Union after union called its members out on strike in an unprecedented show of unity, and by the following day the shutdown was total.Īfter three days Kahn’s capitulated and the strike was over. The dissention which had characterized the labor movement in the immediate and the newly organized, left-led CIO unions-was forgotten in the wave of indignation set off by the police action. One morning a battalion of armed police appeared to escort a convoy of scab-driven lorries through the line. Teamsters respected the picket line, refusing to take their delivery lorries through. The strike started in a small way with a walk-out of retail clerks at Kahn’s, one of the big department stores. From this vantage point he watched the development of the unique general strike of 1946, first (and so far as I know last) of the postwar period in which a whole city was closed down. We’ll fight for Harry Bridges and build the CIO.ĭinky, who was learning something about the economics of labor law practices, always rendered the last line as “We’ll fight for Harry Bridges and bill the CIO.”Īt first Bob commuted from San Francisco to work with Bert Edises in the firm’s Oakland office. We’re not going to let them send Harry over the seas, They can’t deport six million men they know Many were the rallies we attended to protest against the threatened deportation and to join with the white-capped longshoremen in singing Woody Guthrie’s “Ballad of Harry Bridges”: They had earned an illustrious national reputation by their defense of Harry Bridges against the numerous and unremitting efforts of the Government to deport him to Australia. After the war Bob had joined the firm of Gladsteins, Grossman, Sawyer & Edises (Gallstones, Gruesome, Sewer & Odious, as they were affectionately called by their intimates), labor lawyers among whose clients were the CIO, the Communist Party, the ILWU.
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