Harry, the Gag Man
JACOBS, PAUL
NATIONAL REPORTS Harry, The Gag Man By Paul Jacobs Inside the hotel in downtown San Francisco, the 200 people attending a recent labor-management conference were laughing at Harry Bridges'...
...Officially both Bridges and Hoffa are pariahs while in actuality employers like dealing with them, and other union leaders admire their use of power...
...Sure explains how well the new contract has worked out for the employers...
...And laugh the audience does, for after all, everybody knows that Bridges is not interested in revolutionary theory anymore...
...The membership of the San Pedro local voted unanimously last April to support their officials' attempt to fight the "Yellow Dog Agreement" in court...
...To guarantee that all the ILWU members got the point of this clause, a separate agreement was negotiated in 1960 by Bridges and the employers directed specifically against the militant San Pedro local which had pulled a wildcat strike even before the new contract went into effect...
...Actually, Bridges has the harder job on the two-man team...
...The ? men got nothing...
...Sure, a dignified, portly management representative, seems a little embarrassed by his partner but never enough to quit his partner...
...and cut down the work force...
...The same tight relationship between Bridges and the employers is also in the background of the fight being conducted in San Francisco by those ? men who were walking the picket line at the hotel as representatives of the 82 workers who were fired...
...After all, Harry gets the audience laughing and...
...All of them had been working on the waterfront as ? men since 1959...
...The pickets outside the hotel represented 82 unhappy victims of that cozy relationship...
...Outside the hotel entrance a dozen husky Negro pickets marched, carrying crudely lettered and misspelled signs saying "Longshoremen were expelled by ILWU," "Bridges and the PMA are keeping us out" and "Tell The Truth, Mr...
...The expellees have set up the Longshore Defense Committee and hired an attorney, Sidney Gordon of Los Angeles, to fight their cases...
...Their acts were not of a nature to be willful or indicative of intentional disregard of the interests of the Joint Port Labor Relations Committee...
...Indeed, the expulsion of Bridges from the CIO has had as little consequence for the ILWU as did that of the Teamsters, the ILWU'S allies, from the AFL-CIO...
...Years ago Bridges' authority was based on the membership's almost blind belief in him: Today his power is dependent upon the sufferance and cooperation of the employers...
...The evidence establishes—so ruled the state referee—that the discharged men "desired to continue working and that they had no reason to believe that violations occurring over a period of three or four years, and for which proper penalty had in each instance been made, would result in the loss of their employment...
...He has to defend the new contract, the happy spirit of union-management cooperation and the employers' rights to make profits, while simultaneously keeping up his reputation as labor's flaming radical...
...But that help folded when Bridges, in cooperation with the employers, stopped the promotion of all ? men until they gave up the cause of the expellees...
...Bridges warms up the audience and then St...
...The referee held that since they had not been fired at the time they committed the alleged violations, they could not be discharged for "misconduct" now, years later...
...That separate contract is described by Curt Johnson, the current president of the local, as the "Yellow Dog Agreement...
...And that's where the jokes come in: When Bridges talks about unemployment, he says, quite correctly...
...Sure carefully explains, on the "jointly accepted principle of the employers' rights to bring in new methods and save labor costs...
...But perhaps the lawsuits in Los Angeles and San Francisco presage a new spirit inside the union, for this is the first time ILWU members have broken with the protective tradition established by Bridges that any union member who goes to court to protect his rights is automatically a "phony," a stooge for the employers, and a "fink...
...In the act...
...Bridges' "script was never the same...
...A joint union-management committee screened the ? card-holders and jointly rejected the 82, allegedly for past violations of the contract or of union rules, some of them dating back four years...
...Sure, president of the Pacific Maritime Association, the West Coast waterfront employer group...
...Sure remarked to the audience that, although Bridges and he had made the joint presentation many times...
...unlike Class A members, were denied full union membership and protection of their working conditions...
...In exchange for the union giving up its previous resistance to such unqualified rights, the employers set up a $29 million fund to pay a $7,900 bonus to all A men at age 65, allow the A men to retire early and guarantee all of them a weekly minimum wage, based on pay for 35 hours...
...They have just won their first battle: their right to unemployment insurance benefits has been upheld...
...But he continues with "However, we don't want to go into a revolutionary theory like that, do we...
...Sure was right, for like any other town character who hangs around the barber shop, Bridges must keep on gagging it up...
...far more important, since the contract was signed, the employers have saved millions and millions of dollars in labor costs...
...He would be a pathetic figure if he did not have, as a result of his relationships with the employers, enough control to keep men from their jobs...
...Lawsuits on behalf of 45 of the discharged men have already been filed against the union and the PMA...
...Harry milks another good yuck out of the crowd when he talks about negotiating contracts "with both fists cocked...
...In a recent bulletin to the membership, Johnson points out that the agreement is one "by which the employer can eliminate you from the industry or blacklist you without your having a chance to defend yourself or opportunity to be heard...
...Many ILWU members are discovering now who the real employers' stooges are...
...The sophisticated audience knows he is kidding and that, for more than a decade, relations between the union and the employers have been as cozy as they can be...
...Unfortunately, most of the men have been unable to find other jobs since they were fired because of the bad conduct charge against them...
...that it is "a social problem, built into the society...
...Bridges is still a popular folk hero in San Francisco, still living on the proceeds of his early reputation as a militant...
...Aside from a very few people, the local community has largely ignored the case...
...Occasionally St...
...Then when the men applied for unemployment insurance, they were denied benefits because of the bad-conduct discharges they had been given...
...First crack at the A status was given to the pool of ? men which had grown larger and larger over the years...
...The militant and organized fight of the discharged ? men has been surprising to everybody, especially Bridges, since for years he has run the union, in his own description, as if it were a "totalitarian" organization...
...In addition, they lost their accrued vacation pay and medical benefits...
...At the end of 1958, the union and the employers had negotiated the current contract—based, as St...
...The referee charged further that other ? men who had violated union rules were admitted into A membership without difficulty...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Harry, The Gag Man By Paul Jacobs Inside the hotel in downtown San Francisco, the 200 people attending a recent labor-management conference were laughing at Harry Bridges' gags...
...They were Class ? longshoremen who were fired from the docks in June 1963 by a joint union-management screening committee...
...In fact, the ? men were usually given the worst jobs on the waterfront...
...Many of the men claim they are innocent, but that almost all their rights to due process were denied them and that they never were given a proper opportunity to defend themselves against vague, unspecified charges heard by what amounted to a kangaroo court of union-employer representatives...
...He's the gag man in an act he does these days with Paul St...
...And union leaders in the area, with few exceptions, tend to side with him, for they too want no trouble with the militants...
...And just to make sure that no local strikes over these new work rules, the contract provides that if any local does strike, all contributions to the fund cease until the stoppage is over...
...Despite some opposition to the contract, especially in Los Angeles, Bridges managed to get a majority vote for it...
...Legal actions have been filed claiming, among other charges, that the agreement represents an "unfair labor practice" and that it "deprives the membership of their fundamental and legal right of due process...
...At the conference, however, Bridges was playing it for laughs...
...Together, they tour around, explaining the virtues of the current contract between the longshoremen's union and the association...
...On June 4, a referee of the State Unemployment Insurance appeals board ruled that even those of the 82 men who might have been guilty of violations of the agreement or union rules, either consciously or unknowingly, had already been penalized and then allowed to continue working...
...They paid union dues and assessments in exchange for the right to a job but...
...and like a ham actor, pauses, waiting for the boffola laugh he knows he will get...
...Naturally, the result of the contract has been to cut down on whatever militant spirit still remained in the union...
...Since then, the waterfront employers have introduced mechanized equipment, containerization...
...Initially, their cause was supported by most of the other ? men who had passed the screening...
...Outside the hotel last month, the pickets walked patiently while inside St...
...The firings, or "deregistrations" as they are euphemistically described, took place when for the first time since 1948, the San Francisco local opened 500 Class A memberships to replace men who had died or left the docks...
...But despite all his jokes, that is not a bit funny...
Vol. 47 • July 1964 • No. 14
