The Man Who Made The Most of Automation

Says Alfred Renton Bridges (every one calls him Harry), for 30 years the controversial boss of West Coast dock workers, in his Australian cockney accent: "If someone wants to get me out of this job, the best way would be to call me a 'labor statesman.' " Yet that, in effect, is what a lot of people who do not want him out of his job are calling him nowadays. Examples:

> Says Eisenhower's Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, who now lives in San Francisco: "Next only to John L. Lewis, Bridges has done the best job in American labor of coming to grips with the problems of automation."

> Says Clark Kerr, president of the University of California and a specialist in labor-management relations: "Anyone who's seen Bridges off and on over the years has to be impressed with the changes that have been made since 1934. In 1934 longshoremen were sort of leftovers from society, men who couldn't find other work. Now they're the aristocrats of labor."

> Says Stanley Powell, president of the Matson shipping line: "I don't know how the guy who sat at this desk 30 years ago felt about Bridges, but I know it was a hell of a lot different from the way I feel. I admire his ability to keep his word and get his union to back him up."

Such tributes stem from the fact that Bridges, far more than most labor leaders, has faced the challenge of automation. In 1960 his International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union reached an agreement with management's Pacific Maritime Association. Under that pact the employers can introduce as many labor-saving machines as they wish -- at a price of $5,000,000 a year in retirement and other benefits for Bridges' boys. The agreement is paying off for both shippers and dock workers.

Stinking Copra. Last week a crew of six San Francisco longshoremen finished the nine-day job of unloading 7,000 tons of stinking, oil-laden copra from the Liberty ship Silvana. A tracked vehicle pried the gooey cargo from the holds, hoisted it into a vacuum tube that shot it into a conversion plant. A few years ago 18 men would have worked two weeks to unload the Silvana.

Similarly, it used to take six days to transfer a load of passenger cars off Matson's Hawaiian Motorist; the ship can now dock, unload and be back at sea in seven hours. Where 14-man gangs worked twelve shifts to load cargo containers into a Matson ship, a ten-man gang can now perform the complete loading job in just two shifts.

Under the agreement, Bridges gave up most of his union's featherbedding "work rules"--although not precisely in any spirit of generosity. His longshoremen now get a basic $3.19 an hour for a guaranteed 35 hours a week. The agreement's kitty permits a 25-year man to retire at 62, draw a $220 monthly pension for three years, $115 after that (when Social Security begins). If an I.L.W.U. man works until 65, he gets an additional lump sum of $7,920. If a machine knocks a man out of work, he continues to draw 35 hours of pay a week. The deal is so good that last year the I.L.W.U. had some 25,000 applicants for 2,600 openings.

The shippers have no beef, mainly because they save in dock charges--up to $2,500 a day--when ships turn about faster.

Nothing so irritates Harry Bridges, now 62, as the notion that the automation agreement means that he is mellowing. Says he: "We've merely adopted a very selfish, narrow program to take care of the people in our union." Yet others insist that he really enjoys his new status. Explains Bridges' "friendly foe," Maritime Negotiator J. Paul St. Sure: "It got a little trying for him to hear all the time about what a rough s.o.b. he was. He likes his present role." Although Bridges lives in a modest two-bedroom house with his third wife Noriko, 40, a Nisei, on a salary of $14,040 a year, he nonetheless basks in the welcomes he receives at such, big businessmen's haunts as San Francisco's Commonwealth and Bohemian Clubs.

"We Let Him Talk." Bridges' politics remain curious. He says he is a registered Republican, but the only picture on his office wall is one of F.D.R. Yet Bridges is still sympathetic to Communist causes--a tendency that kept him in trouble with the U.S. Government for years. The U.S. repeatedly tried to deport Bridges to his native Australia, once got him convicted of perjury for swearing in his 1945 application for U.S. citizenship that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. But Bridges won that on appeal, and eventually won every other case too.

Anyway, across a bargaining table, Bridges' politics do not seem to matter. "Harry will make a big speech at the table about Cuba," says Matson Vice President Wayne Horvitz. "We let him talk, and then we get back to business." Bridges explains it all in his own jargon: "There are some labels, Communism and socialism, liberalism and conservatism, that mean something. But Republican and Democrat--those labels don't mean anything. As against talking left and moving right, I think it is more honest to talk right and move right."

And let no one call him a labor statesman.

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