Solidarity Forever : Retired Longshoreman Recalls 1934 Strike That Shaped the Fate of Waterfront Labor

For most people, Labor Day means barbecues, sales, the end of summer. For retired longshoreman Pete Grassi, Labor Day means all that and something more. It means remembering back almost six decades, to the bloody waterfront strike of 1934.

That violent, 83-day strike, and the subsequent victory of the fledgling union called the International Longshoremen’s Assn., changed the lives of thousands of men--and much later, women--who worked on the waterfront. Pete Grassi was one of them.

“We needed the union so everybody could be equal,” says Grassi, 83, who spent more than 40 years as a longshoreman. “We needed it so you didn’t have to kiss up to the bosses. We just wanted what was right.”

Grassi started working on the San Pedro docks in 1928, at age 18. Born in Chicago, he had moved to San Pedro with his family when he was a boy, and his father had worked for a while as a longshoreman in San Pedro.

It was hard work. Unlike today, when most ship cargo is packed in large steel containers and loaded and unloaded with machinery, in the 1920s and ‘30s cargo was packed loose and wrestled on and off ships largely by hand.

“Today it’s easy,” Grassi says. “It’s getting to where all you have to do is push a button on a computer and the cargo moves. But it wasn’t like that back then.”

The pay was relatively good, 55 or 65 cents an hour, when there was work. The problem was that the ship companies and the dock bosses decided who worked and who didn’t through an employer-controlled hiring hall or at dockside “shape-ups,” where dozens of hopeful workers might show up for just a few available jobs.

Favored workers, known as “star gangs,” drew long hours; but part-timers or “casuals” often had to bribe their way into jobs. And if for any reason the bosses didn’t like you, you didn’t work.

“Oh yeah, (foremen and dock supervisors) took bribes,” Grassi recalls. “Some guys bribed ‘em with whiskey. I used to bribe ‘em with a gallon of wine, ‘cause my father used to make wine.”

After the stock market crash of 1929, jobs on the docks became even more scarce and working conditions grew worse. A 10-cent-an-hour pay cut in 1932 further increased dockworkers discontent. Finally, in May, 1934, the International Longshoremen’s Assn., which had been fighting to represent longshoremen at all West Coast ports, called a strike. In Los Angeles 1,300 longshoremen walked off the job. They later were joined in the strike by union seamen and teamsters.

The shipping companies were prepared. More than 1,200 strikebreakers, called “scabs” by the union men, were brought in to replace the striking longshoremen. They were housed near the docks in temporary quarters guarded by company-hired private police.

Five days into the walkout, trouble started. On the evening of May 14, 1934, hundreds of strikers marched to the strikebreakers’ quarters. A melee ensued, with strikers battling police, security guards and strikebreakers with rocks, clubs and fists. Suddenly shots rang out; one striker was killed and six were wounded. Scores of others on both sides were also hurt in the fight.

“I was part of the mob,” Grassi recalls. “It had been building up all day and about sundown it finally started. We figured we had to do it, because the scabs were taking our bread and butter.”

Less than a month later, in July, striking longshoremen in San Francisco also clashed with police. Two strikers were shot and killed and hundreds were injured.

In Los Angeles, some of the strikers were given part-time work at union automobile plants; others picked up odd jobs to get by. Many were fed by a union-run soup kitchen. Grassi worked three days a week as a quartermaster on the Catalina passenger boats. Like other strikers, he also walked a picket line at least two or three days a week.

But eventually the union men won. After almost three months, the shipping companies agreed to increases in pay, improved working conditions, arbitration through joint employer-union committees and, perhaps most importantly to rank-and-filers like Grassi, a more equitable hiring system.

Grassi would spend the next four decades working on the docks, except for a brief period as a merchant seaman during World War II. He loaded and unloaded thousands of ships, handling everything from fertilizer to bombs to U.S. Army mules bound for the Pacific during the war.

Because of the union, he was able to earn a good living for himself and his wife Frances and his two stepsons, both of whom eventually became longshoremen. He retired in 1972.

It wasn’t always easy. There were other strikes, in 1937 and in the late 1940s. But over the years union longshoremen won more pay increases--current base pay is more than $20 an hour--along with a variety of benefits.

Membership in the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, which took over from the Longshoremen’s Assn. after the 1937 strike, has declined over the years, from more than 62,000 members after World War II to about 50,000 today. According to Lou Loveridge, a former president of Local 13 of the ILWU and a 40-year veteran of the docks, membership in the Wilmington-based Local 13 has also declined, from a high of about 7,000 members to about 3,000 members today, largely because of mechanization.

Loveridge calls the ILWU “the best union in America,” and credits Grassi and thousands of others like him for making it possible. For Grassi, too, the hard-won union victory of the 1930s still has meaning today.

“We had to fight for everything,” Grassi says. “But the employers learned that if you pick on one guy you’re going to have to pick on all the guys. We stick together.”