Reino Erkkila. Dispatcher file photo.
by Tom Price
Reino Erkkila started on the docks in 1935, working on lumber schooners in the days when longshoremen discharged cargo with the strength of their backs. He would spend the next 40 years in the ILWU, finally retiring in 1975 with the fruits of his long labors.
As an ILWU officer and member and as a worker, Erkkila lived through nearly a century of workers’ struggles, and whether he held a pen or a hook, he was a maker of history and its witness.
Born in Finland in 1912, Reino moved to the U.S. at a young age when Herman, his Finnish father, decided to emigrate back to Montana, where he had previously worked as a miner. Herman was a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was organizing the mines in Butte in those days.
“We talk about the 1934 strike here, but that was every year in Butte in the ’teens,” Reino’s son Dave said.
Wobblies were persecuted, beat up and murdered, but they taught workers the need to organize. Frank Little, member of the IWW General Executive Board, paid the price on Aug. 1, 1917.
“My grandfather Herman was on strike when the vigilantes murdered Frank Little,” Dave said. “My father marched in Little’s funeral with the family. He was always proud that he was there.”
Little was lynched for organizing, for speaking out against WWI and for opposing the capitalist system. The Wobblies faced horrible repression over the next few years, but their militancy would inspire many in the ILWU, including Herman Erkkila, who moved to San Francisco in the 1920s and worked on docks. Ex-wobblies like Herman were well known for sharing their experiences down in the hold with their fellow workers. Sometimes he was in the same work gang as Harry Bridges before the birth of the ILWU.
Reino graduated from San Francisco’s Mission High in 1931 and hopped a train back to Montana in 1932. He came back and attended San Mateo Junior College before joining his father on the docks in 1935.
He met his wife Irene in the Finn Hall in San Francisco and they were married in 1938. He became a registered longshoreman a year later and son and daughter Dave and Lynn were born in 1942 and 1943. Reino’s first elected job in Local 10 was as dispatcher in 1944.
Over most of the next 20 years Reino did stints as Local 10 president and numerous more as secretary-treasurer and BA. He supported healthcare for workers and preventive medicine. He worked on the safety committees in 1954 and on the union’s political committees as a District Council delegate for most of 20 years.
In 1960 he was selected by the International Executive Board as one of 24 rank-and-file delegates who visited 21 nations to study labor conditions. Reino co-authored a detailed study on four countries in the Nov. 4, 1960 issue of The Dispatcher. The delegates compared wages and working conditions, and told of meeting rank-and-file workers around the world, including workers in the Soviet Bloc.
Reino testified in 1961 for Archie Brown in his Kennedy-Landrum-Griffith Act trial. Brown had been elected to the Local 10 Executive Board and had also run for governor as a Communist. The act, co-sponsored by John F. Kennedy while he was a Senator, made it a crime for a Communist to get elected to union office. Bridges said the members had the right to elect whomever they “damned well pleased,” but the government disagreed, saying in its brief that “…members did not have an absolute right to select whomever they chose; their right may be regulated by Congress in the interest of public order.”
Brown was convicted and given a six-month sentence. He won an appeal, but the government appealed to the Supreme Court. With the support of people like Reino and the defense of ILWU attorneys Richard Gladstein and Norman Leonard, Brown prevailed. Chief Justice Earl Warren, speaking for the court, declared the law a bill of attainder, an act that singles out a person or group for punishment without trial.
Meanwhile Reino continued serving the membership. He set up safety training for 400 new B registrants in 1963 and was later given an award for it. His last 10 years were spent in clerks’ Local 34. He stayed active in the Finnish community and died April 5, 2006.
Reino leaves behind his son Dave, who was a longshoreman in Local 10 and 34 for 40 years between 1963 and 2003, and Dave’s daughter Karin and son Richard. Reino’s daughter Lynn Von Wiedenfield has two children, Steven and Wendy, and her daughter Christina.
