Stevedore

Among the communist leaders who had an active part in the San Francisco abolition campaign... and the protest demonstrations were Harry Bridges, whom you see here being escorted out of City Hall by police officials moments before the rioting broke out.

Archie Brown, another Longshoreman, played a major role in inciting the demonstrations against the committee.

He is identified as the number two man in the California Communist Party and, admittedly, has been a party member for some 20 years.

In the course of the three days of the hearings, Archie Brown had to be ejected from the hearing room on three separate occasions.

We hadn't been in Sydney more than a day when we ran into an expression of this quality.

A wharf worker on the waterfront spoke sardonically of the fact that some people looked down their noses at Longshoremen, and in the same speech, he proudly referred to his property holdings, took a poke at Australia's Prime Minister, Mr. Chifley, and had a word to say about the income tax laws, which he felt favoured the rich.

Oh, we're terrible people.

Well, few people know that I'm a wharf labour.

Almost everybody we met was ready to talk fluently about the world situation.

For example, fighting between Dutch and Indonesians had been going on in Java, and the waterside unions of Australia had come out in support of Indonesian independence.

Longshoremen refused to load supplies for the Dutch, and when I asked one of them about it, he explained with remarkable glibness,

I believe the majority of the Australian people support the view taken by the unions that the Indonesians have complete right to their independence as declared in the Atlantic Charter.

So I do the construction with the sheet metal, pick that trade up.

When I came home, With the Longshoremen shit, when I got out, they was doing little cards, and then my card popped off, like, in 21, if I ain't mistaken or something.

So that's, what's this, 26, so that's five years with the Longshoremen.

The sheet metal construction, then I worked at the ballpark.

I didn't work this year because I was too much on me and stuff, so I didn't go back this season, but I worked there for the last 10 years.

Before then, nothing.

Dockers were traditionally employed on a casual basis, and labourers never knew what work might be available.

Men would actually wait outside the dock gates to see if there was any employment.

There was a system called the call-on, which was a very barbaric system, basically, where men fought for jobs in a particular dock.

They were closed in 1981, but these docks were once packed with ships and provided work for thousands of labourers.

They wake in Woolwich, Silvertown, Barking, Limehouse, Stepney, and the Commercial Road, converging by bus, bicycle, tram, truck, train, and finally on foot.

Dockers, tallymen, checkers, stevedores, hatchmanmen, gangers, tractormen, coopers, bank riders, weighers, dockwatchmen, dredgemen, launchmen, needlemen, jetty clerks, warehousemen, measurers, coal trimmers, lightermen, lumpers, and just as you think you've named them all, up goes a crane driver to his seat in the sky.

There was strict demarcation of labour in the docks.

C3 describing it as a fatal injury and a tragic event.

Centreport supporting this, Stevedore's family.

Maritime will investigate as well.

The worker, not a member of the Maritime Union, but it's involved supporting port workers.

Yeah, it was prior to 790.

Prior to Longshoremen? After high school.

Post-Longshoremen.

No, it was before Longshoremen, 2002.

Okay.

The first thing they have you do is they dress you up in a 60-pound jacket, right? And you get on a Stairmaster.

Well, I'm just saying if somebody throws you out, you get in their face and you you and if you're going to if you're going to swear and act like a jackass, get your money's worth, because a lot of these umpires.

are just, these guys, you know, they make Longshoremen blush, the kind of language that they hear.

Yeah, yeah.

So, in a weird way, I think you're going to earn your respect by not acting milk toast.