Bloody Thursday and the Union It Built

Eight o'clock in the morning, July 5, 1934. The Embarcadero is wet with sea fog and about a thousand San Francisco police are lined up along it, carrying shotguns, tear gas launchers, and riding horses. In front of them are a few thousand longshoremen and sympathizers, armed with bricks and with railroad spikes pulled from the tracks. Behind the police, the Industrial Association of San Francisco has staged a column of trucks driven by strikebreakers. The Association has decided that today the port of San Francisco reopens by force. By three in the afternoon the police will have driven the strikers off the waterfront with live ammunition. Two men will be dead in the street at the corner of Mission and Steuart, shot in the back in front of the ILA hall. One was a longshoreman. The other had come to volunteer at the soup kitchen.

This is how a union gets built.

The slave market at the Ferry Building

Before any of this, before the strike, before the shooting, there was the shape-up. Every morning at seven, longshoremen gathered at the Ferry Building and along the piers of the Embarcadero and stood in a crowd while a hiring foreman walked the line and pointed at the men who would work that day. The longshoremen called it the slave market. That is their word, not ours. Longshoremen bought the foreman's favor with whisky, with money, with whatever else a hungry man could produce. A longshoreman's job security, as ILWU Local 19 in Seattle puts it in its own history, was tied to the paternalism of the work-crew foreman, and whisky, money, and other assorted favors guaranteed jobs.

Above the shape-up sat the Blue Book. The Blue Book was a company union, mandatory for any longshoreman who wanted steady work on the San Francisco docks. Speak up, join a real union, talk about a strike, and the Blue Book dispatched you to nothing. You went home. Your kids went hungry.

When Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933, and Section 7(a) of that Act gave workers the formal legal right to organize, San Francisco longshoremen moved fast. By the end of 1933, more than 95 percent of them had joined the revived International Longshoremen's Association Local 38-79. That fall, a militant rank-and-file caucus calling itself the Albion Hall group forced Matson Navigation into a five-day walkout and made the company reinstate four longshoremen it had fired for wearing ILA buttons. Matson folded. The workers won. A preview.

Harry Bridges and the strike the ILA did not want

Alfred Renton Bryant Bridges was born in Kensington, Victoria, Australia, on July 28, 1901. He jumped ship at San Francisco in 1920 and began longshoring in 1922. He was a rank-and-file worker, not a career organizer. He was also a member of the Albion Hall group, and when the 1934 strike came he was elected chairman of the Joint Marine Strike Committee, the rank-and-file body that actually ran the walkout.

On March 23, 1934, the ILA called a coastwide strike. President Roosevelt asked them to wait. They waited. On May 9, roughly 12,500 longshoremen walked out at every West Coast port. Within days, the Sailors' Union of the Pacific and other maritime unions joined them. The Teamsters refused to haul scab cargo off the docks. Within a week, not a freighter sailed from a Pacific Coast port, the first time in the history of the West Coast that had happened.

The demands were specific. A coastwide contract, covering every port together so no port could be picked off and broken. A 30-hour work week. A dollar an hour. And, above everything else, a union-controlled hiring hall. The hiring hall was the whole fight. As long as the company hired the men, the company owned the men. Change who picked the gang and you changed the shape of power on the docks.

In late May, ILA International President Joseph P. Ryan came to San Francisco and negotiated a settlement with the employers. The rank and file rejected it by referendum. Ryan negotiated another. They rejected that one too. Name Ryan plainly. The president of the workers' own international union twice tried to end their strike on the employers' terms, and the workers twice rejected his deal. Bridges became the public face of the strike because the rank and file wanted him there and did not want Ryan.

Bloody Thursday

On July 3, the Industrial Association of San Francisco, a confederation of the city's largest banks, shipping lines, and merchants, decided to open the port by force. Strikebreakers loaded trucks at Pier 38 under police escort. Strikers met them with bricks and railroad spikes. Police answered with tear gas and mounted charges. July 4 was a holiday and the Industrial Association paused. On July 5, they came back with roughly a thousand officers.

Around eight in the morning the fighting began on Rincon Hill above the Embarcadero. Strikers were driven back with tear gas and live ammunition. Fighting spread up Market Street and Mission Street. By three in the afternoon mounted police had cleared the waterfront.

At the corner of Mission and Steuart Streets, directly in front of the ILA hall, police fired into a group of pickets. Howard Sperry, a longshoreman and World War I veteran, was shot in the back and killed. Nicholas Counderakis, known as Nick Bordoise, a Greek immigrant, a member of the Cooks and Waiters Union, and a Communist Party member who had been volunteering at the strikers' soup kitchen at 84 Embarcadero, was shot in the back and killed. He was not even a longshoreman. He had come to help feed the picket line.

More than 100 others were wounded. Governor Frank Merriam ordered the California National Guard onto the waterfront and the soldiers' guns did not leave the Embarcadero for weeks. That afternoon someone chalked a line on the pavement at the spot where Sperry and Bordoise had fallen. It read: "Two men killed here, murdered by police."

That is the passive voice schools teach. Our sentence is active. The San Francisco Police Department shot Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise in the back. Write their names every time.

The silent march

Four days later, on July 9, 1934, San Francisco buried them. The ILA and the Joint Marine Strike Committee organized a funeral procession up Market Street. The press had been telling the city for days that the strikers were a mob and that Bloody Thursday would be avenged with riots.

What the city saw instead was a column of as many as 40,000 marchers walking in complete silence, with tens of thousands more lining the sidewalks. No speeches. No chanting. No slogans. A single muffled drum and the sound of footsteps for nearly two miles up Market Street. Up on the light poles hung banners from an unrelated Knights Templar convention the city had not yet removed. The procession was awesome in its quiet and its simplicity.

Something broke in San Francisco that day. The papers that had been calling the strikers a mob for weeks began printing editorials asking why their own police had shot workers in the back. The anticipation had been revenge. The city had braced for revenge. What it got was a funeral, and a dignity so complete that the people watching from the sidewalk recognized themselves in the procession. These were not ruffians and radicals. These were working people honoring their dead. They were, in that moment, unmistakably like us.

Bordoise was buried separately at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma in what contemporaries called a red funeral. Communist Party official Sam Darcy spoke at the graveside. An immigrant cook, shot down while helping feed strikers from a union not his own, received a graveside eulogy from the Party whose member he had been. The ILWU today still names both men together, every year.

On July 14, the San Francisco Labor Council voted to call a general strike, and 21 unions answered.

General strike, vigilante raids, and a contract

The San Francisco General Strike began on July 16, 1934. Roughly 150,000 Bay Area workers walked off the job. Streetcars stopped. Restaurants closed. Newspapers shrank to bulletins. Mike Quin wrote that an uncanny quiet settled over the acres of buildings, and that for all practical purposes not a wheel moved nor a lever budged.

The next day, July 17, the city answered. Vigilantes, many in leather jackets, driving in convoy, with police following close behind, raided the Marine Workers Industrial Union hall, the Communist Party headquarters, and at least a dozen other meeting halls and private homes. They beat the occupants. They smashed the furniture. They hurled typewriters from upper-story windows into the street below. Behind them, the police swept in and arrested the victims of the beatings. Roughly 300 people were arrested as radicals in a single day.

On the radio, National Recovery Administrator Hugh S. Johnson called the general strike a threat to the community, a menace to the government, and civil war. The respectable narrative of 1934, the one that gets told at Chamber of Commerce lunches, tends to omit the vigilante raids. Restore them to the record. The same San Franciscans who had walked in silence for Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise on July 9 watched the same police department stand aside for leather-jacketed mobs on July 17. Both things happened. Both things are true.

On July 19, the General Strike Committee voted narrowly to end the general strike and submit the longshore dispute to federal arbitration. The longshoremen themselves held the picket line for 12 more days. On October 12, 1934, the National Longshoremen's Board issued its arbitration award. A coastwide contract. Wages raised to 95 cents an hour at straight time, just under the dollar the strikers had demanded. A 30-hour week. And the hiring hall, jointly operated, with the dispatcher selected by the union. The Blue Book was dead.

Across the 83 days of the strike, up and down the coast, nine workers were killed, more than 1,000 were injured, and more than 500 were arrested. Sperry and Bordoise were the two who turned the city.

What they built

The 1934 strike did not yet create the ILWU. It created the conditions for it. On August 11, 1937, the Pacific Coast District of the ILA voted to disaffiliate from Ryan's international and accepted a charter from the Congress of Industrial Organizations as the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. Harry Bridges became its first president.

The ILWU's interracial integration was not rhetoric. It was concrete. In 1934, in the same year as the San Francisco strike, the ILA in Gulf and South Atlantic ports maintained segregated Black and white locals. The San Francisco local did not. Bridges, at the insistence of rank-and-file members and of his own conviction, pushed to integrate longshore gangs on the San Francisco docks that had historically been racially exclusive. During the strike itself he spoke at Black churches in San Francisco about honoring the picket line, because employers were actively recruiting Black workers to be strikebreakers, and he understood that the color line on the waterfront was the employers' line, not the workers'. Peter Cole, the historian who wrote the book on race and the ILWU, argues that this bet, that interracial solidarity is a tactical advantage and not a liability, is the central fact of what the union became.

At the Tenth Biennial Convention of the ILWU in San Francisco in 1953, the union formally adopted its Ten Guiding Principles. The third principle reads: "Workers are indivisible. There can be no discrimination because of race, color, creed, national origin, religious or political belief." That language was not theoretical. People who had walked behind Howard Sperry's casket wrote it. They remembered the sound of that silence.

At the corner of Mission and Steuart Streets in San Francisco today there is a bronze marker. It reads: "In memory of Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise, who gave their lives on Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, so that all working people might enjoy a greater measure of dignity and security." At the bottom of the marker, in larger letters, is a sentence the ILWU did not invent. The Industrial Workers of the World wrote it into their constitutional preamble in 1905: "An injury to one is an injury to all." The IWW coined the slogan. The ILWU lived it. Carve it on the ground where two men bled and the attribution stops mattering.

Every July 5, the ILWU shuts down every port on the West Coast. Not a moment of silence. Not a statement. The actual ports, Seattle to San Diego, go quiet for Sperry and Bordoise.

Here is what matters for a working person reading this in 2026. The shape-up is gone on the West Coast because longshoremen ended it. The hiring hall they control was not given to them. They took it, at the cost of nine dead and a thousand injured, and they took it while refusing to let the employers split them by race or by trade or by citizenship, which is how the employers win when they win. Every fight today to organize the unorganized, whether in an Amazon warehouse, a rideshare app, or a strip-mall coffee shop, runs into the same employer playbook that was run at Pier 38 on July 5, 1934. Divide the workers. Hire some to break the others. Call the police on the ones who will not break. What the ILWU learned on Steuart Street was that this playbook does not lose an argument. It loses a funeral. Refuse the division, bury your dead together, and walk back to work with your heads held high.

They fought for a union and they gave all for each other. They came back with a contract, with a hiring hall they controlled, and with a union that had just learned, in blood on Steuart Street, its own reason to exist.

Sources

The ILWU's own commemorative history of Bloody Thursday and the Ten Guiding Principles are the spine of this piece; the specific events of July 5 and July 9, 1934 are reconstructed from contemporary reporting collected at FoundSF, from Mike Quin's The Big Strike (1949), from the California Supreme Court Historical Society's legal-historical overview by John Caragozian, and from Beyond Chron's event-by-event account. Harry Bridges' biographical detail comes from the FoundSF biographical entry and the ILWU oral histories. Nick Bordoise's biography, including his original name Nicholas Counderakis, his Cooks and Waiters Union membership, and the red funeral at Cypress Lawn, comes from Daniel Frontino Elash's scholarly article on Greek American communists and the 1934 strike in the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora. The October 12, 1934 arbitration award terms are drawn from HistoryLink and the ILWU's own account. The 1937 CIO charter date comes from the University of Washington's Mapping American Social Movements project. The thesis on interracial solidarity as the ILWU's tactical foundation draws on Peter Cole's Dockworker Power (University of Illinois Press, 2018), via his 2024 Jacobin interview. The full source list is in the frontmatter above.