Portal:United States Merchant Marine/Selected article/8
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joseph Curran (March 1, 1906 - August 14, 1981) was a merchant seaman and an American labor leader. He was founding president of the National Maritime Union (or NMU, now part of the Seafarers International Union of North America) from 1937 to 1973, and a vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
Curran was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His father died when he was two years old, and his mother boarded with another family. He attended parochial school, but when he was 14 he was expelled during the seventh grade for truancy.
He worked as a caddy and factory worker before finding employment in 1922 in the United States Merchant Marine. On ships, he worked as an able seaman and boatswain. Between ships, he washed dishes in restaurants and slept on a Battery Park bench at night. It was during this time that he received his lifelong nickname "Big Joe."
Curran joined the International Seamen's Union (or ISU; the remnants of which would become the Seafarers International Union), but was not active in the union at first. In 1936, he led a strike aboard the ocean liner S.S. California, then docked in San Pedro, California. Curran and the crew of the Panama Pacific Line's California went on strike at sailing time and refused to cast off the lines unless wages were increased and overtime paid.
In May 1937, Curran was a founding member of the National Maritime Union. It held its first convention in July, and 30,000 seamen switched their membership from the ISU to the NMU. Curran was elected president of the new organization. During the next 36 years, Joseph Curran worked to make American merchant seamen the best-paid maritime workers in the world. NMU established a 40-hour work week, overtime, paid vacations, pension and health benefits, tuition reimbursement, and standards for shipboard food and living quarters. Curran even built a union-run school to retrain union members, and won large employer donations through collective bargaining to build the school.
