Most commercial products travel by sea. In the United States, any goods coming in on the Pacific coast likely pass through the hands of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which represents workers from Southern California north to Alaska and on the Hawaiian Islands. Since the 1930s, the ILWU has earned a reputation for labor militancy, workplace democracy, and progressive political activism. While the union has long captivated scholars and labor activists, historians have published a surprising number of new monographs on the ILWU in the last few years. Peter Cole’s Dockworker Power, Harvey Schwartz and Ronald E. Magden’s Labor Under Siege, and Robert W. Cherny’s Harry Bridges each offer new insights on the now ninety-year-old labor union. Read together, the four authors explain how the ILWU developed its penchant for radicalism in the workplace, combatted racism on the docks, confronted automation in the form of containerization, and fought for its very survival after the federal government declared war on labor rights in the 1980s.

These new works reflect a growing popular interest in American union labor. Recent polls have shown that as many as two-thirds of American adults hold a positive view of organized labor. The number of unions filing organizing petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is at a several year high—partially the result of unions targeting Starbucks workers, autoworkers in the South, and Amazon facilities for campaigns.Footnote ¹ Further, unions have increasingly taken part in tense debates over green technology and artificial intelligence. Despite offering great potential for societal uplift, these technologies threaten mass job displacement across industries. As workers look to unions as bulwarks against inequity and displacement, they will almost certainly look to the ILWU, which has had a long and unique history of building workplace power.

To provide a brief overview: the ILWU’s origins lie in the 1930s. Prior to the Great Depression, California waterfront workers had struggled to maintain collective bargaining power and secure stable contracts. The San Francisco docks operated under a “shape-up” system of hiring. Employees waited on the sidewalk each morning hoping to be selected. This informal hiring disregarded any semblance of seniority or equalization of pay and operated as a de facto blacklist. “The shape-up abetted exploitative work practices by denying work to anyone who protested a speedup, challenged unsafe practices, disputed a refusal to pay overtime, reported an injury …,” Cherny writes (27).

A coast-wide work stoppage in 1934, coupled with a short-lived general strike in San Francisco, finally upended this unjust system. With the help of federally backed arbitration, West Coast longshore workers won union recognition, secured set rates for wages, hours, and overtime, and finally did away with the shape-up. Instead, union representatives would assign work—enforcing a closed shop, applying seniority rules, and instilling what Cole refers to as the “sacred principle” of hours equalization. The union kept track of hours, ensuring that every member worked enough shifts to earn a base-level pay. The agreement not only made waterfront work safer and more lucrative, but it also established the ILWU has a powerful union with serious staying power. This integral position on the docks allowed the union to withstand post-World War II government repression and a particularly cataclysmic transition to “containerization”—a form of cargo loading that made thousands of longshore workers redundant in the 1960s.

The personal commitment and politics of Harry Bridges, the ILWU’s founding president, partially explains the ILWU’s unique trajectory. Bridges remains something of a legend of the American labor left. He was certainly, as Cherny writes, “a remarkably effective leader of a remarkable union” (x). Born in Australia, Bridges found work aboard several merchant vessels. He eventually made his way to California and, after a brief sojourn working the docks in New Orleans, he settled in San Francisco. Cherny’s biography of Harry Bridges is exhaustive, yet the author does well to keep a tight narrative of the union leader’s busy life. Bridges’s unyielding belief that broad labor action and close coordination between unions would win demands, no matter how improbable, ultimately catapulted the Australian longshore worker to union leadership during the 1934 Pacific coast strike. Cherny devotes around fifty pages to the strike, recounting its development and conclusion with thrilling detail. He also dedicates four chapters to the various attempts to deport Bridges and includes an extended discussion of his relationship to the Communist Party. Though these chapters might be somewhat dense for the casually interested reader, they are fascinating and important interventions for historians of the era.

There has long been historical debate and speculation over Bridges’s politics and the role they played in the ILWU. Since the late-1960s, “revisionist” scholars of American radicalism have sought to reevaluate the role communism played in the United States, particularly in the labor movement. Members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and the fellow travelers that joined them during the “Popular Front” era of the mid-1930s (when the party made alliances with non-communist groups and trade unions, ostensibly to defeat fascism), these historians argue, were fierce opponents of capitalism. Both the federal government and non-communist labor unions persecuted radical unionists because of the threat they presented to the status quo. Had this repression not come, some revisionists claim, American trade unionism might have become more militant and more inclined toward social justice. Skeptics and “traditionalist” scholars counter that while communists undoubtedly helped build the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the CPUSA’s strict adherence to Soviet foreign policy hamstrung its influence in the larger trade union movement. To summarize, the Popular Front was a short-lived moment, hardly a road not taken.Footnote ²

For revisionists, Bridges embodied Popular Front labor persona. Many histories of the era claim that because he was a competent leftist at the helm of a crucial union, the federal government attempted several times to prosecute (at first for membership in the Communist Party—against the law at the time—and then for perjury, conspiracy, and tax evasion) and deport him. Utilizing the papers of Bridges’s attorneys and relevant documents from the FBI, Cherny leaves little doubt that no small number of congressional representatives, state politicians, and government employees in the Justice Department spent years actively building a case against Bridges, often with little sturdy evidence of his criminal wrongdoing. The FBI surveilled Bridges and occasionally wiretapped his hotel room to collect evidence (191–193). That said, some federal employees, including Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, likely helped stall investigations into Bridges. There is even some evidence that sympathetic Labor Department workers shared government records with the defense to help them prepare for trial (180).

On Bridges’s supposed communist convictions, and the legacy of communism in the ILWU, Cherny is reluctant to give a single answer. Bridges certainly belonged to the “Albion Hall” group of militants that spearheaded longshore organizing in 1930s San Francisco (42). It was likewise true that party functionaries participated in the “big strike” of 1934 and donated money to the strike fund. Bridges followed the CPUSA line closely during World War II. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact announcing peace between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, he stood adamantly against American participation in the war. But after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he stood for unqualified American aid to the allies and eventually direct American participation.

Perhaps Cherny’s most interesting discovery, found during research at the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (RGASPI), was a document listing Bridges as a member of the party’s Central Committee in 1936. The document does provide some direct evidence that Bridges had lied at trial and had been, at least for a brief time, a party member. For Cherny, his motivations for keeping silent were obvious: “Once Bridges initially denied his party ties, any later admission of them could lead to a serious embarrassment for himself and the Left more generally, as well as potential charges of perjury” (166). But even if Bridges had been a member of the party, or merely an associated “influential,” as some CPUSA functionaries called him, there were hard limits to his adherence to his Marxism and the party line.

According to Earl Browder, secretary of the CPUSA, the party “could not control Bridges” (161). During the mid-1930s, he went against the party’s wishes and submitted to government-backed arbitration of disputes. After World War II, when the CPUSA asked Bridges to oppose the Marshall Plan and support Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party run for president in 1948, he did so, though without enthusiasm (230). The CPUSA’s support of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary seemed to have fully eroded his remaining ties to the party (272).

The rank-and-file longshore workers were certainly not communist-dominated or even overly sympathetic. Cherny writes that the three largest demands in the 1934 strike—a membership ratification of agreement, a coastwide contract, and a union-run hiring hall—all had broad support in the proto-ILWU before the Albion Hall group accrued power (157). Non-communists easily outmaneuvered party control of the General Strike Committee in San Francisco. In the early Cold War, when members voted to support Wallace and oppose the Marshall Plan, Local 10, the most militant local in the ILWU, voted only 52 percent and 55 percent in favor of each resolution.

In short, communism had limited appeal within the ILWU. By fighting for, winning, and keeping the broadly popular hiring halls and worker-approved contracts, leftwingers like Bridges had long careers at the head of the union. Cherny does not deny the “influence” of the left on the ILWU. He notes that CPUSA members were early adopters of policies like term limits, recall elections, and anti-discrimination rules, which ultimately became part of the ILWU charter. The strength of this influence, however, remains under debate (159).

For historian Peter Cole, the radical left’s impact on the ILWU, and maritime workers the world over, is decidedly unambiguous. Cole has written several books on radical waterfront workers.Footnote ³ In Dockworker Power, Cole offers a comparative history of waterfront workers in San Francisco and Durban, South Africa. “Both sets of dockworkers had left-wing union traditions and undertook actions that were not simply pragmatic and self-interested,” Cole explains (5). Further, dockworkers in the Bay Area and Durban contended with “racial capitalism,” a political economy that divided each port city, both physically and metaphorically, along lines of class and color (9–10).

Cole writes explicitly with the “long civil rights movement” historical framework in mind.Footnote ⁴ He argues that “interracial unionism failed to take hold in most of the US labor movement” in the post-World War II era because of the expulsion of communists from the CIO and the general suppression of leftwing causes during the Red Scare. The ILWU, which survived McCarthyism largely unscathed, is an exception, Cole believes. “Despite the numerous factors that undergirded the failure of the US labor movement to embrace racial equality, the ILWU remained committed to this goal” (73). For Cole, this commitment stems from the union’s leftwing roots.

The “primary explanation for the ILWU’s strong commitment to racial equality is the politics of the original rank-and-filers, many of whom believed in democracy and socialism,” Cole writes (70–71). He notes Bridges’s brief connections to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the ILWU’s adoption of the Wobbly motto “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Because the IWW was, in Cole’s view, the “first union in the twentieth century United States to seriously combat white supremacy,” and because the Communist Party followed a similar path by the 1920s, it was natural that the Longshore Workers would follow suit and organize across the color line.

During World War II, Black workers moved into San Francisco looking for work in wartime industries. The proportion of Black workers on the waterfront—at first in San Francisco and later at the port in Oakland—increased dramatically. While racial tensions amongst dockworkers hardly disappeared, ILWU leadership, and Local 10 officers in particular, readily accepted Black workers. Cleophas Williams, a Black man who moved from Arkansas and joined Local 10 in 1944, became president of the local in 1967. Between the end of World War II and the 1950s, Local 10 members protested police brutality before the Oakland City Council and convinced other ILWU shops to end their de facto segregationist policies. During the 1960s, the local built integrated housing, invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak, helped the Pan-Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island, and supported organizing efforts by the United Farm Workers. Cleophas Williams considered the civil rights and labor movements to be “twin” struggles (109).

To discuss South Africa briefly, Cole finds many parallels between Durban and San Francisco in terms of the fight for racial justice. Dockworkers in Durban organized in their workplaces—albeit without a legally recognized union until late in the twentieth century—and fought not only for wages, but also for an end to apartheid. In what is probably his strongest piece of evidence on the matter, Cole notes that Durban dockworkers struck over horrifically low wages and other workplace injustices in 1972, only months before the famous Coronation Brick strike that launched a three-month wave of work stoppages involving more than 100,000 workers of color. The strikes helped reignite mass action against apartheid. Dockworkers, Cole claims, serve as a “missing link,” explaining why the strikes happened when and where they did (96). As in the Bay area, radical workers, with, as Cole points out in earlier chapters, Marxist legacies, directed labor militancy to address racism and discrimination.

Given this legacy of longshore rebellion, Cole finds it unsurprising that management would eagerly undermine union strength via containerization. Instead of manually filling a ship’s hold with crates and unloading them onto secondary transport (an intensive task requiring thousands of longshore workers), containers allowed workers to lift a mass of goods out by crane and place it directly onto a semi-truck or freight train. Far fewer employees could move a prodigious amount of goods. In a statistic Cole provides, the Port of New York City moved 13.2 million tons of cargo with 35,000 workers in 1954. But with only 3,700 employees, it moved 44.9 million tons in 1995 (7). The same breakneck changes hit every port across the world.

The ILWU offers a compelling case study for how an ostensibly left-wing union confronted potentially cataclysmic automation, and both Cole and Cherny feature the union’s struggle with containerization. Cole writes that the ILWU’s bargaining over the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement (M&M), as the contract concerning containers would come to be known, could serve as “a corrective for a widely held view of technology—as destroyer of worker power and unions—that, admittedly, is all too often true but need not be” (1–2). This is likely true. The 1960 M&M agreement introduced container technology to the West Coast, but in return, it gave workers a $29 million fund to prevent layoffs and offer minimum incomes, provide payouts for retirement when workers reached sixty-five years of age (as well as incentives for early retirement), and boost death and disability benefits. Within the context of labor facing employer-induced redundancies, few, if any, unions had ever received such an offer (288).

Of course, there were gaps in the first M&M agreement—and in the second which emerged five years later—that undercut the ILWU’s position. Prior to containerization, contracts included strict weight limits and crew sizes. After 1960, with cranes doing most, but critically not all, of the heavy lifting, the limits became more ambiguous. Longshore workers complained about increasingly onerous and unsafe environments. Further, while the contract preserved union-controlled hiring halls, members trained on heavy equipment usage became so-called “steady men,” working more hours than general laborers. Perhaps most acutely, the contract emphasis on retirement disproportionately helped older members, who through seniority were already receiving better pay and hours.

Cole spotlights these M&M dissidents. Despite acknowledging that the automation agreements preserved the union’s control of the waterfront into the present, he questions whether the ILWU’s bargaining caucus could have won more. Leftwing dissidents in the ILWU firmly believed that they might have secured a better contract with greater job protections by striking, or at least threatening to, in 1960 or 1966. Cole seems sympathetic to this assessment. Bridges and his team, he writes, had become reluctant to strike—preferring accommodation with their employers over a more militant approach. When the ILWU did strike on the Pacific coast in 1971, Bridges spent his time attacking opponents rather than supporting strikers. Cole even suggests that the longtime president may have undermined the strike by stalling negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) for two months. “Arguably, as a long-time advocate of union democracy, Bridges should have respected his members’ decision to strike, but, truly, he did not,” Cole argues (157).

Cherny includes all of the same intra-union criticisms of Bridges, but he is somewhat more critical of them. Bridges, Cherny writes, was undeniably reluctant to strike in 1971. There is also little doubt that Bridges believed ILWU militants, especially in Local 10, to be pushing “sheer demagogy” (317). Cherny agrees with Cole that ILWU leadership likely underestimated the effect M&M would have on longshore positions, especially after American involvement in Vietnam, which had stimulated West Coast shipping during the mid-to-late sixties, began to slow.

Cherny is more skeptical, however, of claims that striking earlier would have won a better M&M deal or that Bridges shirked his commitment to union democracy. He notes that the PMA had likely fired the head of its bargaining committee in 1966 for “giving away too much”—undercutting the argument that the union could have won more from intransigent employers prior to the strike (290). While he may have privately complained about the actions of various locals, he publicly backed the strikers throughout the stoppage. Bridges also supported a new and complex veto procedure, giving members an additional way to vote down a contract. And rather than punishing his own members by stalling negotiations, Cherny finds it far more likely that he refused to bargain because the PMA would not budge on revising contract language on container freight stations (CFSs)—locations off port property where non-ILWU members stripped and loaded containers. The union wanted jurisdiction in those facilities and CFSs arbitration was a key demand of the caucus (315).

The 1971 strike hardly brought the ILWU additional gains. Cole refers to the outcome as “at best a draw and, at worst, a defeat” (160). Cherny is marginally more sanguine. In addition to wage and pension gains, the PMA offered guaranteed work or pay for twenty-six weeks. Employers moved little on granting ILWU jurisdiction over CFSs but did offer a “tax” on containers not stripped by longshore workers to be paid into the pension and wage fund (322). In all, however, it seems likely the ILWU might have won a similar agreement without draining strike pay coffers. Further, the prolonged strike prompted Congress to consider binding arbitration for dockworkers, which could have worsened agreements far into the future.

Balancing the threats of increasing automation, growing employer strength, and a federal government often out of alignment with labor’s needs has been a near-constant experience for the ILWU since the 1970s. Schwartz and Magden tell this story well in Labor Under Siege. An oral history that compiles interviews of former ILWU president Bob McEllrath (ILWU president from 2006 to 2018) and other union members, Labor Under Siege provides an interesting addendum to the previously discussed books. As Schwartz, curator of the ILWU oral history selection, writes, Labor Under Siege is the “story of how [McEllrath] handled Taft-Hartley and other serious challenges while in office” (xvi). In other words, it tells the history of how a progressive union—one that managed to survive the tumultuous Cold War—persists in an era in which labor-saving technology continues to displace workers and union density hovers near historic lows.

Like many unions, the ILWU has struggled in recent years. In 2002, the PMA locked out the ILWU. Management likely hoped to use the Bush administration’s War on Terror, which required extensive shipping out of West Coast ports, as a cudgel to force concessions out of the union. Schwartz and Magden note that ILWU officials genuinely worried that the Bush administration would “militarize the port.” There was a “real prospect of the ILWU being destroyed as an organization by the government,” they argue (75). In a fascinating anecdote, McEllrath recalled a phone call in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the union “economic terrorists” for not immediately accepting PMA demands.

Prior to the 2008 negotiations, the PMA introduced another wave of computerized technology making more clerks and cargo checkers redundant. In 2011, the company Export Grain Terminal (EGT) on the Oregon-Washington border deliberately violated an agreement to hire ILWU workers at its facility at the Port of Longview. When it did eventually hire union workers, it offered a contract to a rival union. EGT inspired an eighteen-month lockout by a series of Pacific Northwest grain companies. More recently, in November 2019, International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTS) won a complaint against the ILWU that was filed with the NLRB. When the union was found guilty of conducting a secondary boycott against the company (illegal under Taft-Hartley), ICTS sued the ILWU for millions in damages. At the time of this review, the longshore workers and ICTS have settled on a fine payment of $20.5 million.

The ways in which McEllrath and the ILWU responded to these myriad challenges prompt reflection of the union’s long history. What exactly was the legacy of Bridges and the radical early founders? What defines a leftwing union? While there are no easy answers, these three recent works on the International Longshore Workers Union offer some conclusions broadly applicable to American, and indeed global, labor history.

The ILWU is a militant union situated at a strategic nexus, or “choke point,” in the American economy.Footnote ⁵ But there are hard limits to the efficacy of shopfloor militancy alone. During the 1930s, longshore workers fought a tough battle, and the ILWU organized one of the few city-wide general strikes in U.S. history. The strike, however, was only resolved because of sympathetic federal arbitration organized by the New Deal Roosevelt administration. That arbitration gave the ILWU a coast-wide bargaining unit and the ability to paralyze American commerce in the event of a stoppage. Still, even that power could not overcome the PMA in the early 1970s—largely because the Nixon administration used Taft-Hartley to order a return to work. While federal mediation helped the ILWU in the 1930s, four decades later Nixon’s NLRB voided the container “tax” deal the PMA agreed to and another agency, the federal Pay Board, voided the wage gains on the grounds that they would be too inflationary (Cherney, 323). In McEllrath’s final negotiations with the PMA between spring 2016 and mid-2017, the bargaining caucus ultimately decided to extend until 2022 an earlier agreement, due to expire in 2019, explicitly to avoid fighting for a new contract during the Trump administration (Schwartz and Magden, 234–237).

In every one of these instances, longshore workers defiantly held pickets. In some cases, they even committed small acts of sabotage. In the EGT strike, ILWU members blocked freight trains, brawled with police, and dumped the grain out of seventy rail cars. Yet, almost every time, federal and state authorities got injunctions, arrested leadership, handed down return to work orders, and amassed fines (Schwartz and Magden, 162–163). Upon assuming the presidency after McEllrath in 2019, William Adams reflected on the ILWU’s radical tradition and noted the limits of constantly waging war with the employers: “With Bridges and the old-timers, they knew when to fight and when not to fight, and when they fought, they fought on their own ground. People got to remember this is not 1934 and nobody here is Harry Bridges” (241). Even at a “choke point” of production labor cannot win its struggle alone.

In a fascinating article in Labor Power and Strategy, an edited volume by historian John Womack, Jr., labor researcher Glenn Perušek, and former ILWU organizing director Peter Olney, labor scholar Katy Fox-Hodess notes that unions require “associational power,” or the ability to draw mass support from outside the union’s ranks, to be successful. Fox-Hodess’s research “suggests that broad-based social support for this highly (technically) strategic group of workers is critical to maintaining their ability to exercise technical power in the first place.” In one example she provides, during the 1990s, Colombia waterfront workers, with weak public support, shriveled during a privatization push by the Colombian government. A few decades later, in Portugal, where the dockworkers had positioned themselves as a staunch opponent of government austerity measures and had broad support, the waterfront unions survived and won new contracts.Footnote ⁶ Without organizational alliances, good paying jobs on the waterfront will likely decline.

The ILWU has often had a good sense of associational power. Schwartz and Magden describe the longshore workers as having a “tradition” of “social justice” work. Indeed, the ILWU has long committed to supporting causes not directly related to waterfront work. As both Cherny and Cole point out, on several occasions during the 1930s the union refused to load the cargo of ships flying the flag of fascist nations. And while none of the reviewed books discuss the subject with much detail—preferring instead to cite other monographs on the subject—the ILWU played a major role in the “democratic revolution” that brought statehood to Hawaii in the mid-1950s.

Labor Under Siege and Dockworker Power focus extensively on post-Bridges ILWU activism. For Cole, the ILWU’s connections to civil rights protests, boycotts of South African cargo from the 1960s through the 1980s, work stoppages to protest the Iraq War in 2008, and participation in protests for Palestinian statehood in 2010 actively demonstrate the union’s leftwing bonafides and its belief in global struggle and mass action. Schwartz and Magden similarly discuss at length the union’s participation in Iraq War protests, its connections to longshore unions abroad, its continued organizing in non-longshore industries, and its participation in the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline project. As the two authors point out, these outreach programs have the effect of building alliances with sympathetic organizations and the broader labor movement. Keeping in touch with other waterfront unions is crucial in an era in which shipping companies are increasingly global in scope. If ever united in action, a coalition of international longshore strike could grind global commerce to a halt (91).

Fighting automation is another way in which the ILWU has sought to sharpen its associational power. Assuming the presidency, McEllrath claimed to quickly realize what Bridges had realized forty years prior: that fighting technological change was a losing battle. “It’s not feasible. You can’t do it,” he reflected in an interview with Schwartz and Magden. “Perhaps Harry could see it coming. I could see it” (121). In the several contracts he negotiated, McEllrath never sought to block new robotic technology or labor-reducing shipping software. He accepted new machines, so long as any new contract extended ILWU membership to any new employees brought in to work them. Lawrence Thibeaux, former president of Local 10, describes this approach to dealing with robotics and software introduction: “The bottom line is that there’s a human being somewhere that’s bypassing us and that’s the guy we need to be looking for so that we can organize that guy into the ILWU” (125). Rather than fighting change in North American ports, the ILWU pivoted to ensure that its ability to halt shipping remained consistent and that new types of workers joined the union’s ranks. This strategy could serve as a useful roadmap for other unions facing similar challenges.

When read alongside one another, Harry Bridges, Dockworker Power, and Labor Under Siege tell an interlocking story about the ILWU. Of course, on their own, each has its shortcomings. Cherny’s Harry Bridges is an exhaustive biography of one of the United States’ most prestigious labor radicals. While academics of twentieth century American history will find plenty to digest in the sections on Bridges’s communist connections and deportation trials, they might prove too far afield for the average reader. Schwartz and Magden’s work provides a union history in the union members’ own words. Their many collected interviews provide a treasure trove of quotes and anecdotes. But Labor Under Siege is still an organizational history that will eventually benefit from a thorough vetting using additional available sources. Similarly, Cole’s work, novel in its investigation of ILWU activism post-1940s (particularly as it relates to the classic civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s) could benefit from a comparison with other social justice unions of the time. For example, was the ILWU’s activism substantially different from that of the pro-civil rights Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, United Autoworkers, or International Ladies Garment Workers Union? Cole writes that the ILWU’s leftist background makes it unique. But a broader analysis of the labor movement could help bolster that claim.

These works provide interested readers with an updated portrait of a truly fascinating union and will likely contribute to new studies on leftwing organizing, civil rights unionism, and worker-led responses to automation. Perhaps these books could help inform some kind of spiritual update to John Laslett’s classic Labor and the Left. Footnote ⁷ What exactly defines a leftwing union? Is it a commitment to internal democracy, civil rights, social justice activism, and/or its goal to secure “strategic” positions in the supply chain? A comparison between the ILWU and other progressive unions would help to answer these questions. How do the longshore workers compare to ostensibly leftwing CIO unions like the United Packinghouse Workers of America, Transport Workers Union, or National Maritime Union, who were complicit in enforcing Taft-Hartley? Packinghouse workers remained militantly committed to workplace racial equity despite barring communists from leadership. They also occupied far less of a “choke point” in capitalist production. The Garment Workers participated in civil rights lobbying and, like the ILWU, funded a series of cooperative housing projects across the country (although they had serious problems with internal democracy). Perhaps the most interesting comparison to the ILWU would be with Local 1199, a New York-based union that drifted between affiliations and now operates under the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). 1199, like ILWU, had leaders with Communist Party ties. During the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King repeatedly praised the union for its commitment to organizing Black workers. The union targeted hospitals for wall-to-wall union campaigns, rallying workers in a sector increasingly crucial in the American economy.

Automation, too, could benefit from this more macro approach—particularly the kind of comparative international framework Cole adopts. All three reviewed books make ideal microhistory blocks for a grand narrative of how unions, across industries and regions, have responded to the breakneck technological changes and government-backed austerity of the late-twentieth century. These subfields are clearly a growing trend in labor history. The works reviewed here will provide a better understanding of contemporary industrial displacement for those actively interested in today’s labor movement.Footnote ⁸