Why We Struck
I
AT midnight, October 29, 1936, we struck.
For ninety-nine days water-borne commerce ceased on the Pacific Coast of the United States except when English, Japanese, or Scandinavian ships paused briefly to discharge passengers and take on stores, or when oil tankers steamed into the silent harbors. The Maritime Federation of the Pacific, a superunion of all the West Coast unions whose members depend on the sea and its commerce for a living, federated on industrial lines, withdrew the entire active personnel of a major industry from that industry.
From the Canadian border to the Mexican line, and out in the Hawaiian Islands, every longshoreman, checker, and scaler walked off the docks. As soon as their ships were safely moored and all safety regulations complied with, every captain and mate left the bridges, every able-bodied seaman the decks, every cook and steward the galleys, every radio operator the wireless rooms. In a vital industry employing nearly 40,000 people, only a handful of stenographers and shipowners remained busy in offices uptown.
Ships clotted the harbors and cargo rotted in the holds while the strike dragged on into 1937. The productive wealth held stagnant amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Scores of steamship companies and waterfront employers were directly involved. The fleets tied up comprised hundreds of ships, from clumsy little steam schooners with teakettle engines to magnificent transpacific passenger liners. The areas finally involved were the entire coastlines of the United States. In monetary loss, that part which can never be regained, the cost, conservatively estimated, was close to a billion dollars.
None of this need have happened. Yet it will probably happen again. That it should not happen is the desire of the maritime workers quite as much as it is that of t he shipowners. We will strike again only if we believe that the benefits won are revoked, or if the union control that guarantees their continuance is attacked.
In the heat of the struggle, and to gain ends they thought justified, both shipowners and workers have feared to give an inch lest a yard be lost. That attitude is passing, I believe. On our side, now that the shipowners have accorded us a recognized position of bargaining on equal terms with them, we feel that we can negotiate knowing our demands will receive consideration instead of complete disregard.
Two coöperative moves that I witnessed the same day, shortly after the strike ended, illustrate this. Together with V. J. Malone, an official of our union, — the Pacific Coast Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders and Wipers’ Association, — I went aboard an intercoastal freighter. The company had completed a rearrangement of the crew’s quarters. The messroom next to the men’s quarters had been torn out and rebuilt amidship near the galley. This left considerable space in the afterhouse, which permitted more rooms with fewer men in each. The remaining space was designed for a recreation room, where the crew, when off watch, could gather without disturbing men asleep in their rooms. The additional comfort gained can only be appreciated fully by seamen accustomed to the cramped quarters we usually have to endure.
The significance of this concession to the crew lay in a scene five years earlier when I tried to convince one of the company executives that deck hands should be put on an eight-hour day. He got very red in the face and shouted vehemently that to work deck hands less than twelve hours a day would break a government regulation.
I witnessed the second coöperative action that evening at our weekly union meeting. The port superintendent of a shipping line sent a communication about several of our members who had got drunk and delayed the sailing of the ship. One of our officials, whose record for backing up union members in disputes with shipowners is second to none, moved that the men be disciplined. With over three hundred men in the meeting, the motion carried six to one. A year earlier, feeling was so intense against shipowners that, regardless of his popularity, any man making such a motion would have been booed off the floor.
II
Not everything is peaceful on the Pacific, however. The desire to be cooperative is present, but one cannot overturn a century-old rule of the sea and replace it in three years with a perfectly working substitute. The system is too new, and the rules not yet clarified. Also, there still remains much resentment on the part of the men because of the years that have passed, and there is much fear of the future on the part of the shipowners.
This is an exposition of the background of the seaman’s life in relation to the causes of the recent strike, not only because I have been a seaman for years, beginning in 1926, but also because the 1936-1937 maritime strike was a seamen’s strike. We struck because seafaring is a life as well as an occupation, and the natural evolution of the social side of that life has been artificially retarded far behind that of the people ashore. Other units of the Maritime Federation were aware of this situation, and although their own differences with employers could have been settled without a strike had they deserted the seamen, they refused to accept new agreements until the seamen had also received their just demands. This was not charity. Strictly speaking, it could not even be called sympathy. It was common-sense logic directed toward their own preservation. For, as Benjamin Franklin phrased it on a similar occasion, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’
American seamen man the third greatest merchant fleet in the world. It is essential to national prosperity and national defense, this fleet. But, until the last decades, it was American in name only. It was American territory inhabited by residents of other countries, almost to the exclusion of Americans, either native-born or naturalized. During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the fear of American ‘hell ships’ drove native Americans inland instead of to sea. Most American overseas commerce was then carried in foreign bottoms. The sailors from these ships were often shanghaied aboard American ships. They knew no other craft, and when in America stayed with the occupation which was familiar to them. Even to-day the English on ships is spoken with a great variety of accents. Everything from Tagalog to Danish is heard when the seamen lapse into childhood tongues.
The European maritime nations contributed most of the seamen. Scandinavians, Finns, and English filled the deck departments. Scotch and Liverpool Irish went below to tend the machinery, as did the Latins from the Mediterranean region. Around this nucleus has grown up in the last twenty years a body of young American-born seamen. Previous to 1929, these seamen spent an average of from three to five years at sea before returning to land to marry and settle down at a shoreside occupation. During the depression, however, many who had gone to sea in former years returned when jobs ashore became scarce. Others who would have left the sea, had conditions been normal, remained on the ships. Newcomers are decidedly few. The Marine Firemen’s union, to which I belong, has an active membership of over 4000 on the Pacific Coast. Yet, only slightly more than a hundred new members were taken in by the union last year.
At present America has more skilled seamen than at any other time in history. It is unusual to get on a ship and find more than a few men in any department unable to hold down every unlicensed job in that department — cooks’, machinists’, and electricians’ jobs excepted. Union regulation of the percentage of skilled men on a ship and the jobs beginners may hold is more stringent than the government’s new safety-at-sea requirements. As might be expected in a highly skilled group, the average age of the men is high, ranging between thirty-five and forty. The runaway boy of old who went to sea would never be trusted to care for one of the great modern turbines.
On the Pacific Coast, 23,000 of these Americans live on the ships they drive across the seas. To the landsman, a voyage is a vacation, and a ship, a floating hotel. To the seaman, a voyage is a period of work, and the ship, his home and nine tenths of his world. Perhaps the percentage should be higher, for he will probably average about twelve hours a week off the ship, and on long voyages it will be less than that. He lives twenty-four hours a day in this small factory, eating, sleeping, and seeking recreation in close proximity to his work. When the ship reaches port, the passenger goes ashore to stay, but not the seaman. He sails out on the ship when it leaves, for another month, or perhaps five, at sea. Like his brothers ashore, he must work fairly consistently to eat, but, unlike the man ashore, he must live constantly with his work.
In this lies much of the cause of strife. In this life the seaman is continually under the control of his boss. His employer is also his butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker. He is hotelkeeper and cook. He polices the seaman in his home, and gives him paternal permission sometimes to leave that home. He tells him when to get back. He tells him where to sleep, when to eat, where to stand when he looks at the sea, and where and on what he may sit. Everything ashore that has to do with a man’s life away from work (transportation, home life, entertainment, even associates) must be provided for the employee on the ship by his employer.
III
It can be understood, then, that additional issues were involved in this maritime strike besides those for which most men strike. A man ashore strikes for higher pay, then uses the increased income as he wishes, and where he wishes, to buy better living conditions. We at work on the ships must bargain for these improved living conditions when we ask for better wages or working conditions, and we must bargain with the same man — pur employer. Ashore the shopper has the advantage, for the merchant or innkeeper wants his trade. But on a ship the merchant or innkeeper has the advantage, for he is also the employer, and the job he offers includes in its pay the food and shelter that can be shopped for nowhere else if we take the job.
As to the life lived at sea under these conditions, it is a curious mixture of paternalism, feudalism, and garrison life projected into the ultramodern setting of a machine age. Everything is metallic, hard, utilitarian. We are walled in by riveted steel plates that line our sleeping quarters, messrooms, washrooms, and the passageways between. With us, at work or asleep or reading, is the continuous thump and whir of turning machinery — the sense of endless motion.
At the end of the four-to-eight watch at night, I come up out of the fireroom, climbing a long, steep ladder of steel to a passageway directly above the boilers. The Black Gang’s quarters are here on this deck, with a steel plate and some concrete separating us from our work. In the passageway is the machine shop, with its lathes, drill press, and grinders. Opening off the shop are three rooms, each containing four men, four beds two-high, four lockers, and a bench. The door to my room is closed, for the twelve-to-four fireman is sleeping. The storekeeper, who has a lower bunk, works daytimes, and is playing cards in the messroom. The fourth occupant of my room is the fireman who has just relieved me below. I move cautiously to avoid waking the sleeping man.
The room is seven feet wide and eleven feet long, and seven feet up to the mass of piping squirming below the overhead. The porthole is closed because of a heavy sea outside, and we must depend on a metal conduit the size of a tomato can, which spills languid air into the forecastle, where an electric fan mixes it with the smells already there. The concrete is hot underfoot, too hot to step on with a bare foot, and the temperature is at least a hundred in the closed room. The sleeping fireman lies naked on his bed, and the sweat runs off him as fast as it gathers.
The ship has left Manila and is steaming for Singapore. The heat in the fireroom on this day was a hundred and twenty on the floor plates, and a hundred and fifty-four on the upper gratings when I changed the oil strainers. Although I did only the most necessary work, and stayed under the ventilators as long as possible, as I walk into my room the sweat squeezes through the leather of my shoes as though I had waded across the deck when it was awash. I replace the shoes with wooden sandals and, picking up my water bucket, soap, and towel, go into the washroom around the corner. The other men who came off watch with me are there. We fill our buckets from a fresh-water tap and lower a steam end into the water to heat it. With the buckets on the deck we wash ourselves thoroughly. Next we refill the buckets and wash out all the clothing we wore that watch — socks, shorts, singlet, and dungarees. Fifteen minutes after we went below to-day they were soaked with sweat. We hang them on lines above the boilers in the fiddley, gasping in the fierce heat that drives up past us, and careful not to touch any metal. Then we go to our bunks to toss in heavy, drugged sleep until called at three-thirty for the morning watch. Had the weather been calm, we might have slept on deck on the hatches.
Are all ships like this? Not all. A few are better, and many are worse. There was one ship, an East Coast ship on which I sailed one of the times I shipped out of New York, which had fifty of us in the crew berthed up forward under the forecastlehead — the raised deck in the bow where the anchor windlass is placed. We cleaned up in a triangular room twenty feet long and twelve feet wide at the base. The washrack was a plank with four holes cut in it to hold our buckets. No steam line led forward to the washrooms, and whenever we wanted hot water we had to go amidships to the galley, carry our bucket up two flights of stairs to the passengers’ promenade deck, across that and down another ladder to the forward well deck, and across that into the fo’c’sle. By that time the water would be almost cold — but then, if the weather was bad, we had already had our bath while crossing the deck.
Toilets are usually primitive castiron pipes, and so unsanitary they would be instantly condemned by any city board of health were they found in a slum tenement. So would nine tenths of the crew’s quarters be condemned if they were in buildings ashore. On a great number of ships, the lavatories open directly off the fo’c’sle, and whenever bad weather strikes and portholes have to be covered the stench is horrible.
Overcrowding fo’c’sles is one of our worst sources of discomfort. Anyone who has had to live in a house where someone on a night shift has to sleep daytimes wall realize what it is like when 70 per cent of a ship’s crew works both day and night. The problem of the person awake is to do the necessary work of cleaning himself and his gear and amuse himself without disturbing the sleeper. When quarters are badly crowded, with men who work at different times of the day on different watches mixed together, it means misery and hardship for all. On large ships, I have seen fifty men sleeping in one big room, or expected to sleep there. One of the newest ‘luxury liners’ has nearly thirty herded together. Six or a dozen men to a room is common practice, and ships with a maximum of four men to a room are bragged about.
IV
In 1932,I signed for the maiden voyage on a liner financed, designed, and subsidized by the government, which was to set a standard of beauty and luxury for other nations to shoot at. The admiring visitors were not taken through the crew quarters. The unlicensed personnel were berthed six men to a room that was eight feet wide and eleven feet long. This allowed each man for himself, his bed, his locker, his clothing, and his share of passageway, a space about four feet wide, four feet high, and seven and a half feet long — this without considering the usual number of pipes and conduits along the bulkheads and overheads.
Nor is this a solitary example. Multiply these dimensions by four, six, twelve, or twenty, fill the space with as many men, beds, lockers, throw in a few benches and the personal possessions of the men, run dozens of pipes big and little through the room, and that is home at sea. Have some of the men in bed, some going to bed, some getting up, and others already up and busy in the room, and that is life at sea. If, in such quarters, three men want to change their clothes at the same time, one changes his clothes and the others change their minds.
Since sleeping quarters can be used only occasionally for recreation, the men go to the messrooms to read or play cards or talk. These rooms are available usually for two hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, and from six o’clock at night on. Half a dozen noisy groups are busy at diverse activities in each. On freighters, the crew may go anywhere on the outside decks during their spare time, but on passenger liners the crew space is very restricted. In the tropics one spends a great deal of time on deck, even sleeping there. Farther north, sunshiny days are fewer, and the crew stays below most of the time. On runs like that, cramped and poorly ventilated quarters are more than usually detrimental to a seaman’s health and morale. This is especially true of the engine-room crew, which must spend the working time amid steam and fumes of hot oil.
Incidentally, while writing about these living conditions which some may think are down to Oriental levels, it might be well to mention that on certain Oriental ships, Japanese tankers, the crew is berthed two to a room. The new foreign ships, especially the Scandinavian, provide more commodious and better-situated quarters than do the American ships.
Of all unlicensed seamen, the members of the stewards’ department have fewest accommodations. In addition to sleeping in crowded ‘glory holes,’ they eat standing up on all but the very newest ships. They don’t have messrooms where they can put plates on a table. Instead, each one fills a plate at different steam tables in the galley, then leans back among the pots and pans, supporting a plate in one hand and using a fork with the other. Neither do they play cards, write letters, or read books at the nonexistent tables in the nonexistent messrooms. Their crowded quarters have to serve for recreation rooms. Their hours start at six in the morning and end about ten at night. In between meals they snatch brief intervals of time off. On short runs where they must assist passengers to embark and get off, they have even less time to themselves.
So much for the unlicensed personnel. The officers have been better treated in the matter of quarters and food than their men, which is just and right, as food and quarters are the major part of a seaman’s pay, and the officers are the most experienced and valuable seamen on the ship. On the matter of overtime exacted by their employers, they are as bitter as their men. It is hard to come in from a long voyage with home and family waiting, and be required to spend fifteen hours a day on the ship. Those ships that have been away for months require the most attention when in home port — but so do the men. During the two years that overtime compensation has been exacted by the men, much less overtime has been required.
Next to poor food and miserable quarters, the question of overtime has tied up more ships in the guerrilla warfare since 1934 than any other trouble. Eight out of ten seamen are opposed to any overtime, because it is most often exacted in port when they wish to be ashore. The time ashore is brief these days, with ships operating on express-train schedules, and the men want all of it they can get. Up until this spring, the seaman was allowed proportional time off instead of getting cash for overtime. This time off was usually given when he did not care to go ashore. The boss was able to demand the extra work anytime and anywhere, but the seaman could not do the same with his pay in time off. He had to take it where and when it was given him.
This is a picture of the sea life that we who drive America’s ships across any kind of water, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, must live. We man an industry necessary to the welfare of all Americans ashore. It is not necessary for their welfare, however, that we should live at a level far lower than they do.