Harry Lundeberg was born on March 25, 1901, in Oslo, Norway, the son of Karl Gunnar Lundeberg and Allette Koffeld. His father, a sailor turned small businessman, advocated syndicalism. His mother publicly championed women's equality and workers' rights.
Lundeberg attended Norwegian public schools until the age of fourteen.
Lundeberg, following his family's tradition, went to sea while at his teens. For the next nineteen years Lundeberg's life centered on ship forecastles. He sailed by both wind and steam, in and out of most major world ports, and under the flags of nine nations. He joined Norwegian, British, and Australian maritime unions, a Spanish syndicalist union, and, according to some reports, the anarcho-syndicalist Industrialist Workers of the World.
In 1923 Lundeberg made Seattle, Washington, his home port. He transferred his membership from the Australian Seamen's Union to the Sailor's Union of the Pacific (SUP) in 1926 and became an American citizen in 1933. By 1934, when he came ashore for full-time union work, he had the rank of boatswain, the highest-paid deckhand. Lundeberg's experiences as a nomadic, disenfranchised sailor reinforced the syndicalist views he had acquired from his parents. Yet as social, economic, and political conditions in the world changed, he evolved from a rank-and-file insurgent in the early 1930's to a traditional "business unionist" in the late 1930's and 1940's, to a conservative, anti-Communist Republican in the 1950's.
Lundeberg initially became prominent in labor affairs as a radical critic of the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) maritime unions. In 1934, when Pacific seamen ignored the advice of SUP leaders and stopped work in sympathy with the embattled longshoremen, the Seattle sailors chose Lundeberg to head their local strike committee. After the walkout he became the sailors' port agent in Seattle and rapidly developed a power base. In April 1935 Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) backed his election as president of the newly formed, loosely structured Maritime Federation of the Pacific (MFP). Lundeberg used this position to undermine the entrenched SUP leadership by directing the movement to expel Paul Scharrenberg, editor of the Seamen's Journal and secretary of the California Federation of Labor, from the union. With the power of the incumbent officers weakened, in 1935 the rank and file elected Lundeberg secretary-treasurer, the highest post within SUP. Thereupon he resigned as head of the MFP and moved to San Francisco.
The old guard of the International Seamen's Union (ISU), with which SUP was affiliated, became alarmed at the Pacific sailors' increased militancy and expelled them from its ranks in January 1936. For the next year Lundeberg considered taking his now independent SUP into the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), but finally decided against this move because he feared he would have minor influence in CIO affairs compared with Harry Bridges of the ILWU and Joe Curran of the National Maritime Union. Needing allies, in October 1938 Lundeberg convinced the AFL to replace the discredited ISU with the Seafarers' International Union (SIU), a confederation of various small unions of sailors, fishermen, and warehouse and cannery workers dominated by SUP and headed by Lundeberg.
Lundeberg had worked with Harry Bridges in his early climb to power but by the late 1930's they had become bitter foes. Several times their followers engaged in brawls, Lundeberg receiving a broken jaw in one such fray. Personally, Lundeberg resented Bridges' greater prominence in the West Coast labor movement. Economically, he condemned the ILWU incursions into SUP jurisdiction (while coveting certain longshoring jobs for his sailors). Ideologically, he detested Bridges' association with Communists, his acceptance of political action, and, in later years, his cooperativeness with employers.
Lundeberg became prominent as a labor leader. During his tenure in Sailors' Union of the Pacific, he raised the average seaman's wage from $67 per month in 1935 to $400 in 1953. In 1949 he won for his members a welfare program and the Sailor's Home Trust Fund, financed by the shipowners. In 1936, 1946, and 1952 he initiated major strikes, the last of which lasted sixty-three days.
Lundeberg was strong opponent of communism in labor. Throughout his life he upheld the primacy of economic action over legislative reform, saw strikes as essential tactics for improving seamen's working conditions, and condemned the increasing tendency of political systems to limit the actions of individuals and voluntary associations. As secretary-treasurer of SUP and president of SIU, Lundeberg advocated "bread and butter unionism" and earned the nickname "Lunch-box. "
Throughout his union career Lundeberg closely followed the life-style of the sailors. A critic of "tuxedo unionism, " he appeared everywhere in the standard sailors' garb of gray cap, shirtsleeves, and black dungarees. In 1949 he worked his passage to a European conference as a hand, although the union had appropriated enough money for him to travel first class. He kept his salary equivalent to the highest pay for a sailor of his rank, and lived in a modest home in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame. He did not smoke, drink, or chew tobacco, but he did swear profusely in a thick Scandinavian accent, and played a skillful game of poker.
Lundeberg was married to Ida Lundeberg. They had three children.
