Harry Bridges, original name Alfred Bryant Renton Bridges, was born on July 28, 1901 in Melbourne, Australia, the oldest of six children in a solidly middle-class family. His father, Alfred Earnest, was a successful suburban realtor, and his mother, Julia Dorgan, was a devout Catholic.
Bridges received a firm Catholic upbringing, serving four years as an altar boy and attending parochial schools from one of which he earned a secondary diploma in 1917.
After leaving school Bridges tried his hand at clerking but was bored by white-collar work. The sea, however, enthralled him. In late 1917 he found employment as a merchant seaman and remained at sea for the next five years. As a sailor Bridges saw the world, experienced exploitation, became friendly with his more radical workmates, and, for a time, even joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a left-wing, syndicalist American labor organization. When one of his ships made port in the United States in 1920, Bridges decided to become an immigrant. He even took out his first papers as part of the process of establishing U. S. citizenship. But his carelessness in meeting the statutory timetable for filing final citizenship papers (as well as his alleged links to communism) became the basis for the government's later attempts to deport him.
Having settled in the United States, Bridges left the sea in 1922 and took up work as a longshoreman in San Francisco. He labored for more than ten years in one of the nation's most exploitative job markets and in a city whose waterfront employers had established a closed-shop company union. During that decade (1922 to 1933) Bridges lived in relative obscurity as an ordinary longshoreman, leading a conventional working-class life.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal changed all that. The labor upheaval of the 1930s lifted Bridges from obscurity to prominence. When discontent erupted among West Coast waterfront workers in 1933 and 1934, Bridges seized the moment and became a militant union agitator. In 1934 when labor conflict spread up and down the Pacific Coast and culminated in the San Francisco general strike, he acted as the waterfront strikers' most effective leader. He led his followers to a great victory in 1934. The longshoremen in San Francisco won not only union recognition but also a union hiring hall to replace the traditional shape-up in which workers obtained jobs in a demeaning and discriminatory manner.
Building on this success, Bridges next tried to unite all the maritime workers of the Pacific Coast in the Maritime Federation of the Pacific (1935). His plans for waterfront labor solidarity were disrupted by the outbreak of a union civil war between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Bridges chose the CIO side, took his union members out of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA)-AFL, and reorganized them as the ILWU. John L. Lewis, president of the CIO, appointed Bridges to the new union federation's executive board and also as regional director for the entire Pacific Coast. By 1939 Bridges had won a deserved reputation as one of the CIO's new labor men of power.
He had also won many more enemies. Employers found the ILWU to be an especially militant and demanding negotiating partner. Foes in the AFL, among public officials, and even within the CIO used Bridges' links to communism to undercut his influence as a labor leader. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins tried to deport him in 1939. Through votes and investigations, Congress sought to accomplish the same goal. While different branches of the federal government hounded Bridges, Lewis, in 1939, limited Bridges' sphere as a CIO leader to the state of California.
Despite his enemies inside and outside the CIO, Bridges led his union from victory to victory. The labor shortages associated with World War II, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam, combined with the strategic importance of Pacific Coast ports in the shipping of war-related goods, provided the ILWU with enormous bargaining power which Bridges used to the fullest. He used the power his union amassed on the West Coast as a base from which to organize waterfront and plantation workers in Hawaii. The ILWU brought stable mass unionism to the islands for the first time in their history and thus transformed Hawaii's economic and political balance of power.
Bridges meantime initiated a long strike among Pacific Coast waterfront workers in 1948 that would win them the best labor contract such workers had ever had. But that was to be the last strike Bridges led as a militant labor leader. Shortly after that success for the ILWU, the CIO in 1949-1950 expelled Bridges' union as one of eleven charged with being under communist control and serving the interests of the Soviet Union.
By 1960, however, Bridges won a new reputation for himself as a labor statesman. In that year he negotiated a contract with the Pacific Maritime Association which eliminated many union work rules, accepted labor-saving machinery, and tolerated a reduced labor force in return for either guaranteed jobs or annual earnings for more senior union members. A decade later, in 1971-1972, Bridges led his last long strike of 135 days, but it aimed mostly to ratify and strengthen the agreement of 1960, rather than to dilute it. Bridges had made his peace with employers and relished his role as a labor statesman.
In 1968 Bridges was appointed to a city Charter Commission, and then in 1970 he was appointed to the San Francisco Port Commission. In 1977 he retired as ILWU president. During his last eight years as a union leader, Bridges had left far behind the radicalism and controversy that marked his earlier career. But both Bridges and his union remained distinctive. In an era of highly-paid union officials, many of whom lived ostentatious private lives, Bridges remained as abstemious as ever, living frugally on an atypically modest union salary; he had earned only 27, 000 dollars a year. The ILWU built by Bridges was a legacy in which any trade unionist could take pride, but he always downplayed his role. Bridges died on March 30, 1990 in San Francisco.
For more than 40 years Harry Bridges earned a reputation as one of the most radical, astute, and successful leaders in the American labor movement. He first came to national attention during the combined waterfront and general strikes which paralyzed San Francisco in 1934. Bridges emerged from this labor conflict as the dominant leader and spokesperson for Pacific Coast waterfront workers. He built his union, the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), into one of the most militant and successful in the nation. Before he retired from active union service in 1979, Bridges also won plaudits from employers for his role as a labor statesman, which meant accepting technological innovations and less total employment on the waterfront in return for union and job security.
International Longshoremen's Association, International Longshore and Warehouse Union
Bridges was married three times. In 1923 he married Agnes Brown. They had a daughter, Jacqueline “Betty” Bridges, born on December 28, 1924. As Harry rose within the leadership of the San Francisco local, Agnes seldom saw him. In 1940 Harry had become acquainted with Nancy Fenton Berdecio, a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe. Nancy’s husband was a Bolivian artist named Roberto Berdecio. She became pregnant with a child from Harry, and Roberto filed for a divorce. The baby was born on May 26, 1943, three weeks after the Berdecio divorce was final. The child was named Julie. The birth certificate gave her the last name of Berdecio, and the law assumed Roberto was the father.
Harry and Agnes separated and “divided their community property by mutual agreement. ” In December 1944 Harry filed for divorce, charging “general cruelty. ” In June 1945 Agnes filed a divorce cross-complaint charging Harry with fathering a child in New York. As one might expect, he denied paternity. The Bridges divorce suit opened in San Francisco on August 21, 1945. It was very nasty and attended by capacity crowds and reporters from the major news agencies. Nancy Berdecio’s sister came out from New York to testify that the child was born 23 days after the divorce was final.
Harry was first on the stand. He denied being the father of Nancy Berdecio’s daughter, then went on to accuse Agnes of being an alcoholic. He said that Agnes was opposed to his union work, taught their daughter racial discrimination, and tried to get him to accept bribes. By 1946 his divorce from Agnes was final, and he married Nancy Berdecio. She would become the stereotypical younger and more glamorous wife of a successful middleaged man. They had two children. Harry and Nancy divorced after eight years of marriage.
After two marriages ended somewhat acrimoniously, Harry met and fell in love with Noriko Sawada. Nikki, a Nisei Japanese American who was interned during World War II, decided to marry Harry in Reno, Nevada in 1958. When the court clerk denied them a marriage license on the grounds that it violated the state’s anti-miscegenation law, the couple challenged the law in the courts. They won, and were married at the end of 1958.
She left him for another union official, Julian Hicks.
She threw knives, scissors, and once a mirror at Harry.
She testified against her mother and in her father’s behalf in their divorce trial.
