By Thea Lavin

The streets of San Francisco were unusually still July 13, 1934. Delivery trucks sat in dusty warehouses instead of carrying milk and meat to the waiting city. Loaded barges floated in the bay, and downtown factories stood in dim silence. Even the bustle of morning traffic on Market Street was replaced with an eerie hush that enveloped the city.

The seeming tranquillity wasn't the result of an official holiday or unanimous siesta, but the beginning of the largest general strike in U.S. history.

After months of trying to unionize the Port of San Francisco, S.F.'s dockworkers launched a multi-industry strike that shut down the city for four days. The 70th anniversary of the historic strike is the focus of the 11th annual LaborFest, a series of films, lectures, and other events taking place in locations around San Francisco until the end of the month.

While dockworkers in most West Coast port cities held strikes in the months leading up to the summer of 1934, San Francisco was the only city where a broad cross section of workers rose up and walked out. Workers from just about every industry took part, with especially strong showings by garment workers, food service employees, and printers.

The San Francisco general strike is widely regarded as the greatest example of union solidarity in U.S. history. It also proved quite effective, resulting in dockworkers being awarded equal work opportunities, a six-hour day, and higher wages. Most important, the victory was sealed in a first-ever coast-wide contract that gave the International Longshoreman Workers Union (as the ILWU was then known) leverage over its industry.

Few believe such a massive feat could be achieved today, despite the millions of dollars AFL-CIO affiliates and other unions invest every year in campaigns to mobilize membership.

"It would take a tremendous amount of public support to make a general strike successful today," Harvey Schwartz, a labor historian at San Francisco State University, told the Bay Guardian. "Everyone felt very desperate in the '30s, and people were ready to lay it on the line.... The level of violence that was concentrated against the longshoremen in '34 is what you need to have a general strike. There were tear gas and gunshots up and down the waterfront."

Many of the difficult circumstances that motivated the 1934 general strike haven't disappeared. Since President George W. Bush took office in 2000, unemployment rates have reached an all-time high and millions of U.S. workers have been without health insurance. Only 13 percent of the labor force is unionized, and in most industries, union membership continues to decline.

AFL-CIO leaders cite government officials who are hostile to labor organizing as the primary obstacle preventing the labor movement from leveraging the concentrated workforce the ILWU unleashed in 1934.

For example, after the ILWU again went on strike in 2002, Department of Labor director Elaine Chao and Department of Homeland Security director Tom Ridge evoked the Taft-Hartley Act for the first time in years, which allows the president to force strikers back to work.

"They told them, 'If you strike, you are considered a terrorist,' " said Jack Rasmus, chair of the National Writers Union Local 3 and author of Fire on Pier 32, a play about the general strike. "If Bush gets elected again, it may accelerate the dissatisfaction of labor and inspire action."

Dick Meister, a former labor reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, also cited offensives by the Bush administration as a major obstacle to increasing union membership. "A lot of employers will say, 'If you want to join the union, then you're fired,' which is against the law," Meister told us. "The Bush administration is supposed to enforce the law, but they don't."

The disparity between labor's ability to mobilize in 1934 and its ability today, however, cannot be entirely attributed to unsympathetic federal laws and officials. After all, powerful antiunion figures have been present throughout U.S. history. Instead, the distinguishing variable is the radically different organizing techniques employed by unions during the era of the general strike compared to today.

Most AFL-CIO affiliates currently recruit organizers from college campuses rife with self-sacrificing idealists in their 20s. After passing through initial training programs, newly "professional" organizers travel around the country campaigning for workplace unions. The majority burn out within their first two years and have little more than their ideology at stake in the communities they organize.

Back in 1934, the potent ILWU membership was recruited and governed by the rank and file, not a professional union staff. Union members whose livelihood was directly on the line were responsible for calling fellow workers into the general strike. "By the time the president of the longshoremen union arrived in San Francisco from the East Coast, union members had already bargained for rights and walked off the job several times," Rasmus said.

According to many labor experts, the difference between professional and rank-and-file leadership is a historical issue of union democracy. The primary goal of professional organizing from the outside is to increase the size of the union rather than allow members to exert meaningful influence. Union officials, rather than the members themselves, hold the power.

"It can easily lead to membership disempowerment when organizers are hired from the outside ... as a substitute for strong on-the-job organization and rank and file leadership," Steve Early, a staff representative for the Communications Workers of America, wrote in an article titled "Thoughts on the 'Worker-Student Alliance' Then and Now" that appeared in the May 2003 issue of Labor Notes.

Ironically, the ILWU's rank-and-file organizing model was the cause of its 1950 ejection from the Congress of Industrial Organizations, before that group merged with the American Federation of Labor. After Sen. Joseph McCarthy began indicting everyone from artists to antipoverty advocates in the red scare, overzealous labor activism became highly suspect. CIO officials claimed the ILWU's bottom-up governing style too closely resembled communism and booted it out of the international association.

"The most rank-and-file-activist characters were kicked out [in 1950]," Schwartz said. "Many of those characters were union members responsible for the general strike of 1934."

Harvey Schwartz and Jack Rasmus take part in a lecture called "Lessons and History of the San Francisco General Strike," July 27, 7 p.m., ILWU Local 6, 255 Ninth St., S.F. Free. For a complete listing of LaborFest events, which run through July 31, go to www.laborfest.net or call (415) 642-8066.