The 75th Anniversary of "Bloody Thursday" and The San Francisco General Strike.

July 6, 2009 marked the 75th anniversary of an important day in American labor history, the day two strikers were killed by police, shot in the back, a day known as ‘bloody Thursday.” On July 9, 1934 a funeral was held for the two slain workers, Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise, their coffins borne on flat bed trucks, led a solemn procession of over forty thousand people up Market Street. This violence against striking workers was the breaking point in a long series waterfront clashes. The subsequent general strike, shut down San Francisco, and crippled the west coast for days. The result was the creation of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, ILWU, covering the entire west coast. The workers got their union run hiring hall, no more corrupt “shape up,” and workers in general benefited by the example set by the striking dock workers. Workers now had the confidence to join and form unions, and engage in collective bargaining. Catherine Powell, director of the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, called this; “A pivotal event in San Francisco and American Labor history, important in part because it came before the Wagner Act, granting the right to collective bargaining.”
For further reading; The Big Strike, Mike Quin, International Publishers. 1991.
A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront And General Strikes in San Francisco, David Selvin, Wayne State University, 1996