[ Back to LQ | Metro | Metroactive Central ]

The Docks Of the Bay

Unionism thrives on the Bay Area's waterfronts despite setbacks

---

The Union Makes Us Strong: Radical Unionism on the San Francisco Waterfront
By David Wellman
Cambridge; 383 pages; $39.95 cloth

---

Reviewed by Geoffrey Dunn

The state of the American labor movement in the 1990s, according to conventional wisdom, is one of continual decline. Ever since its heyday in the 1930s, so the story goes, when the radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) forged a nationwide moment of working-class insurgency, the history of U.S. labor has been one of constant defeat and accommodation.

Not so, argues David Wellman in his new book, The Union Makes Us Strong, an illuminating and in many respects iconoclastic study of longshore workers on the San Francisco waterfront.

Wellman, whose previous book, Portraits of White Racism, helped to dispel the Archie Bunker stereotype of working-class racial prejudice, spent the better part of five years researching, interviewing and just plain "hanging out," as he calls it, with rank-and-file members of International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) Local 10. The result is a rich and colorful account of the Bay Area's shipping docks.

Anyone familiar with West Coast labor history is well aware of the ILWU's radical and militant legacy. The ILWU played a central role in San Francisco's legendary General Strike of 1934, while the union was ousted from the CIO in the late 1940s because of the "communist leanings" of its charismatic leader, Harry Bridges.

All that changed, according to most outside observers, when the ILWU accepted a modernization and mechanization agreement in 1961, which, on paper at least, turned over the control of the workplace to the industry's shipping magnates in exchange for job security and benefits. In short, the union sold out--or as one historian declared, the ILWU "had been brought to heel."

Although Wellman acknowledges the accommodating impact of the ILWU's labor contract, his keen observations of the shop floor reveal that, in spite of the contractual arrangements, longshore workers repeatedly contest management's authority in a variety of concrete and meaningful ways. Far from being rendered docile by the labor agreement, they retain a subversive militancy and a "culture of resistance" that is shaped and, at times, even fueled by the contract. "On the waterfront," Wellman declares, "class relations continue to be a spectacle of incompatibility."

Wellman also observes a progressive and democratically organized union, a union committed to racial equality, and one in which participatory politics continue to be held in esteem. Bureaucratic structures and systems of authority are also constantly challenged. In opposition to virtually everything written about labor in the '90s, Wellman describes a vibrant, thriving union.

The real power of Wellman's study, I believe, is the respect he pays to the work of the waterfront--and to those who perform it. Although never guilty of romanticizing the longshoremen (he takes them to task and disagrees with them when he feels it's appropriate), he does humanize them and treat them as equals in ways that most academic studies of working-class Americans do not.

More importantly, he's able to understand longshore workers and document their activities. Most academic historians and sociologists live lives so distant from working-class culture that they have not been able to distinguish the trees from the forest in their accounts of the American labor movement. In this respect, The Union Makes Us Strong provides an important model--and benchmark--for all future labor studies.

I have only two beefs with Wellman's book. The first is its less than proletarian price. (I hope a paperback publisher will pick it up so that the people about whom it's written can afford to purchase it.) The second is its occasional lapse into academic jargon. Although Wellman is making a case against traditional labor sociology and its abstract, frequently absurd theoretical posturing, he often embraces the language of the enemy to formulate his argument.

It's an alienating experience for the lay reader (and, I trust, longshoremen as well) to suffer through phrases like "the social location of hierarchy" and "prefigurative politics." Surely there is a more common, accessible language available to make these very same points.

But these are only minor complaints. Anyone concerned about the American labor movement will find much of interest in this often fascinating, and surprisingly lively, read.

[ Books Index | Metro | Metroactive Central | Archives ]