From the Docks to the Killing Floors

“You had a slogan, ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ It’s still a good slogan. It’s an old Marxist slogan. Still use it. And that’s how simple it was, workers of the world unite, you got nothing to lose but your chains. Still as good as the day it was said. We still try to operate by it, at least I try to.” So said Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) from 1937 to 1977, in an interview with Bill Moyers.

The ILWU is one of the unions featured in the sixth episode of Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO, along with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC), and the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). There were many other unions that formed the CIO — unions in oil, printing, transport, and retail — but the four that are covered in this episode were four of the biggest and most influential.

Highlights of the episode include archival speeches from UE director of organization James Matles, more from Moyers’s interview with Bridges, and part of an oral history with ILWU Local 10 president Cleophas Williams.

Further reading:

• Robert Zieger, The CIO: 1935–1955, Chapter 4
• Mary Heaton Vorse, Labor’s New Millions, Chapters 17, 21
• Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941, Chapter 12
• James Young, Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania
• James Matles and James Higgins, Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-File Union, Parts 1 and 2
• Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60
• Ronald Filippelli and Mark D. McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers
• Robert Cherny, Harry Bridges: Labor Legend, Labor Radical, Chapters 7–12
• Peter Cole, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, Chapter 2
• Harvey Schwartz, The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934–1938
• Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s
• Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor, Chapter 12
• Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–54
• Paul Street, “The ‘Best Union Members’: Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago’s Stockyards during the 1930s”

Listen:

• “From the Docks to the Killing Floors,” Organize the Unorganized