Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States

Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States

Now in his 70s Harry Bridges has had a long, exciting career as an independent, incorruptible, often intransigent labor leader. As a young Australian immigrant, he was a seaman and longshoreman on the West Coast, helped to organize the longshoreman union, and emerged in 1934 as the leader of the San Francisco general strike. Thirty-eight years later, in the spring of 1972, after a successful 130- day strike, he and his union were again in the national spotlight. This biography is a sympathetic portrait of one of the most colorful labor leaders of our time. It tells how he and the international longshoremen and warehousemen’s union survived attack after attack, first by the ship owners and then by the justice department and the immigration service, which tried three times to deport him as communist alien. It tells how the I.L.W.U organized the multi-racial waterfront and agricultural workers of Hawaii and revolutionized the economy and social fabric of the island. It describes the controversial Mechanization and modernization agreement, one of the first union contracts to give workers a share of the increased profits created by automation. This book is much more than the biography of one man; it provides an inside view of 40 years of American labor and social History.

Charles P. Larrowe

Lawrence Hill and Co.

1972

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English

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