Shore Strikes

P: In San Francisco, Calif, last week the crew of Pacific Steamship's liner H. F. Alexander struck for $30 dismissal wages.

P: In Astoria, Ore., States Steamship's freighter San Anselmo was held in port by striking longshoremen.

P:In Hilo, Hawaii, the Matson liner Matsonia left strikers on the beach, sailed with a skeleton crew.

P: In Berkeley, Calif., longshoremen refused to unload a cargo of copra from Portland California Steamship's freighter Admiral Nulton because they would have to pass through the picket lines of the striking Warehousemen's Union to reach her.

P: In San Francisco the Dollar liner President Hoover was held in port by strikers, while 471 passengers fumed and $1,000,000 in mail and cargo waited, because tne Line refused to rehire a 25-year-old seaman named Charles Brenner. On the voyage from Honolulu Brenner headed a group of sailors who complained that Captain George Yardley had violated sea safety laws by putting out with hatches open, booms hanging overside, four lifeboats dismantled. When the ship was ready to sail from San Francisco for the Orient, 50 members of her deck-crew refused to sign on unless Seaman Brenner were hired also. The Line refused. After six days' delay and $50,000 loss to the Line, the Department of Labor's pudgy Trouble-Shooter Edward Fitzgerald persuaded Secretary Harry Lundeberg of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific to cool off the crew so that the President Hoover might get to sea.

All this added up to a first-rate marine labor crisis on the West Coast which threatened to tighten rather than ease as Sept. 30 drew near. On that date expires the agreement reached after the 1934 general strike by the waterfront labor unions, notably Harry Bridges' International Longshoremen's Association, and the Waterfront Employers' Association. Negotiations on a contract to replace it found both sides in a thoroughly truculent mood last week. Debates were featured by such extreme proposals from both labor and management that the shipowners finally suggested arbitration. The longshoremen agreed to poll their members on the proposal, frankly adding that they would try to instigate another general strike rather than give in an inch to the shipowners. As the referendum started on the Pacific Coast, Longshoreman Bridges set about involving the rest of the U. S. by getting I. L. A.'s National President Joseph P. Ryan to call a conference of Pacific, Gulf, Great Lakes and Atlantic longshoremen to consider united action on all coasts.

Meantime a highly emotional fuse was stuck in an already explosive situation with the development of a sensational waterfront murder case. For the killing of a freighter engineer in San Francisco last April, police last week arraigned four suspects, announced that one of them had confessed committing the crime on Union orders. To the defendants' defense rushed the I. L. A., trumpeting: 'There shall not be another . . . frame-up like the case of Mooney and Billings!"

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