Waterfront Tug-of-War Over Labor
A captain loading lumber at the Seattle waterfront finds his non-union crew repeatedly intercepted by striking longshoremen.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Capt. Brummer of the barkentine Eureka is having many vicissitudes in the work of loading his vessel with lumber at the foot of Spring street. When he arrived, he had a non-union crew, who were coaxed away by union men. He then hired longshoremen, but discharged them for poor work. Yesterday morning, union sailors took his new non-union men away. Capt. Brummer reported that twenty-five or thirty men, headed by Paddy Flynn, agent of the sailors' union, surrounded them and forced the men off the ship. Brummer claimed there were no police around to prevent the intervention, leaving him to continue struggling to get his vessel loaded.
“Twenty-five or thirty men came from under the cars and laid hold on other objects and surrounded us.”
This confrontation on the Seattle waterfront reflects the intense, often physical, struggle for labor rights in the city's early industrial days. Similar tensions between capital and organized labor would define much of the region's civic development throughout the early 20th century.
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