I’d be happy to. Prior to 1934, West Coast longshoremen (ie. dockworkers, those of us who load and unload ships) were hired through a daily routine known as the “shape-up” — “the most despised symbol of the longshoremen’s oppression.” https://twitter.com/markjonesjr/status/1346411537465040896

The shape-up was systemic throughout the maritime world, from SF to Boston, London and Durban, going back to at least the 1860s. It carried on elsewhere, but was finally eradicated here with the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, one of the most important strikes in US history.

The shape-up was a brutal and deeply exploitative hiring scheme. Men would gather along the docks in the morning, desperately hoping to get a shift that day. The company foreman would look over the men and hand pick them one by one, leaving most empty-handed.

Foremen exploited their desperation, securing all sorts of kickbacks ranging from petty corruption, like a cut of their wages or a bottle of whiskey, to outright sexual extortion, demanding time with the longshoremen’s wives and daughters. In SF they called it the “slave market.”

Our union’s founder, Harry Bridges, an immigrant sailor from Australia who “swallowed the anchor” and settled in San Francisco, compared the shape to auctioning livestock, bitterly recalling years later that they had “been hired off the streets like a bunch of sheep.”

The shipping companies used the shape-up to not just drive down wages, but imposed speed-ups against the longshoremen as well. If you couldn’t keep up, you wouldn’t get picked, forcing you to work at a dangerously fast pace to keep your job in an already treacherous environment.

The job was rife with accidents and death. Men literally dropped dead on the job from exhaustion alone. When a longshoreman got killed at work, their friends had to drag his body out of the way and keep going or else risk losing their jobs as well.

If you protested these barbaric conditions or talked about a union, you got blacklisted — and the shape-up enforced it. Company foremen kept lists and used them to screen trade unionists and agitators off the waterfront.

After years of abuse and at the heights of the Great Depression, longshoremen began reorganizing in 1933, preparing for an industry-wide strike. They wanted union recognition, living wages and a shorter day, but their central demand was an end to the shape-up.

In contrast to this system, they wanted a worker-controlled hiring hall: one where rank-and-file longshoremen themselves would elect dispatchers from their own ranks to oversee job assignments, with equalization of work opportunities and an end to kickbacks and discrimination.

After months of trying to negotiate, longshoremen finally struck on May 9, 1934, shutting down nearly 2000 miles of coastline from Bellingham, WA to San Diego, CA. Less than a week into the 82-day strike, police murdered 20-year-old Dickie Parker on the picket line in San Pedro.

Parker never worked a shift as a longshoreman, joining the union only the night before he died on May 15. Police shot him dead on the beach. John Knudsen, 43, spent weeks in the hospital before dying from the wounds he got on the picket line alongside the young Dickie Parker.

In Seattle, company guards ambushed strike leader Shelvy Daffron and shot him in the back. Olaf Helland, a member of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, was killed when he was struck in the head by an unexploded tear gas canister battling strikebreakers at Smith Cove.

On July 5, outside the San Francisco union hall, two plainclothes officers leapt from an unmarked car with shotguns in hand and fired into the crowd. They hit several dozen before fleeing and left two dead on the corner of Mission and Steuart.

One of the victims was Howard Sperry, a veteran of WWI and a member of ILA Local 38-79, predecessor to today’s ILWU Local 10. He went halfway across the globe to “make the world safe for democracy” only to be shot dead at home fighting for exactly that.

This is Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934: That’s longshoreman Howard Sperry laying dead on the sidewalk and Charles Olsen crawling to safety. Olsen was initially reported dead as well. He went into hiding for several weeks, afraid the police would find him and finish the job.

The other casualty that day was Nick Bordoise, who was found in the street around the corner, and wasn’t even a maritime worker himself. He was an out-of-work line cook (and Communist) volunteering in the strike kitchen — and he died fighting for my union.

The deaths of Sperry and Bordoise weighed heavy on San Francisco. The funeral procession on July 9 was led by two flatbed trucks, each carrying a coffin, and followed by thousands of mourners marching in absolute silence save for a somber funeral dirge.

As one observer described it, “Above the clamor of that strike-turbulent summer of 1934, the silence was a wrenching cry of pain and anger.”

A week later on July 16, the whole city went out in solidarity in what became the historic San Francisco General Strike.

When the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike finally ended after 82 days, the longshoremen won nearly every one of their demands, most importantly: the worker-controlled hiring hall and an end to the shape-up.

Eight decades later, we continue to honor our martyrs by refusing to work on July 5, the day Sperry and Bordoise were murdered, a holiday we commemorate as “Bloody Thursday.” The whole coast shuts down for the day so we can spend time with our union locals and our families.

And we don’t acknowledge this history just once a year either. Inside ILWU Local 10’s hall, there’s a large mural on the wall depicting the picket lines from that violent summer. Above it reads, “THEY DIED FOR A HIRING HALL, NOT A SHAPE-UP.” You see it every day you go to work.

Bloody Thursday is a reminder to us in the ILWU today that the good things we got were never given to us; they were fought for and paid in blood. But a union’s not just about wages and benefits. Our union and the hiring hall itself are about dignity, equality, and democracy.

So I don’t know about you, but I think that’s worth dying for.

Also if y’all want to hear more about the ILWU, the hiring hall, Bloody Thursday, and more, check out these two episodes of @WorkingPod from last month with me and my friend Skiff! https://inthesetimes.com/article/ilwu-union-longshore-workers-waterfront-hiring-halls

Make sure to check out Part 1 first, where we talk about growing up ILWU, how we met, what it was like coming to the waterfront, and what the work itself looks like today in Tacoma. https://inthesetimes.com/article/ilwu-longshore-workers-waterfront-tacoma-washington-union-punk-labor