Longshore organizing got a boost from the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, which included a section protecting workers’ right to organize—and which the Roosevelt administration was willing to enforce. Dozens of new locals formed up and down the West Coast, all the way to Alaska. Bridges and his allies in Local 38-79 pressed for coastal unity and sent organizers far beyond the Bay Area. (In the 1940s they led a remarkable campaign to organize sugar-plantation workers in Hawaii.) At a meeting of the Pacific Coast District of the ILA in 1933, the locals settled on a batch of demands, including maximum hours and a worker-controlled hiring hall. They also wanted a single coastwise contract in order to prevent employers from relocating cargo to ports they perceived to be less troublesome. Bridges had no support from the ILA president, Joseph P. Ryan, who resented this western rebellion.
In May 1934, after months of fruitless bargaining, thousands of Pacific marine workers went on strike. Bridges, who would soon turn thirty-three, led the strike committee and traveled to major port cities to get commitments from longshoremen as well as other workers in the supply chain. Rank-and-file Teamsters truckers, like rank-and-file ILA members, were increasingly at odds with union leadership. The president of one Teamsters local in California dismissed the longshoremen as “radicals of the worst type,” yet his members refused to cross the picket line. Bridges also visited Black churches to seek support from men whose exclusion from the docks made them vulnerable to being recruited as scabs. Cherny quotes from a Black newspaper: “He implored Blacks to join him on the picket line and when the strike was settled, Blacks would work as union members on every dock in the Bay Area and the West Coast.”
Bridges and his fellow unionists found themselves battling “labor spies, strikebreakers, and private armed guards.” Each port was different, but in cities such as Seattle, Oakland, and Los Angeles, longshoremen risked their lives to block replacement workers from the docks. “The city of San Francisco stood on the brink of class warfare,” Cherny writes. “Sentries with bayoneted rifles marched in front of the piers. Machine-gun nests guarded key locations. Tanks prowled the Embarcadero.” Two months into the strike, on a July day that would come to be known as Bloody Thursday (and is still commemorated by the ILWU), two unionists were shot and killed, most likely by the police. Thousands of workers and supporters joined a funeral march through downtown.