the postal workers employed by the U.S. Postal Service. For this reason, they are under attack. However, they are not the only ones.
The attacks on the public sector and its workforce are part of a larger plan developed years ago by Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Business. The plan is referred to as neo-liberalism and its main feature is austerity. Reducing the number of federal , state, and municipal employees and cutting pensions and Social Security are the first part of the plan which President Ronald Reagan called “starving the beast”. Under this plan, all social services are virtually eliminated with the exception of the military, and the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative Branches of government. This is also called Social Darwinism, or survival of the fittest.
Our mission with Labor Today and LUEL is to unite all of Labor, to give them a voice regardless of industry or type of work without regard to status: union or unrepresented. We provide assistance to the Walmart workers, the Fight for $15 and a union and other efforts. We are international and we support the mission and policies of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).
Labor United Educational League – Labor United Educational League (luel.us)
