The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) is a North American labor union representing longshore workers along the East Coast of the United States and Atlantic Canada, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, Puerto Rico, and inland waterways; the ILA has approximately 200 local affiliates in port cities in these areas. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is dominant on the West Coast, western Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii.
History of the ILA Origins
While longshoremen in the United States had organized and conducted strikes before there was a United States, the first modern longshoremen's union, the Longshoremen's Union Protective Association (LUPA), was formed in the port of New York in 1864. It was later absorbed by the ILA.
The ILA traces its origins to a union of longshoremen on the Great Lakes: the Association of Lumber Handlers, founded in 1877, then renamed the National Longshoremen's Association of the United States in 1892. It joined the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1895 and renamed itself the International Longshoremen's Association several years later, when it admitted Canadian longshoremen to membership, and later was briefly known as the International Longshoremen, Marine and Transport Workers' Association when it sought to extend its jurisdiction to include workers in the industries whose goods they handled.
Organized and led by an Irish tugboat worker named Daniel Keefe, the organization had as many as 100,000 members on the Great Lakes, the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Gulf Coast in 1905. From the outset, Keefe faced significant challenges, most notably the outright hostility of Chicago's influential industrialists to unions and the traditional anti-union leanings of longshore recruits from small Midwestern towns. Nevertheless, Keefe successfully expanded membership in the newborn union to include large numbers of dockworkers.
The Early Twentieth Century As the start of the twentieth century loomed, the ILA had approximately 50,000 members, almost all on the Great Lakes. By 1905, membership had doubled to 100,000, half of which were scattered throughout the rest of the country. ILA leaders focused on eliminating independent stevedoring firms and securing closed shop contracts. Keefe bargained with employers, guaranteeing uninterrupted work in return for badly needed improvements in working conditions and wage increases.
Keefe retired as President of the ILA in 1908, succeeded by another Great Lakes tugboat man, T.V. O'Connor. O'Connor's presidency spanned twelve of the ILA's most tumultuous years. In 1909, a bitter three-year strike on the Great Lakes pitted the employers' Lake Carriers Association against every maritime union except the ILA, whose locals voted against participation because it was clear to them that the strike was a losing battle. So powerful and well equipped was the Lake Carriers Association that Lakes shipping ran almost regularly despite the union walkout. In the end, the ILA was almost alone on the Lakes.
The 1914 absorption of LUPA into the ILA prompted the creation of the ILA's New York District Council and ignited an intense period of growth for the union, both in terms of size and power. The organization of coastwise longshoremen in 1916 was a significant victory that greatly improved the ILA's position in negotiations: shippers no longer had the option of diverting freight from striking ports along the Atlantic. A similar coastwide strike also occurred on the West Coast in 1916, but ended in defeat for the Union.
As the ILA grew, power shifted increasingly to the Port of New York, where the International established its branch headquarters. There Joseph P. Ryan was organizing longshoremen as an officer of the ILA's New York District Council and, in 1918, as president of the ILA's "Atlantic Coast District".
The ILA in New York faced a number of internal divisions. While New York longshoremen were predominantly Irish-American for the latter part of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, making up 95% of the workers on the New York docks as of 1880, employers began hiring Italian immigrants and African-Americans as strikebreakers as early as 1887, then retaining them in later years as a means of dividing workers and discouraging strikes. By the turn of the century the ILA had separate Italian, Greek, African-American, German and Irish local unions in New York, reflecting the hiring patterns in the industry, in which foremen typically hired members of their ethnic group.
In 1912 Italian-Americans made up roughly a third of the workforce, primarily in Brooklyn, while the Irish dominated the Chelsea docks in Manhattan. Irish dockworkers also had more of the dock and deck jobs in Manhattan, leaving the harder work in the hold to others; Italian dockworkers did the same in Brooklyn, spurning the dirty work of unloading banana boats, which fell to Black dockworkers instead.
The ILA was also riven by internal factionalism. This came to the fore in 1919 when longshoremen throughout the New York-New Jersey Harbor struck in protest of an arbitration award that gave them raises of only five cents an hour for straight time work and ten cents per hour for overtime—what strikers dismissed as "the Woolworth raise"—instead of the thirty-five cent raise that the Union had sought. The ILA's International President T.V. O'Connor, who had reluctantly accepted the award, denounced the strike, which he blamed on radicals from the Maritime Transport Workers' Industrial Union (MTW), an arm of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). O'Connor's most serious opposition, however, did not come from the IWW, but from equally conservative members of the ILA leadership and rivals who had been part of LUPA. They succeeded in pushing O'Connor aside, then, having achieved their personal political goals, urged members to return to work while they pursued talks as part of a Special Conciliation Commission appointed by the Mayor. The strike, which was already collapsing as some local unions returned to work, achieved nothing.
In addition the ILA faced external competition, particularly from the IWW, which had a number of members on the West Coast, where many workers moved into longshoring from other centers of IWW strength, such as the lumber and mining industries. The IWW was also strong in Philadelphia during these years, despite efforts to convict the leaders of Local 8 of the IWW on charges of espionage during World War I and the prosecution and conviction of many of the IWW's national leaders in 1919. An employer lockout in 1922 largely destroyed the organization.
The ILA likewise faced strong from opposition from employers. The shipping companies on the West Coast, where a few lines dominated the industry, took a particularly hard line, demanding the open shop as early as 1914. Their intransigence may well have encouraged the growth of the MTW, as well as the influence of IWW radicals within the ILA on the West Coast.
In 1921, ILA president Thomas V. O'Connor resigned. Anthony Chlopek, the last of the Great Lakes presidents, was elected ILA International president and Ryan served as his First Vice president for the six years of Chlopek's presidency. Perhaps the most significant development during Chlopek's term was the institution of the Prohibition Enforcement Law. Ryan was elected International president in 1927.
The Great Depression and the Revival of the ILA Longshore work, particularly in the port of New York where thousands of longshoremen worked only a day or less in an average week, was largely casual and irregular; many workers earned less than what authorities considered the minimum necessary to support a family. Longshore work became even more precarious during the Great Depression, as masses of unemployed workers seeking longshore work nearly doubled the available pool of workers. Employers took advantage of these conditions to reduce wages further and establish company unions.
The ILA responded to the crisis by taking advantage of two newly-enacted federal laws: the Norris–LaGuardia Act) of 1932, which limits the use of federal court injunctions to prevent strikes and picketing, and the Wagner Act, which protects the rights of workers to organize unions and to strike to obtain their demands. Membership soared, increasing as much as sixfold in as many years in some districts.
Secession of the West Coast Locals The process of rebuilding the union was not without hurdles. Ryan and the union's regional and local leaders regained much of the lost ground, but often at the cost of diminished centralization. The most dramatic example of this was on the Pacific coast.
The ILA Pacific Coast District was led by the left-leaning Harry Bridges and his associates, known as the "Albion Hall group", who rebelled against Ryan's leadership during the 1934 West Coast longshore strike. A network of union activists largely circumvented Ryan during the strike, first organizing the membership to reject the contract that Ryan had negotiated, then leading a strike over his objections. Bridges and other veterans of the strike replaced Ryan loyalists in union elections up and down the West Coast following the strike.Robert W. Cherny, "The making of a labor radical: Harry Bridges, 1901-1934." Pacific Historical Review 64.3 (1995): 363-388. online
Ryan never trusted Bridges, even though he was forced to make him an International officer in recognition of his de facto power on the West Coast. Ryan fired Bridges in 1936, however, after Bridges launched an East Coast speaking tour in support of the left-wing sailors' union, the National Maritime Union, with which Ryan had unfriendly relations. Bridges subsequently took all but three of the ILA's West Coast locals out of the ILA to form the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations shortly thereafter.
The ILA During World War II and the Postwar Years The war had unexpected effects on the ILA's members' relations with both their employers and their union. On the one hand, the ILA, in the name of aiding the war effort, relaxed the rules that had restricted the size of loads that longshoremen could handle, making work harder and more dangerous. On the other hand, as more and more workers left the docks either to enlist or to find other jobs in the defense industry, the remaining workers received more steady work and less of the casual daily work offered through the shapeup. These workers were more willing to launch wildcat strikes and other challenges to their employers and the ILA leadership.
This new defiance boiled over in October 1945, as returning veterans played a key role in a citywide wildcat strike to reject the contract negotiated by Ryan. ILA members went out on another wildcat strike in 1947, then again in 1948 and again in 1951.
Investigations into Mob Involvement in the ILA Organized crime figures had been involved in the longshore industry and the ILA from the early years of the twentieth century. Paul Vaccarelli, an Italian immigrant who boxed under the name "Paul Kelly", led the Five Points Gang, a largely Irish-American street gang from the Five Points neighborhood of Southern Manhattan, with protection from Tammany Hall. Vaccarelli was also a Vice-President of the ILA who took over leadership of the rank-and-file rebellion against the "Woolworth raise" in 1919.
In the next generation Eddie McGrath, an Irish-American gangster who worked as an enforcer for the ILA on the Hell's Kitchen waterfront and controlled the docks on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s, became an important liaison within the ILA to organized crime figures. He was a close ally of powerful organized crime figures such as Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, and Meyer Lansky.