The Docks and Society

In the period of relief before the dock workers' strike flares up again, the public needs to reconsider its entire attitude toward this essential industry. For unless there is a basic change in this attitude, all the crime commissions, waterfront commissions, and all the reform attempts of the AF of L will be as temporary as the anti-strike injunction itself.

Secure in his middle-class respectability, the average American has chronically regarded the waterfront as a social leper colony. It is to him a place about which novels are written, but entered only at one's own risk. The waterfront has been one of the last American outposts of the old English poorhouse theory: that improving economic welfare will be but contributing to saloons. This fact has not gone unnoticed or unresented by the many men who load ships to make an honest living. Partly because they lacked alternative help, they have given their support to those leaders of the International Longshoreman's Union who have expressed concern for their welfare and plans for their betterment. That many of these leaders have used this concern as a front for gambling, racketeering and extrotion has long been evident. But this fact has been necessarily overbalanced in the workers' minds by the leaders' evident success at raising the wage and work standards of the shipping industry. As long as the public was ignoring them, they felt, why should they not at least partly ignore the public's moral prohibitions? It is no wonder, then, that the Al of L should have such trouble shaking locals off the International Longshoreman's tree, for the present union leaders appear to the workers veritable Robin Hoods.

Perhaps it had to take a national emergency to impress this problem upon the public mind. We only hope it sticks. The AF of L has the right alternative and the inter-state waterfront commissions have the right approach. But the dockers need the understanding of more than organized labor, and state commissions bog down without public support. Stability on the docks will only be realized when the public so acts to show its realization that dock workers are not merely undesirable men in an essential industry, but human beings with the same dignity and needs as everybody else.