Bloody Thursday and Paint on the Sidewalk :: American History Depression Essays

Bloody Thursday and Paint on the sidewalk On the edge of North Beach, across the street from where the myriad of gnomish shops in the wharf which sell Alcatraz t-shirts and miniature Cable Cars begin, two world outlines made of white paint adorn the ground in straw man of a union hall. These are passed by hundreds of tourists daily, as well as many residents, yet few stop to ponder the curious shapes or the crude text painted in red SHOT BY POLICE JULY 5, 1934. Though this spot does not mark where the original casualty occurred, for the men died in front of the original Longshoremens Hall on the corner of Mission and Steuart streets, when the new hall opened here on the edge of North Beach these outlines were placed to remember the event. That event, Bloody Thursday, became the flood of the waterfront strike in 1934 and a turning point for Employer and Union relations in San Franciscoand the rest of the nation. ILA DEMANDS By the end of 1933, the effects of the Great impres sion began to shift public opinion toward the rights of workers, and enlivened the efforts of unions working for collective exertion to ensure those rights. As a report before Congress in 1942 explained, Legislation such as the National Industrial recuperation solve emboldened these unions to explore the potentialities of a protected right to bargain jointly and, in the context of this potential, the all but defunct International Longshoremens Association renewed their activity and met with immediate success. On the West coast, the ILA gained dozens of new members and even extended membership to include checkers, seniors, weighers, lumber handlers, grainmen, and warehousemen industrious on the waterfront.1 In December, the San Francisco local voted on a resolution to participate in a coast-wide strike to demand a six day, 30 hour work week with minimum pay of $1 per hour. playacting on the instigation of the local, a convention of members from all West semivow el ports met in San Francisco in February 1934, deciding to strike unless the wage-and-hour demands were accepted. The Waterfront Employers Union, an association of ship owners which controlled intimately of the dock labor, refused to even meet with the ILA until they filed a complaint with the National Recovery Administrations Regional Labor Board.