Harry Bridges Institute - Harry Bridges and the ILWU

1958 Harry and Noriko ("Nikki") Bridges at their wedding in 1958

1949 Hawaii Regional Director Jack Hall, Bridges and International Secretary Treasurer Lou Goldblatt in 1949

1945 Bridges being sworn in as a U.S. citizen in 1945, with his daughter Jackie looking on.

Additional Resources:
Visit these sites for more information -

The Harry Bridges Chair
University of Washington Center for Labor Studies

The Harry Bridges Project
Information on Ian Ruskin, biographical info, "From Wharf Rats to Lords of The Docks."

Bloody Thursday:
The Museum of The City of San Francisco has an extensive online archive of newspaper articles relating to Bloody Thursday. Here are a few links where you can find out more:
Dock Riots of July 3, 1934
Arbitration Rejected, July 4, 1934
Bloody Thursday July 5, 1934

Other Articles:
Business vs. Harry Bridges, 1935
Accused of Communism, 1941
Bridges Biography in PDF
(ILWU web site, requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Harry and The ILWU
A Glimpse At His Life and Accomplishments
Use the links on the left and on our Links Page to find out more about Harry Bridges.

Harry Bridges' life was filled with good times, great victories and monumental accomplishments. His achievements, and those of the talented group of people who worked with him in building the ILWU, will be long remembered. Harry Bridges passed away on March 30, 1990, leaving a legacy of labor reform felt by millions of working class people the world over.

As Harry said when he retired: "I got to play a small part in some of the great events of this century. I got the testimonials, I got to meet all kinds of famous people. I was also the one that got attacked, red-baited, called every name under the sun. All of this stuff, the good and the bad, came about because the rank and file of this union chose to elect me as their representative. The praise I got really belonged to the members of this union, and the attacks on me were all directed at them."

Mechanization and Modernization
By the time the late '50's rolled around, technology loomed on the horizon. Harry Bridges, the pragmatic visionary, paid attention.

Mechanization of the longshore industry, he was certain, was inevitable. A series of discussions with maritime employers gave birth to the landmark Mechanization and Modernization Agreement in 1960.

Although some members feared a loss of jobs, the agreement was ratified, setting the standard in the industry. It allowed employers to use machinery and reduce the number of longshore jobs through attrition. The tradeoff was innovative protections for the longshoremen, including a multi-million dollar fund to supplement pensions and guarantee pay for those who opted not to retire.

The "M and M" as it was called, cost shippers some $29 million but saved them $200 million in reduced costs, and boosted productivity to record levels. Bridges was hailed as a "labor statesman" (a label he flatly rejected because it implied he had sold out) and a "man of his word" by some of the very employers who had previously sought to do him in. The irony never escaped him.

On Civil Rights
Bridges was a staunch advocate of civil rights ever since his brief association with the Wobblies in 1921. These views were fostered and established as policy during union organizing on the San Francisco waterfront in the early '30's.

In 1942 his "On the Beam" column in The Dispatcher called for an end to discrimination against blacks and women. He was among the first in the labor movement to condemn the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. And in the early '60's, he was strongly critical of the government's lackluster investigation into the bombing of black churches and the deaths of civil rights activists in the South.

On the Power of Labor:
(Presented at the 1967 ILWU Convention)
"Labor power we have. The organized worker as well as the unorganized worker has labor power. Whether they are working by the hour, by the day, whether they are salaried workers paid by the month, whether they are working in private enterprise or whether they are working for the government. This is the true power of this country. It is not the banks, it is not the big corporation, and it is not those so much with wealth. Neither, I must say with all due respect, is it the power of teachers and students. Basically the true and real power is with working people of all colors, of all beliefs, of all national origins.

Our job, the job of this Union, is to properly reappraise, properly harness, properly organize and direct what we know we have got. And that is labor power. Everything we have achieved has been through the proper use, the judicial use, of that particular labor power."

On Political Action:
(Presented at the 1945 ILWU Convention)
"There is a weapon we can fight with. We have had a little proof of it in the last few months. That is the weapon of political action. That is going to be the main fighting weapon of all labor, international as well as national, if we are going to do those things that we are in business to do as a labor union.

Along with that we will have to understand that labor, from here on in, is only going to be able to make gains and protect itself to the degree that it convinces and educates a community that unless (labor unions are) taken care of in certain ways, not in their own interests, but in the interests of the community, the community suffers."