Talk:International Longshore and Warehouse Union

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[edit] Bridges a Commie

I took out that this question wasn't settled; Harvey Klehr and what's his name, the other one, claim they found evidence of this in the Cominterm archives in the 1990s. Don't have the source handy right now but thought I should mention that there is one.Bobanny 05:20, 5 October 2006 (UTC) p.s., up here in Soviet Canuckistan, this is merely trivia, but I understand the US has a bigger anti-Communist problem.

Dispute: This article has a clear anti-union bias. It omits much of the progressive work conducted by the union and focuses on red baiting. It also omits the violence directed at the union during the 30s from the Klan and other anti-union forces. See The ILWU Story: Six Decades of Militant Unionism for a fuller picture.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.14.92.158 (talk) 15 December 2006

Communists played a major role in the development of the ILWU and the CIO, and I don't see how acknowledging that is anti-union or red-baiting. Moreover, much of the reaction unions faced was carried out as an anti-communist campaign. The Cold War is over, and the Communists lost, so I don't see the point in letting anticommunism continue to distort history. Klehr and Haynes are vehemently anticommunist, and condemn Harry Bridges and others for their associations with the international communist movement. That is red-baiting but it's also a value judgement that doesn't follow from what Bridges and other Communist activists actually accomplished as leading union proponents in that period of labour history. Unfortunately, Klehr and Haynes were among the handful of people given access to the Comintern archives in Moscow, but just because their conclusions are dubious, doesn't mean the information they found should be dismissed. Absolutely, this article could be expanded to offer a "fuller picture" of the ILWU, but if by that you mean obscuring the role Communists played, than I disagree. But by all means, be bold and jump in. Bobanny 21:43, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

The ILWU take on Bridges:

" He underwent two deportation hearings and a denaturalization proceeding and twice was vindicated in other actions before the Supreme Court. All four prosecutions were based on the same false charge: his alleged Communist affiliation.[emphasis added] He was wrongfully convicted, illegally imprisoned, fraudulently stripped of his citizenship, and his attorneys sent to jail for defending him. Not without reason did Supreme Court Justice Murphy declare at the time of Bridges' first vindication before the highest court that, "The record in this case will stand forever as a monument to man's intolerance of man.""

Also regarding the split with the CIO:

" Until the end the ILWU insisted that there should be room within the CIO for disagreement, and that, in keeping with the principle of autonomy, the policies and programs of CIO affiliates should be those endorsed by their rank and file-not those imposed from the top by national CIO leaders. The CIO did not agree and the ILWU was redbaited and then expelled in 1950, along with several other progressive unions, on the premise that the union was under "Communist domination."[emphasis added]

Concurrent with the anti-Communist hysteria during the Korean War, the CIO leadership sought to wreck or weaken the dissident unions and take over their jurisdictions. To this end they collaborated with the Departments of Labor and Commerce and certain AFL maritime unions to set up a so-called security program on the waterfront which called for Coast Guard screening of all ship and shore workers."

As far as communists playing a "major" role in the development of the ILWU and the CIO, it's just as easy to say that the KKK played a major role in union busting at the behest (or with a blind eye at the VERY least) of the corporate/govt. anti-unionists. There were plenty of repressive and violent forces acting against unionism, but this article seems to forget that...[Source of above quotes: The ILWU Story: Six Decades of Militant Unionism This source was obviously VERY SELECTIVELY consulted for the bulk of the ILWU entry] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.163.29.97 (talk) 16 December 2006

I'm not sure what your argument is regarding the Communist Party. I don't know the extent of KKK anti-union activity, and I don't doubt that it's worth mentioning, but I do doubt that it's as significant a factor as communism because anti-unionism campaigns were framed as anticommunist campaigns, and the KKK was only one of many groups ranging from liberal to fascist, fighting against unionism/communism (possibly spurred on because the CPUSA in this period was also organizing black workers), particularly in its most militant phases. Ignoring or playing down communism, real, perceived, or alleged, in interwar labour struggles is a distortion. Recently uncovered evidence also confirms that John Lewis made a working arrangement with the CPUSA to help build the CIO. The fact that the CIO later purged communists, and red-baited perceived upstarts so that they could be purged as well, doesn't change the role that communist organizers played in the CIO.

As for the ILWU's take on Bridges, it's not inaccurate in that no evidence was found in the 1950s incontrovertibly proving he was a member of the Communist Party. That evidence was found in the 1990s in Moscow. Lots of people denied and covered up their connection to the CPUSA for good reason, and Bridges was one of them. Should the ILWU update their official history? Probably, but I can't imagine they are too eager to emphasize the past extent of communists in their organization, especially with people like Harvey Klehr and John Haynes chomping at the bit to hold that up as evidence that labour unions were nothing more than pawns of Stalin, in a country where that kind of fallacious reasoning still finds a receptive audience. That Bridges was a member of the Communist Party does not in any way invalidate his work on behalf of American laborers.

I still don't see how this article is anti-union. I agree that it should be expanded, but just because it's lacking in certain areas doesn't make it anti-union. I'm guessing that whoever wrote it is/are sympathetic to labor, as are all the other union articles I've seen on Wikipedia. Most of the sources used in the article are decisively pro-labor in their orientation (and it should be noted that the ILWU isn't a neutral source, and therefore isn't the final word on any of this, although I have no quibbles with the above excerpts). Bobanny 22:25, 16 December 2006 (UTC)