National Affairs: Showdown

At the foot of San Francisco’s Hyde Street stands the bleak, red North Beach warehouse of big California Packing Corp. Last October the company closed the warehouse, discharging 75 members of Harry Bridges’ Longshoremen & Warehousemen’s Union. The company said it was a permanent shutdown, the warehousemen a lockout. Whatever it was the warehouse has been closed ever since.

Fortnight ago, wanting to remove some of its stored Del Monte canned goods, California Packing dispatched a fleet of trucks manned by members of the Teamsters Union, which on the West Coast is bossed by A. F. of L.’s beefy Dave Beck, “Tsar of Seattle Labor” and a sworn enemy of Harry Bridges. Promptly hustled to the warehouse was a crew of Bridges’ unionists to picket not the warehouse but the Beck teamsters.

Instanter Dave Beck declared war, ordering his teamsters to cease trucking all goods handled by the Bridges longshoremen—a virtual embargo of the entire San Francisco waterfront. Exceptions were made for such things as perishables and Government orders. Soon settled and forgotten was the original warehousemen-California Packing squabble. For pugnacious Dave Beck it had served its purpose as a labor Sarajevo. What started as a local warehouse squabble was by last week a major labor battle, involving the whole of San Francisco, threatening the whole Pacific Coast.

The real stake in this war of Labor against Labor was jurisdictional possession of the West Coast warehousemen, who were ignored by Teamster Beck until Longshoreman Bridges in his “inland march” started to organize them. Today he has 11,000 in the C. I. O. camp. Meantime Dave Beck got the A. F. of L. to award jurisdiction over warehousemen to the teamsters, a meaningless gesture to Harry Bridges, who is now West Coast director for C. I. O. Longshoreman Bridges offered last week to settle the dispute by a National Labor Relations Board election but Teamster Beck, having only a handful of warehousemen signed up, flatly refused. “This,” cried he, “is a showdown fight. We’ll close every port on the Pacific Coast where warehousemen are not teamsters,” “These gentlemen,” rasped Longshoreman Bridges, “not only want a labor war but demand it. . . .”

Meanwhile with no trucks to cart the goods away from the waterfront, inbound cargoes piled up on the San Francisco docks. Warehousemen and longshoremen continued to work but jobs dwindled as the available storage space gradually filled up, and a delegation of longshoremen’s wives waited on San Francisco’s Mayor Rossi with pleas to end the war. When shippers started to direct cargoes to Oakland and other Bay ports, Beck simply widened his embargo. Outbound freight was not hit so hard because it moves to the docks largely by rail, not trucks.

Though ostensibly on the sidelines, San Francisco’s businessmen favored Dave Beck—but only as the lesser of two evils. Much as they would relish a Bridges defeat, they have no desire to see Dave Beck fasten on San Francisco the brand of politico-labor dictatorships he has developed in Seattle. Having flown from his own bailiwick to San Francisco to direct the war in person, Teamster Beck bid loudly for the goodwill of capital, trumpeting: “Before we’re through we’re going to call on the American Legion, fraternal organizations, business, responsible labor and the general public to support our position and stop irresponsible and Communistic activities.” In the words of the Secretary of the Draymen’s Association, whose contracts the teamsters had flagrantly violated, the employers’ general attitude was: “The fat is in the fire now. Let it sizzle for a while.”