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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Appendices - 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations - 7. Longshore Work
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1098 An American Dilemma
counts is physical strength and endurance as well as certain training in the art of apply-
ing it. The popular beliefs in Negro inferiority never refer to his physical condition,
so it is quite natural that they have hampered him less in this field than in most others.
In only a few cases have white workers been able, for a time, to monopolize higher
jobs; this happened with respect to cotton screwmen in New Orleans, but the white
monopoly was broken at the beginning of this century, and the whole craft was eventu-
ally eliminated through technological development.® Racial competition, in the main,
has been a question of sharing jobs of the same type or, at least, of about the same
general status. In the South the Negro had from the outset such a numerical superiority
that it soon proved difficult not to treat him as an equal or near-equal. Then, too, the
big expansion during the First World War was accompanied by 2 .scarcity of white
labor. There was no way of stopping the Negro from making gains.
There are disagreeable aspects of this occupation which have made i\ unattractive to
white workers. The work is extremely strenuous. There is little chance for the old^
worker. Accident risks are high. Job opportunities are irregular and subject to severe
business cycle fluctuations. Periods of idleness are broken by hours and days of rush
work. Those who have a job try to keep it in order to make full use of it. This, at
times, makes them work as much as 36 hours at a stretch, which Increases the accident
risk.
Moreover, most ports have the so-called “shape-up” system of hiring **
which means
that there is no even distribution of work opportunities. The workers become entirely
dependent on the hiring agents and foremen. This leads to favoritism. It opens the way
to discrimination against the Negroes, who, for the most part, work in separate gangs
and often have been segregated in separate positions when working on the same ship
with whites.** It also leads to “kick-backs” to hiring agents and foremen and to other
forms of corruption, graft and sometimes plain racketeering on the water front. Some
of the labor unions have become undemocratic because of the power of the foremen.
The trade union history of the longshoremen is long and turbulent, full of racial
strife, with whites attempting to exclude Negroes or Negroes breaking the strikes of
whites. But almost from the very beginning there were some successful attempts to
organize racial cooperation on a basis of mutual solidarity and equality. There was a
strong Negro union in Charleston, South Carolina, in the i86o’s, and during the 1870’s
at least two noteworthy Negro unions were formed, one in New Orleans and one in
Baltimore. In 1865 Negro and white longshoremen collaborated in a strike in New
Orleans,** and there was a much bigger strike in the i88o*s in which workers of both
races participated. About that time a noted foreign observer commented on how “despite
occasional outbreak of racial antipathy,” the unions in New Orleans had been able to
“harmonize the opposing factors, and have undertaken, through the recognition of
black labor, a problem in civilization whose solution they will probably not Jive to see.”**
The International Longshoremen’s Association (I.L.A.), organized during the 1890’s,
•Sterling Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker (1931), pp. 185-187.
^ In this system of hiring, the worker must find out for himself where work is available
each day and there is no assurance that the foreman will select him.
* Ibid., p. 197.
pp. 182-183.
•A. S. von Waltershausen, Die Nordamerikanischen Gewerkschaften unUr dent Einfluss
der jortschreitenden ProduktionsUchnik (1886), p. 94; quoted in Spero and Harris, of.
cit., p. 184.
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