FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

₁ Robert Carson, “Robert Carson: The Waterfront Writers and Artists Oral History Project,” interviews by Nicholas Anderman and Erfan Moradi, 2019, transcript, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The container-Transamerica Pyramid image also appears in Carson’s poem “Lew Welch,” in The Waterfront Writers: The Literature of Work, ed. Robert Carson (Harper & Row, 1979), 44.

₂ Bridges’s approach to automation is hotly debated even today, some 65 years after the first Mechanization and Modernization agreement came into effect. For more on this controversy, see chapters 4–5 in Peter Cole, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press, 2018); and chapters 15 and 17 in Robert W. Cherny, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (University of Illinois Press, 2024).

₃ Johnny Selzer, “Class Struggle Stories of the Waterfront,” San Francisco Examiner, October 21, 1979.

₄ We are now assembling this material into a formal archive, to be housed at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley and online at www.waterfrontwritersandartists.org.

₅ Robert Carson, “Introduction,” in The Waterfront Writers: The Literature of Work, ed. Robert Carson (Harper & Row, 1979), 2.

₆ David Wellman, The Union Makes Us Strong: Radical Unionism on the San Francisco Waterfront. (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 144.

₇ Herb Mills. “Excerpts from A Rat’s-Eye View of History,” in The Waterfront Writers: The Literature of Work, ed. Robert Carson (Harper & Row, 1979), 26.

₈ Robert Carson, “Robert Carson: The Waterfront Writers and Artists Oral History Project,” interviews by Nicholas Anderman and Erfan Moradi, 2019, transcript, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

By 1970, it had become clear to many working in the maritime industries that the shipping container was set to revolutionize cargo transport, with dire consequences for workers. For Robert Carson, a marine clerk in the Bay Area, this realization arrived in the hold of a ship:

. . . one day I was working down hatch at Pier 17 [in San Francisco], and they were building the Transamerica Pyramid, which we could see . . . over the bow of the ship. We could see this thing rising and coming up to a point . . . right? And . . . one of the first containers with the ship’s gear came across our point of view . . . and it looked like a block that would be put up into the Transamerica Pyramid, a building block, right? . . . I’m pretty sure it was Lew who said, “You know what this is? We’re still building pyramids for the pharaohs. That’s what this is!” Can you imagine how fraught that statement is? You know, the work slaves, the galley slaves, the Jews, the years and years of slave labor . . . it was like “Holy Christ.” The whole work gang stopped when he said that, and looked up, because it just crystallized everything.¹

This prophetic scene took place just as tensions on the waterfront were reaching a breaking point. In 1960, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) had signed the first of two controversial Mechanization and Modernization Agreements with the employer. The deals, which were passed by slim margins, effectively traded job protections and pensions for longshore workers in exchange for the employer’s right to automate cargo handling. Over the next decade, containerization spread rapidly up and down the Pacific coast, reshaping the rhythms and culture of port work and eventually displacing thousands of longshore jobs. Frustrations simmered. Many rank-and-file workers felt that union leadership – including the ILWU’s charismatic president Harry Bridges – had failed to grasp the true stakes of the battle over containerization. It wasn’t just jobs that were disappearing, but the shared social world of the docks.²

In 1971, that frustration erupted into a coast-wide strike which lasted more than 130 days – the longest in ILWU history. The strike exposed deep rifts within the union over how to confront technological change – between older and younger workers, between those with steady jobs and those stuck in the casual pool, and between members who viewed containerization as inevitable and those who saw it as a betrayal of the union’s core principles. It also revealed tensions around race, seniority, and access to the shrinking pool of union-protected jobs, which were exacerbated by the uneven impacts of automation across different locals and job categories. In the end, the union won concessions but failed to beat back the container. For many on the docks, the strike marked a turning point in labor relations on the West Coast, one that made clear just how much the union had already lost. Tightly knit gangs, autonomy over the work, the dense social fabric of the hiring hall and the ship’s hold – by the early 1970s, all of this had already begun to give way to a more fragmented, isolated, and management-driven system.

It was in the aftermath of the strike, as container cranes went up across the West Coast, that a small group of Bay Area longshoremen and marine clerks set out to document the changes on the waterfront. Initially, the group consisted of a few workers scribbling poems on the job. In 1977, on a whim, Carson organized a reading for the nascent group at the Mandala Folk Dance Center in San Francisco. The event was informal and loosely planned – there was no set program, no rehearsal, no real expectation that anyone beyond a few friends might show up. But the room filled. The mood was intimate and raw. A journalist described a later reading as possessing a funereal quality: “Their voices are voices at a wake.”³ These were self-affirmed artists reading their poetry and stories, yet they remained working-class men who belonged to working-class communities. A second reading, held a few months later, drew another full house. From these improvised early performances, the Waterfront Writers and Artists (WWA) began to take shape.

From the start, the group was a loose, sometimes chaotic collective – never fully unified, often arguing. Members came and went, personalities clashed, and readings occasionally veered off script. But for a few intense years, the WWA was remarkably productive. Between the late 1970s and early ’80s, they published a flurry of chapbooks and an edited collection, The Waterfront Writers, with Harper & Row. They staged regular public readings, collaborated with artists and academics, and even experimented with sound recording and 8 mm films. “We read all over the Bay Area – at colleges and universities, coffee houses, community centers, and bookstores,” Carson told us. “This had a profound effect because we were able to meet and read with other working-class artists.” Then, as quickly as it had formed, the group more or less dissolved, burned out by the demands of work, creative differences, and the slow grind of port life under automation. Still, the archive they left behind is substantial, including some 15–20 hours of audio and film recording, thousands of photographs and illustrations, and many linear feet of writing. In a short window of time, the WWA managed to create a body of work that offers not only a record of a disappearing world, but a ribald, often surprising account of how workers tried to make sense of that world even as it slipped through their fingers.

Since 2018, we have been working closely with the remaining members of the WWA to locate, collect, and organize the group’s scattered and largely forgotten body of work. Much of it – chapbooks, photographs, audio reels, typewritten poems, hand-drawn posters – had been tucked away in the garages, basements, and attics of retired longshoremen across the western United States, preserved more by accident than design. What we found was a remarkably rich and heterogeneous record of working-class cultural production, one shaped by the rhythms of dock work, the upheaval of containerization, and the desire to make sense of these transformations.⁴

The group’s creative output reflects the wide range of experiences on the waterfront, and encompasses a variety of forms and media, including poetry, photography, narrative prose, drawings, and found sounds and images. What united these diverse efforts was a shared conviction that the changing world of port labor needed to be documented, interpreted, and represented from within the rank-and-file itself. In this way, the WWA challenged longstanding divisions between manual and intellectual labor. Like the night workers chronicled in Jacques Rancière’s Proletarian Nights and the communards in Kristen Ross’s Communal Luxury, the members of the WWA rejected the idea that workers should remain silent witnesses to their own transformation, insisting on their capacity to reflect, analyze, and create meaning from their labor. Anticipating the influential work of Allan Sekula, the group approached everyday life under capitalism as a vital site of both artistic expression and intellectual inquiry.

Beyond the readings and print publications, perhaps the group’s most significant output was Longshoremen at Work, a 1994 essay film co-produced by three group members. Originally projected as a dual-carriage slideshow at early WWA readings, the narrationless film pointedly depicts the shift from breakbulk to containerized cargo and the resulting changes to the port landscape and to longshore labor. The film’s first half shows breakbulk labor at one of San Francisco’s last traditional piers. We see crowded decks, irregular packaging, and close coordination among workers. The second half shifts to the containerized Port of Oakland, where gridded yards and cranes render human presence nearly invisible. In documenting this spatial and technological transformation, Longshoremen at Work offers a clear-eyed and brutal account of how automation restructured waterfront labor and displaced the social worlds that once sustained it.

The WWA’s work extended beyond the docks themselves, documenting how containerization reshaped not only the labor process but the urban landscape as well. As shipping moved to Oakland, San Francisco’s working waterfront was steadily dismantled, and with it the cafés, bars, and storefronts that once served dockworkers and their communities. The group’s writing and photographs capture the erasure of a world in which work and daily life were closely intertwined. Carson’s poem “Ambience,” for example, satirizes the city’s transformation into commercial retail space, where longshoremen are displaced from the waterfront yet repackaged as local color. For the WWA, these changes marked not only a shift in how cargo moved, but also who the city was for and who was being written out of its future.

While much of the WWA’s output evokes a world that was vanishing, it would be a mistake to read the project as simply nostalgic. Their work records loss, but not with sentimental longing for the past. Nor was it uniformly anti-technology. As Carson put it, the group was concerned primarily with change, and “the necessity of change in work styles and lifestyles [as] a national concern.” What the group opposed was not machinery itself, but the dehumanizing abstraction that came with it. Automation stripped away control, eroded community, and drained work of its meaning. The best of the WWA’s output leans into this tension, resisting erasure without retreating into idealization. What their work ultimately affirmed was not a fixed image of the past, but the basic principle that labor can be a site of creativity, critical insight, and class consciousness.⁵

Most members of the WWA began working on the waterfront in the 1960s, though a few – like George Benet, a hard-drinking poet with ties to San Francisco’s beat scene, and Asher Harer, a Trotskyist and militant organizer – had been on the docks since the 1940s and ’50s. As such, they had all witnessed the transformation of the ports firsthand. They experienced, in fragments, the remnants of an older waterfront: a world of breakbulk cargo and gang labor, where sacks of rice, barrels of wine, and automobiles were moved not by automation, but by crews of longshoremen working in close physical coordination. This was a system of work that demanded improvisation and collaboration. Each vessel presented its own unique puzzle, and the solutions had to be worked out collectively by the gang, drawing on shared knowledge and accumulated experience. As Herb Mills – longshoreman, political scientist, and WWA member – would later write, the nature of breakbulk cargo allowed for a “radical decentralization of initiative.” Employers depended on workers’ ingenuity, and in that space of autonomy, a rich social life flourished.

That old order was one in which the job itself was an “occasion for talk” – a ritualized form of camaraderie that enabled workers to build trust, resolve disputes, and collectively resist the employer’s efforts to divide and control them.⁶ On the docks, there were makeshift courts, in which truth was negotiated through friendly gibing, collective witnessing, and narration. There were informal codes of solidarity: cover for your hungover brother, don’t rat, don’t let the boss know more than he has to. In this world, as Mills once put it, every worker became “something of a storyteller.”⁷ The tales told on the docks were autobiographical, political, and generative of shared experience. The WWA’s work carried that storytelling impulse forward, putting it into conversation with current events well beyond the waterfront. Even a brief survey of their titles reflects the group’s diverse concerns: “Old Sailor Looking at a Container Ship,” “Monopoly Capital and the Interpenetration of Imperial Markets at Pier 27,” “A Rat’s-Eye View of History,” “Depression,” “The Year They Invented Poor People,” “A Letter From a G.I. to a Vietnamese,” and so on. If WWA members sometimes looked to the past, they did so to remember what kinds of working life had once been possible and to ask, pointedly, what might still be possible in the face of an increasingly automated, atomized future.

This insistence on the interpretive and political capacities of workers remains relevant today. At the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the ILWU continues to fight against the automation of cargo terminals – battles that echo many of the same concerns raised by the WWA nearly fifty years ago. The union’s resistance is a challenge to the way automation is used to undermine labor power, threaten jobs, and concentrate control in the hands of employers and global logistical capital. Like the WWA before them, today’s longshore workers are asking not only whether machines will replace jobs, but what kind of world is being built in the process, and for whom, exactly. In this sense, the WWA’s collected oeuvre offers more than historical perspective; it provides an aesthetic framework for understanding the present.

But for all the seriousness of their concerns, the group approached their work with humor, cynicism, and a sense of collective possibility. “We’re bullshit artists,” Carson once quipped, capturing the group’s refusal to posture as cultural authorities even as they insisted on their right to represent their own experience.⁸ Yet together, their poems, photographs, stories, sound recordings, and films form a singular archive: a record of how workers on the West Coast lived through one of the most profound technological transformations in modern labor history. In doing so, they insist that artistic production is not the domain of elites, but a crucial means through which working people might interpret the basic conditions of their lives, assert their presence, and imagine alternatives to the systems so intent on displacing them.