Harry Bridges to nowhere

A commie's legacy lives on at the west coast ports;

One Bay Area importer of European antiques, who asked not to be named because of fear of retribution...

We pause to let the above that we've bolded, sink in.

...recently had to wait almost a month past the scheduled arrival date for the shipping container holding goods he purchased from France. He ended up paying $5,100 more than normal because of inspection and storage fees, even though the container was not available to be picked up.

I couldn’t get it, but they were charging me for storage, and they wouldn't let me pick it up myself until they could move it to where it could be picked up. It was a perfect catch-22,” said the importer, who owns a small store that he said barely provides him with a living. “They're sticking it to everybody. Maybe the bigger companies can absorb this, but it was hard for us.”

It always is. 

Pavel Hanousek, co-founder of SkLO, a glass product design and manufacturing firm in Healdsburg, told The Chronicle that his monthly container of glass from the Czech Republic was delayed for more than three weeks. While he waited, orders worth $100,000 were canceled and most of his 12 employees had to be sent home. He said he is now looking to use other ports, including Houston and those on the East Coast.

Again, our bold above. So what does the University of Washington have to say about this?  

The Harry Bridges Project was founded to meet a pressing need to educate a new generation of workers about the rich history of the labor movement; to demonstrate the working community and to showcase and celebrate the contributions of labor leaders as well as rank-and-file trade unionists, not only in the founding of unions, but in the continuous struggle for worker’s rights.

If you're lucky enough to be a worker on the waterfront with a job, that is. Otherwise, you just suffer the depradations of the ILWU, founded in the 1930s by the slavishly pro-Stalin Harry Bridges. Who supported the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, until Hitler turned on the Soviet Union in 1941.

Then it became the duty of all left-thinking comrades to join in solidarity with the imperialist war-mongers;

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bridges urged employers to increase productivity in order to prepare for war. When the CIO later adopted a wartime no-strike pledge, Bridges supported the pledge and proposed at the highpoint of the Communist Party's enthusiasm for unity—immediately after the Teheran Conference in 1943—that the pledge continue after the end of the war. The ILWU not only condemned the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Employees union for striking Montgomery Ward in 1943—after management refused to sign a new contract, cut wages and fired union activists)—but also assisted it in breaking the strike, by ordering members in St. Paul, Minnesota to work overtime, to handle overflow from the struck Chicago plant.

Bridges also called for a speedup of the pace of work—which may not have been inconsistent with the ILWU's goal of controlling the way that work was done on the docks, but which sounded particularly strange coming from the leader of a union that had relentlessly fought employers on this issue and which was rejected by many ILWU members.

But that only lasted as long as the shooting in WWII. After the war turned Cold, Bridges went back to attacking the government of the USA. Even trying to sabotage the Marshall Plan by delaying shipments to war torn countries.

Quite a guy, Harry. Still, after all these years.