Long Siege?

Three weeks ago the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the union-run hiring hall, as operated by most of the big maritime unions, is in effect a closed shop and thus illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act. Nobody in the shipping industry cheered the decision; few wanted it.

The hiring hall had become the great stabilizer of maritime employment. Before the unions began setting them up in the mid-'30s, hiring of seamen and longshoremen had been a racket; men were obliged to buy jobs and kick back part of their wages. As the unions ran them, jobs were filled from a list of union men registered at the halls. It was clearly discriminatory; non-union men could get jobs only when there were not enough union men to fill them. Thus the hiring hall became a stronghold of union security. But it brought a measure of peace to the nation's waterfronts.

Last week wily, wiry Harry Bridges called a West Coast shipping strike and invited a showdown over the Taft-Hartley Act and the hiring hall. It was his seventh major tieup of the. Pacific waterfronts in a dozen years. Like most of the others it promised to be long, costly and bitterly fought.

A Concession to the Dead. Bridges had been itching for the showdown since last spring. He was restrained for 80 days by an injunction obtained under the Taft-Hartley Act. When the injunction ran out last week, shippers offered Bridges a carbon copy of the agreement which had been accepted by East Coast, Gulf and Great Lakes unions: let the hiring halls operate as before, until the courts rule on their legality.*

Bridges would have none of it. He would have no strings attached to his hiring halls. And, if the Supreme Court should rule them illegal, that would .be the end of any contract with Harry Bridges. When the shipowners rejected his demands, Bridges stalked out, flung back: "See you on the picket lines tomorrow."

The strike clamped down West Coast ports as tight as a submerged submarine's hatches. About 160 U.S. ships of the Pacific cargo and passenger fleets were caught in port; about 200 were at sea and would be tied up the minute they docked in West Coast ports. Hawaiians and Alaskans, who know what it is like to have Bridges paralyze their economies, battened down for another long storm. Bridges made no provision for loading cargoes for the occupation forces of the Pacific. He made one concession: "Only the dead will be worked." This meant that the bodies of World War II dead arriving on Army transports would be unloaded.

"Out of Business." Then Bridges ordered his pickets to open soup kitchens and prepare for a four-to six-months' strike (the last one, in 1947, ran 94 days). "When this strike is finished," he cried, "we will be out of business or they [the shipowners] will be out of business." The shipowners replied that they would never sign a contract with a union whose officers have not signed the Taft-Hartley Act's non-Communist oath--which. Red-liner Bridges has refused to do.

* Last week NLRB, which has no power to enforce its rulings, took the first step toward a Supreme Court decision, asked the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan to enforce its order against the hiring halls run by Joe Curran's National Maritime Union on the Great Leaks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.