Sam Kagel, with Harry Bridges looking over his shoulder. Photo courtesy of Sam Kagel Family. by Tom Price
Sam Kagel was a friend of the ILWU even before the union was organized. In his 70 years on the waterfront, Kagel was present at the birth of the union out of the fire of the 1934 strike, and he would later become the Coast Arbitrator, interpreting the contract he helped found for both labor and management.
He was born in San Francisco in 1909 to parents who escaped from Czarist Russia and its anti-Jewish pogroms. He grew up in Oakland, near the docks, and social ferment was in the air. He lived a few blocks from the Industrial Workers of the World reading room, which the police raided. At about the same time his mother Zelda refused to give the cops the minutes of the meetings of the Workingman’s Circle. She was secretary of that strike-support group. His father Hyman ran a store while Sam worked delivering produce, occasionally slipping purloined watermelons to IWW vagabonds when he was a kid.
While still a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Kagel got a job in 1932 at the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau, an outfit that provided legal and organizational help to workers.
Through his work at the Bureau Kagel soon met Harry Bridges. Bridges and Kagel together would soon learn the value of organization and teamwork as Bridges’ brilliant strategic skills joined up with Kagel’s tactical expertise.
Kagel’s office passed out a union recognition petition and longshoremen up and down the Coast signed up to join the International Longshoremen’s Assn. The union’s demands were simple: end the “fink halls,” the phony company-unions; end the morning “shape up,” where workers had to fight and bribe their way into jobs; establish a six-hour day with a pay raise; and establish a Coastwise agreement. The maritime employer’s resistance to these demands led to the Big Strike of 1934.
Soon after the strike began Bridges was chair of the Joint Maritime Strike Comm., and Kagel—25-years young—was a member, representing the Marine Engineers Beneficial Assn. The cops and scabs killed six men up and down the Coast,
but the union held firm. In San Francisco a general strike ensued after two men were killed.
“I can still see the general strike of July 16-19 held to protest the killings,” Kagel once said. “I can still see it and feel it.”
Roosevelt appointed the National Longshoremen’s Board to arbitrate the longshore strike. Kagel helped prepare the testimony for the workers’ star witness—Harry Bridges. They sat for hours over a bottle of Old Quaker whiskey, going over every detail. The Board ruled for the union’s basic demands. The West Coast ILA became the ILWU in 1937.
One of the Board’s actions was to set up arbitration for local disputes, and later, in 1948, Kagel would assume the newly created post of Coast Arbitrator. He kept that job until 2002. During those years he established labor arbitration as an art and science, handing down thousands of rulings in the longshore industry and rulings groups as diverse as the National Football League and the International Ladie’s Garment Workers Union. Former Coast Committeeman Bill Ward remembers Kagel as a great friend.
“The first thing he did when I got onto the Coast Committee was to invite me to lunch,” Ward said. “He filled me in on who he was, what he did. He gave me a basic lesson on what to present to arbitration. ‘Don’t waste time bringing things that aren’t backed up by the printed word of the agreement’.
“He was fair to the industry and to the union,” Ward continued. “He was a great supporter of ours, at the same time he as fair in representing the industry, both parties. He told me right off the bat. ‘I like this union, I helped build it, Harry and I have been friends for 40 years, and we learned a lot from each other.’”
Sam Kagel died May 21 of heart failure at the age of 98.
“Between ’32 and ’41 or ’42 we had what I call 50 years of labor experience all smashed into this short period,” Kagel said. “What a lucky guy I was, because I was right in the middle of it.”
A full appreciation of the life of Sam Kagel will appear in the July-August Dispatcher.
