Local Beginnings and piecemeal Chapters.
There was no one magic moment when the American Longshoremen and Harbor Workers Union was born out of a vacuum, derived from an inspirational happening. Instead it was a piecemeal process, and at times a painful one, born of local battles in particular ports across the United States. In New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, dock workers who managed to live through the brutal labor it took to work on docks began organizing unions of their own. The groups had their own leadership, focuses and forward traumas. There were the chapters where greater importance was paid to getting better wages, and there were the chapters where the importance was laid on getting safer surroundings.
At first there was no coordination between the attempts, and the failure to coordinate meant
that shipping could operate out of one city while squelching other when they could.
It was a revolutionary shift in the power relations between dockworkers and their bosses, even if it was still fragmented.
The Ports Unity Push.
As these local chapters of the SIU began to gain steam,
a sense of dawn began to emerge among longshoremen: real power could come only with unity.
The outlying conquest of a single port might also be too easily lost, unless other ports were in the train.
One telling example is that in the event cargo workers went out on strike in New York,
companies could simply send their ships to Baltimore or Massachusetts and break up the strike.
Workers began to understand that they are strongest
when united and only cities working together could take the fight on against shipping magnates who dominated estate.
In the wake of this heightened awareness leaders in several local chapters began talking and meeting,
trading thoughts on how they could set up a larger, more-organized group
that would speak for longshoremen all over the country.
Birth of an organisational umbrella ohcpd13id>anisation.
From these discussions the first attempts to coordinate the disparate chapters were formed.
It was not by any means smooth sailing — local politics, regional power struggles and priorities seemingly did not line up exactly.
Now, the workers differed, of course, in their conditions of struggle and yet a national union appeared so futile and so pressing: because these all had this common against them.
Organized labor took a lead in closing these gaps, underscoring both the human equality and the human suffering of dockworkers wherever they lived.
Finally, when those random efforts culminated into the American Longshoremen and Harbor Workers Union,
not only was a turning point in labor history on the waterfront achieved.
The longshormen on the other coast would unite under one banner and multiply their voice where single chapters could never hope to do.