Laurie Mercier talks to Harvey Schwartz about his new book about the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Labor Under Siege: An Oral History of Big Bob McEllrath and the ILWU’s Fight for Organized Labor in an Anti-union Era. Schwartz is curator of the Oral History Collection at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) library in San Francisco and the author of a number of books about working people, including Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Workers’ Oral History; Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU; and The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934-1938. Mercier and Schwartz discuss how strategies employed by the ILWU to survive and thrive during the anti-union era of the late 20th and early 21st centuries offer lessons to today’s resurgent labor movement.
- KBOO