1923 san pedro maritime strike

The 1923 San Pedro Maritime Strike (also known as the Liberty Hill Strike) was, at the time, the biggest challenge to the dominance of the open shop culture of Los Angeles, California until the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s.

The strike was led by members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or the "Wobblies") which bottled up shipping in the harbor. One of the largest staged protests during the strike was led by author Upton Sinclair on a small plot of land called Liberty Hill where he was arrested for reciting the First Amendment. It was eventually crushed by a combination of injunctions, mass arrests and vigilantism by both the police force and the Ku Klux Klan. There would not be another waterfront strike of this magnitude until the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike.

Labor relations in the Pacific coast maritime industry had been in almost constant turmoil since the turn of the century. The traditional craft unions of seaman and longshoremen, plagued by bureaucratic squabbles, the hostility of the Los Angeles Times, powerful employers’ groups such as the Merchants’ and Manufacturers Association were not able to change the culture of open shops in Los Angeles.

One of the most effective weapons used by open shops to combat radical forces was “decausualization,” which relied heavily on the use of company-controlled hiring halls to weed out as many union sympathizers as possible from working in the docks. Even with all the preventative measures put in place, members of the IWW were able to still infiltrate a vast amount of the docks on the West Coast under the guise of other organizations used as a front.

Although the IWW was able to gain access to the docks, they were not having too much success on the waterfronts of California until the start of World War I. The build-up leading to American involvement meant higher than normal output in all the ports, and a shortage of labor. In May 1916, the International Longshoremen’s Association began a dockworker’s strike for an increase in wages in Seattle, Washington. The dockworkers in San Pedro, totally about 1,600, came out on strike at the same time. The strike was quickly put down when the shop owners hired a special Los Angeles Police Department unit to work in the protections of strikebreakers to maintain an opened shop.

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