"I's the Power": Interracial Unionism on the Milwaukee Waterfront in the Depression Era

Michael Billeaux, Madison Area Technical College
David Calnitsky, Western University

Local 815 of the International Longshoremen's Association was an unusual sight. Reorganized in 1934, ILA 815 was a racially integrated union with a majority-white membership and a black leftist leader. From its founding until 1942, Black and left-wing caucuses controlled the Milwaukee port, frequently striking employers over matters of working conditions, pay, and union recognition. The achievement of a union-controlled hiring hall, unique outside of the West Coast, gave longshoremen control of waterfront labor, and the port became a base for Black power and a rebuke to the established racist patterns of work in the city. In 1942, however, the structure of the Great Lakes shipping industry, the competition among ILA locals in the Great Lakes region, and local anti-communist projects conspired to rout the radicals, black and white. The potential for militant interracial struggle that ILA 815 represented was thus snuffed out early. This paper examines how the local features of class structure and class organization first supported, then undermined, the establishment of interracial working-class solidarity. For the former, an emphasis on microfoundations sheds light on how such challenges to the racial status quo can emerge. For the latter, a focus on class dynamics -- the balance of class forces, how the production process organizes relationships among workers, the organizational forms adopted by employers and workers, and so on -- can doom interracial solidarity to failure and weaken black organization even without the intervention of any deliberate projects by either employers or other workers to sow racial divisions or establish racial workplace hierarchies. This research bears on the study of racial capitalism in two ways: by showing how micro-level dynamics can cut against the general trend; and by identifying a mechanism whereby racism is reproduced by capitalist class relations as such.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 13. Labor Movements and Configurations of Racial Capitalism: Theorizing Race, Class, Gender in historical change