Weir, in this small-but-significant battle with the captain of the ship, is aware that the crew must settle the matter then and there, win or lose. He had been instructed never to leave a ship, “in the middle of a fight with an officer or captain. If you do, you leave it for the next crew that comes aboard. It will catch them off guard, as a surprise, and they will be at a double disadvantage because topside will know the history of the beef and they won’t.”[5] Therefore, when the captain tries to play the, “But there’s a war on” card, Weir refuses to budge. From the dock, standing fifty or so feet from the boat, he holds his ground. Weir reminds the captain that he has been elected delegate by his deckmates. That makes him the captain’s equal in bargaining processes such as these. Weir notes that he’ll gladly go over the history of struggle that reestablished that rule, but that if he has to do so, he’ll soon be joined by the engine department. If the captain needs a reminder after that, Weir shouts, he’ll soon have the stewards out on the dock as well. The captain needs no more reminders after that, and promptly agrees to all the deckmates’ demands, which include supplies for the engine department and the stewards. The struggle doesn’t end there.

It continues during lunch, as the deckmates, including Weir, strategize about what to do to handle any contingency. If the FBI comes, they have a plan. If the captain tries to get one of them fired, they have a plan. They also develop behavior rules while working the ship: no one is to come back on board drunk; everyone is to work hard and leave no reason for any kind of complaint; no one is to talk to any of the officers during lookout times about anything personal. After a confrontation like this, they cannot give the captain an excuse to go after any one of them. In this way, they discipline themselves to fight together and defend themselves.

The requested supplies – new mattresses, fresh milk, good coffee, fresh vegetables, citrus fruit, fresh meat besides mutton, new showerheads – all arrive within an hour. Their final request is one that must be constantly enforced, throughout the duration of the voyage: they demand they be given the right to organize their work as they see fit. They do not want any supervision over them watching as they do their jobs. They reserve the right, at any time, to stop work entirely until supervisors have left them alone. Upon witnessing such power for the first time, Stan Weir was thrilled!

The emphasis on direct action among the merchant marines was no accident. Weir had often asked questions of the ’34 men about the possibility for union bureaucrats to change. They always had a similar answer: “Bureaucrats can never undo what’s happened to them. They can’t go back to being who they were. The reason bureaucracies get built is to avoid making the good fight.”[6] Or they would say, “Now maybe you can see why we emphasize direct action. We know it’s what you need in order to keep the new bureaucrats from taking the unions to their offices.”[7]

In spite of these words of wisdom and warning, Stan Weir had to learn through bitter experience the nature of the union bureaucracy. One hint of the lesson in store for him came in December, 1946, when he experienced the Oakland general strike firsthand. His first impulse was to call Harry Lundeberg, head of the Sailors’ Union and let him know what was happening. Shortly after, some SUP members arrived, gave him some buttons to pass out, and left. That was their idea of leadership. At a mass meeting called in the Oakland Auditorium, masses of people showed up an hour early hoping to be moved to continue their struggle. Only Harry Lundeberg, likely without the help of any SUP buttons, was able to move them or connect with them. But even he had little to offer the strikers in the way of tactical considerations on how to win their struggle. As Weir recalls, “the strikers left without instructions for protecting themselves and their occupation of Oakland’s core area.”[8] The unions proved equally incompetent in their ability to bargain for the retail clerks whose strike had sparked the city-wide shutdown. After the general strike was called off, the clerks stayed out another five months, and returned to work then only out of sheer exhaustion, having little to show for their struggles. In hindsight, Weir laments his lack of faith in the ability of everyday people to take control of those matters. Rather than waiting around for union bureaucrats to lead the general strike to victory (which would entail a long wait indeed!), he notes that “at no point during the strike did any of us…climb up on a parked car and express the ideas that were already kicking around among us: ‘We can lead this strike ourselves’.”[9]

It would be long before Stan Weir could fully understand the lessons the ’34 men had tried to teach him during his apprenticeship in militancy as a merchant marine and those before his eyes during the Oakland general strike of 1946. Many painful experiences awaited him.

Democracy at Work: A Fight Against the Bosses and the Union

“The bureaucracy inevitably must substitute the struggle over consumption, higher wages, pensions, education, etc., for a struggle in production.” -C.L.R. James, State Capitalism and World Revolution

“[Autoworkers at GM] were far more interested in the question of the conditions of their daily lives than they were in a wage increase.” -Stan Weir, New Era of Labor Revolt

“There can be unions run by regular working people on the job. There have to be.” -Stan Weir, Unions with Leaders Who Stay on the Job

During his lifetime, in numerous struggles on the job, Weir came face to face with the nature of union bureaucracy under capitalism. The longest of these struggles began in 1960, as Harry Bridges, then-president of ILWU, began his efforts to “mechanize and modernize” the longshoring industry by signing a contract with the Pacific Maritime Association that allowed for the automation of the industry to begin in earnest. The introduction of this automation made industry “more efficient,” while at the same time eliminating thousands of jobs. In addition, this increase in efficiency brought with it a decrease in workers’ safety. In the aftermath of automation, the accident rate in the longshoring industry soared. “Between 1958 and 1967,” according to statistics cited by Weir, “U.S. waterfront employers reported a 92.3 percent increase in the number of workers’ compensation cases.”[10]

Harry Bridges signed the first “Mechanization and Modernization” contract in 1960. Along with eroding the gains made by longshoremen during the strikes of 1934-36, gains Weir had learned so much about as a merchant marine during WWII, this contract created a new classification, that of “B Men,” for dockworkers and longshoremen. “B Men” were hired provisionally, and became “A Men” after a 6-month trial period. As “A Men,” workers got their choice of jobs, and this in turn created an informal seniority system that relegated “B Men” to the worst jobs, in the worst conditions. In addition, “B Men” could not vote on union matters until they had achieved “A” status. What no one but Bridges, ILWU officials, and members of the Pacific Maritime Association knew was that these workers were never meant to achieve “A” status. “A” status was continually denied them as the union and companies “studied the impact of automation.”[11] The system merely eroded workers’ solidarity, which allowed the controls won during the militant days of 1934-36 to be eliminated.[12] The result was a dramatic increase in production and profit, which then funded further automation of the industry. In essence, workers funded their own doom.

Stan Weir was among the leaders of the opposition to this plan. As such, Harry Bridges and the ILWU bureaucracy had him and 81 others fired. The ensuing battle over the fired workers’ reinstatement lasted 17 years. Weir knew from his time as a merchant marine what was at stake: the controls over production that had been established previously through the militancy he had learned about and been trained in while at sea as a merchant marine. One of these controls was a union hiring hall, where unions issued work permits to new longshoremen, a system that made workers themselves responsible for hiring, and not the company. Other features included a “low-man-out” system, which gave the right to first refuse work to workers who hadn’t worked in the longest time; a system of hatch seniority, which meant that a crew had the right to work at whatever hatch they had been assigned to as long as a ship was in port. This forced employers to pay overtime when warranted. Finally, sling load limits protected workers on the job, “created more jobs, prevented companies from speeding up work,” and also, “catered to the social world of the workers by ensuring more breaks in between loads. This social warrant enabled longshore workers to select work partners compatible with them and to organize the work process as they saw fit.”[13]

It was this method of control, along with the extent of that control, that employers sought to eliminate in order to reassert their own control of production. The introduction of automation techniques on the waterfront served as a handy pretense to assault workers’ control ruthlessly. It was this same thing that Weir and so many longshoremen resisted. That this resistance pitted them not only against their employers, but also against their union, is the political lesson Weir drew from his experience fighting against Harry Bridges and the ILWU bureaucracy. While it is true that Weir was well aware of the way unions operated in our society through his previous work experiences and his firsthand experience of the Oakland general strike, this experience confirmed in devastating terms the reality of his previous insights.

Hope Sustains: the Model of the “New Era of Labor Revolt”

“The main cause of the revolts was and is the onerous conditions of work in America.” -Stan Weir, The New Era of Labor Revolt

In 1966, Stan Weir wrote a pamphlet for the Independent Socialist Clubs of America called, “The New Era of Labor Revolt.” In this pamphlet it is clear that Weir was drawing strength for his own fight on the waterfront, which was at that time in its 3rd year, and destined to last 14 more, from a new wave of democratic-minded militancy sweeping across the nation. Weir finds its essence aptly summarized in a bumper-sticker campaign that originated in Detroit among locals of the United Auto Workers and spread to all auto cities in the country, including “Fremont, Milpitas and Southgate, California, Arlington, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia.”[14] As negotiations began in 1964, Reuther pursued a ruthless strategy for ensuring labor peace. He negotiated with Chrysler first, which was the smallest of the Big Three automakers and had the smallest organized workforce. He then used the Chrysler contract as a template for negotiations with Ford to secure a similar contract. It didn’t take fancy educations for GM workers to read the writing on the wall, and they struck without further consulting Reuther.[15] But Reuther outmaneuvered his dissatisfied ranks by declaring their walkout an official strike. What is significant about this strike, Weir notes, is that it “was a strike directed primarily against the union leadership and directed against the employer only secondarily.”[16]

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