Labor Against the Working-Class City: The International Longshore Workers' Union and Redevelopment in San Francisco, 1965-1979

Today, San Francisco is well known as one of the country’s most expensive cities, a place that is unaffordable for many working-class people. It is less well known that the city’s unaffordability crisis began long before the rise of the tech industry, dating back to the establishment of an urban redevelopment regime in the 1960s. In this paper, I detail the rise of downtown redevelopment in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, examining the emergence of a powerful group of investors, politicians, and labor leaders who crafted a new vision of urban land use that relied on the displacement of poor and working-class residents. Critically, I look at the central role of the International Longshore Workers’ Union (ILWU), a famously progressive labor union, in pursuing a major redevelopment project, the Yerba Buena Center, that led to the displacement of some of its own rank-and-file. I use the case of the ILWU to ask a larger question about organized labor and redevelopment: why did so many labor unions during this period actively pursue urban renewal policies that made city life unaffordable for working-class people? In answering this question, I look to the role of changes in the postwar economy, including de-industrialization and mechanization, in decreasing the political power of many industrial unions. Finally, I examine organized resistance to the displacement caused by the construction of the Yerba Buena Center, focusing on the efforts of retired former industrial workers living in downtown San Francisco.