Paul Hall was an American labor leader, who was the key figure in the creation of the Seafarers International Union (SIU).
Background
Paul Hall was born on August 20, 1914, in Inglenook, Alabama, the son of Robert R. Hall, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and Minnie B. Discher. His father died when Paul was twelve years old. The impoverished family moved to Tampa, Florida, to live with relatives.
Education
Pride impelled Hall to leave school and seek work wherever he could find it.
Career
At the age of fifteen, Hall became a professional prizefighter. As a middleweight, he had seventy-five fights, with middling success, for small purses. Still in his teens, Hall went to sea, sailing in the steward department before finding his permanent rating in the engineering department. As a professional seaman, he made numerous voyages before and during World War II, some of them in submarine-infested waters. He was active as a rank-and-file member of the Seafarers International Union (SIU) from its creation in 1938 as a successor to the ineffective and corrupt International Seamen's Union (ISU).
In 1944, at the age of twenty-nine, Hall won his first union election as a dispatcher in Baltimore. Within two years, Hall became the dominant figure of the SIU's autonomous Atlantic and Gulf Coast district, in effect leading his own national union. This was the result of his triumph in organizing the workforce of the Isthmian Fleet, a subsidiary of U. S. Steel, which was the largest shipping company in the world.
With the death in 1957 of the legendary Harry Lundeberg, first president of the SIU and successor to Andrew Furuseth, who had assumed the ISU presidency in 1890, Hall became president of the SIU. Despite the smallness of its membership - the total number of AFL-organized seamen rarely exceeded 100, 000 and after World War II was usually below 40, 000 - the head of the SIU played a major role within organized labor. Hall became the AFL-CIO's senior vice-president, chairman of its most important committees, and president of the AFL-CIO's Maritime Trades Department.
The AFL-CIO, whose 8. 5 million members made it the second-largest federation of unions in the world, provided unstinting and indispensable support for the maritime industry throughout Hall's lifetime. Hall's life as a union leader was dominated by his conviction of the decline of American-flag shipping and the extreme importance of federal legislation to the maritime industry's survival. After taking control of his international union, Hall emerged as an Olympian figure in the industry, speaking not only for the seamen but also for shipowners and the shipbuilders.
His major antagonists were the American oil companies with their foreign-flag tankers and farm groups with their focus on farm exports. In the face of higher manning costs and the desire to protect national interests, the Maritime Trades Department's foes came to include such unlikely allies as the State Department and the Defense Department, and Common Cause and Ralph Nader. With exceptional deftness, Hall for nearly twenty years was able not only to hold off his formidable antagonists' efforts to modify or end favorable maritime legislation but also to achieve new beneficial laws, most notably the 1970 Merchant Marine Act.
His greatest defeat was President Gerald Ford's veto in 1974 of the oil cargo preference bill, which would have preserved seamen's jobs and the nation's ability to meet its maritime needs for the foreseeable future. Because President Ford was a personal friend, a lifelong supporter of the SIU, and a beneficiary of the union's political funds, the veto was a crushing and unexpected blow. Central to the SIU's political power was its Political Action Committee, which for years had collected and dispensed more money than any other American labor union.
A left-handed compliment to the union's political effectiveness was a federal indictment of its entire executive board, including Hall, in 1970 for allegedly violating the Corrupt Practices Act. The gist of the charge was that seamen were coerced into making contributions for political action. The court two years later dismissed the indictment because of the delay in bringing the case to trial. Despite this outcome, the financial and human cost of the indictment was huge. Prior to its end, Hall suffered a serious heart attack; the union's secretary-treasurer and second in command died of heart attack.
The most colorful episodes of Hall's career involved his assistance to fellow unionists. Time and again unions in trouble turned to Hall for help, which always included his advice on tactics and strategy. A surprising number of unions, some of which were far larger than the SIU, were unable to plan an effective campaign or even to organize picket lines without his aid. The SIU freely gave substantial gifts and loans to hard-pressed organizations and, when needed, hundreds of seamen volunteered to participate in other unions' strike activities.
A partial list of beneficiaries includes the Office Employees Union in its 1947 Wall Street strike, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in its general strike of 1958, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union in its organizational efforts in New York City and elsewhere in the mid-1960's, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' difficulties in Canada, and César Chavez's organizational work in the 1970's.
As a close colleague of George Meany, Hall took on assignments that much larger unions shunned. When some Teamster locals disaffiliated from their International in the early 1960's and searched for an organizational home, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa succeeded in cowing nearly all of the labor movement into refusing them through a threat of retaliation. The SIU took Hoffa on, and battle was joined in half a dozen states and Puerto Rico between the 2 million Teamsters and the SIU, one-twentieth its size. The spectacular battle ended with the SIU's representing thousands of cab drivers in Chicago and former Teamsters in other places.
Although a native southerner, he opposed Jim Crow laws and integrated his union in 1950. As he grew older, he took increasing pride in the SIU training school in Piney Point, Maryland. In a declining industry whose existence depended on his political skills, Hall preached that it was essential to have available an adequate number of trained new seamen and upgraded professional sailors. During the last ten years of his life, about one thousand recruits were trained each year for entry-level jobs, most of them dropouts from Appalachia or urban ghettoes.
One episode demonstrating Hall's influence is revealing. In the fall of 1975, during the New York City financial crisis, Governor Hugh Carey of New York State was unable to meet with President Ford. In Hall's Washington office, he vented his frustration at having a financial plan to save his state and being unable to do anything about it. Within minutes, Hall had the president on the telephone and arranged an appointment for the governor with Ford.
President Jimmy Carter, out of the country when Paul Hall died on June 22, 1980, in New York City, sent Vice-President Walter Mondale to speak at his funeral. Other eulogies were delivered by Governor Carey and Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO.
Achievements
Membership
Paul Hall was a founding member and president of the Seafarers International Union (SIU) from 1957 to 1980. He was the senior vice president of the AFL-CIO at the time of his death.
Personality
Paul Hall was a closet intellectual, a voracious reader who had painfully educated himself during his early years of union office.
Connections
In February 1943, Paul Hall married Margaret Rogers, and divorced her in October 1948. Hall then married Rose Siegel Eldridge in 1950; they had two children.