The Story of Bloody Thursday

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The ILWU

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Oral Histories

THE STORY OF BLOODY THURSDAY

A version of this article first appeared in the July 2009 issue of San Pedro Today magazine. It was written by Jack Baric, the writer-producer of Bloody Thursday.

“No one really wanted to be a longshoreman. They were on the bottom rung of society. The average worker was down and out, didn’t have a home, and he was struggling to put food on table.” said Dave Arian, president of the Harry Bridges Institute. He is describing the condition of West Coast longshoremen during the Great Depression.

As our nation struggles with the most difficult economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is staggering to understand just how much more dire the situation was in the early thirties as compared to now. Consider this: We now have an unemployment rate of around 9%, during the Depression it was nearly 25%. Pete Grassi, a San Pedro longshoreman from that era, described a fairly normal routine for many West Coast dockworkers of that era, “You had a place where you went to pick up food to help you out. Every Friday the county used to give out bags of food.”

With times so difficult, one might think it insane to voluntarily stop work and go on strike, but as Arian put it, “The idea that workers could sustain themselves based just on their job didn’t exist so workers going into the 1934 strike didn’t have too much to lose because they were already sacrificing, the only way they could go was up.”

A major demand of the strikers was to develop fair hiring practices through gaining control of a union controlled hiring hall. The longshoremen fought to eliminate something they called the shape-up, which was the daily dockside routine where hundreds of men crowded around a boss hoping to get picked for a job that day. Al Perisho, the president of the ILWU Southern California Pensioner’s Club, described how a shape-up worked. “The guys would go down to the docks and a boss stood on a platform picking men. Everybody’s got a hand up and there’s a signal system where you were willing to give a guy a couple of bucks for a job.” San Francisco State labor professor Harvey Schwartz said, “The hiring was exploitive and brutal. You had to put out a bribe to get a job.”

For those lucky enough to get a job it was like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. The labor conditions were extremely strenuous. It was not rare to work around the clock because the shipping companies lost money if they didn’t get the ships back out to sea and so a man often found himself on the job for 12, 16, or even more than 24 hours straight. Henry Gaitan, a San Pedro longshoreman from the era, said, “The longest shift I ever worked was 32 hours. It was just a continual operation and your hands would bleed from that rough burlap. God it was tough.”

Even the most ardent anti-union person today would likely be relieved to have workmen comp benefits available if they were injured and unable to work. Prior to 1934, a man working on the docks was out of luck if he got hurt on the job. ILWU historian, Gene Vrana explained, “If a man was injured he was moved to the side so that the operation wasn’t slowed or stopped,“ Perisho added, We used to say how much to take care for an injured longshoremen? 10 cents -- put a dime in the phone and call a replacement.”

Faced with exploitive hiring practices and brutal workplace conditions, the men had nearly reached their boiling point. The final straw came when they were hit with two straight wage cuts without even being told in person. They read about the cuts in the newspaper. 1934 San Pedro longshoreman Ed Thayne recalled, “After they'd given us these cuts, why we figured it was just about time to go on strike. All they’d done is put it in the paper so we thought we'd really give them something to read about!”

The first step to going on strike was for the men to join a union. Up until 1933 they belonged to something called the Blue Book Union (it was called that because of the color of the membership books). The Blue Book was actually a company run union and so if the men had any workplace grievances they really had no place to turn. Longtime ILWU president Harry Bridges described the Blue Book this way. “On paper some of the company union conditions were very good, but if you had a beef against the company, everybody knew in advance that if you went to the company union and made a beef, you lost your job.”

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