A Forgotten War: The Labor History of San Francisco
I. Bartling
Looking up at the skyscrapers piercing San Francisco’s skies and hearing fleets of cars driven by Uber and Lyft drivers, one can see that San Francisco is a gentrified city of tech startups and yuppies. It is hard to remember that San Francisco was once a city of blood, sweat and toil --a city, the heart of which was once manufacturing and shipping, not coding and programming.
Long ago strikes were bloody and unions powerful; even the coffee shops were unionized. San Francisco was an industrial union town for decades, yet this heritage is a ghost, long forgotten. There are no monuments to this era, no legacy for something once so strong, a reflection of unionism’s decline throughout the United States.
A bloody strike in 1934 shook the city to its core and transformed it for decades. This strike, which spanned the West Coast, was organized by longshoremen and mostly composed of sailors and longshoremen; despite the great distances the strike spanned, San Francisco was the strike’s center. The strikers’ demands were simple: “A six-hour day, a 30 hour week, $1 an hour, and [a] union hiring hall” for all longshoremen along the Pacific Coast, said Harry Bridges, the strike’s radical leader. The strike was a bloody affair from the start. “We had a hell of a time because picketing was illegal. One of the reasons is the waterfront was state property. We’d get out there with our flag, our union banner, and I think we had a couple of drums to march along. Then the cops would move in and beat the **it out of us”. The strikers were persistent, pressing on even after the first major violent clash with police on May 28.
By June 16, 1934, the President of the International Longshoreman’s Association (the union the strikers were apart of) Joe Ryan, signed an agreement with San Francisco’s conservative mayor granting the longshoremen their demands, but giving nothing to the other strikers. The longshoremen opposed this agreement with fuming anger: “[uproars broke] out in the membership, with hootin’ an’ hollerin’” and Harry Bridges, who ensured that the President would be able to make his argument, “[had] to gavel ‘em to silence and say, ‘Look, fellas, the President’s gonna have his say.’” All strikers rejected the agreement except Los Angeles’; the strikers pressed on. On July 5, the police fired on two strikers: Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry, in one of the most violent events in San Francisco’s history. San Franciscans were furious, calling a general strike on July 14.
This revolutionary strike was pure chaos; The San Francisco Chronicle called it “a hundred riots.” Meanwhile, “35,000 workers” were organized in San Francisco in the midst of the strike, an event that would unionize San Francisco’s workers for decades. The general strike lasted for only four days, partly because the unions that hadn’t initially participated in the strike were more moderate than the socialist-leaning ILA. Unions agreed to National Recovery Administration-led arbitration (something the ILA initially refused to do) but the NRA sided with the unions, giving them their demands. That victory led to San Franciso being made in the union’s image for decades.
And a legacy it is! Even now, the Bay Area’s longshoremen are represented by a union, hired via a hiring hall and sometimes paid wages in excess of $100,000 a year. Even now, unions are much stronger in San Francisco than they are nationally; the Union Membership and Coverage Database estimates that 18.6% of workers in the San Francisco Bay Area are represented by unions, a number significantly higher than the national percentage.
But the San Francisco today isn’t the San Francisco of industry and unionism; San Francisco is neither an industrial nor a unionized city. One hears not of industry nor fiercely fought strikes, but of technology and gentrification. It begs question: what happened? That question’s answer is complex and deeply connected to national trends. A liberal government supported the strike of 1934 and the strike was in line with the trend of strengthening unions throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and the strength of unions in San Francisco mirrored the peak of American unions in the 1950s and 1960s, but the gentrification and de-unionization of San Francisco similarly mirrors the decline of American unions beginning in the 1970s and continuing today.
Yet the true lesson of the 1934 strike and the labor history of San Francisco is not that everything reflects national trends; one could argue that the 1934 strike helped start the trend of rising unions. The true lesson of both the 1934 strike and the decline of unions is that any power can and will eventually be brought to heel, just as the longshoremen brought the waterfront companies to heel, and in turn businesses weakened unions and gentrified San Francisco. Everything, no matter how strong, will weaken, decline, and above all, change. Yesterday, San Francisco’s classes warred with pepper spray and guns. Today they war in ballot boxes and courts. The world is ever changing and repeating, and San Francisco will continue to change with it.
