On November 6, at the "un-American" time of 7:45 a.m., I joined roughly forty Science, Technology and Society and PPA majors for a boat tour of the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, hosted by the Harry Bridges Institute (HBI), a think tank affiliated with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

After milling about in Carnegie, the established meeting place, for a good 20 minutes that I would rather have spent cuddling with and whispering sweet nothings to my life-size and "fully functional" Wonder Woman doll, we all piled into a 1970s era yellow school bus. We were as eager to go west as young, bright eyed and bushy tailed Josiah Grinnell once was after speaking to Horace Greeley, former editor of the New York Tribune.

Now, according to the official Pomona College statistic that we’ve all quoted at one time or another, we are only 35 miles east of LA. According to the natural laws of physics, as created by Herr Isaac Newton, velocity equals distance divided by time. Our magic bus ride on LA’s horribly congested freeways lasted roughly an hour and a half. The math suggests that we were traveling at an average velocity of 23.3 miles per hour, given the fair assumption that we traveled in an absolutely straight line.

Eventually though, much like the European immigrants of the 1800s who checked in at Ellis Island, we arrived at our final destination in the LBC (Long Beach City) in a huddled mass, tired and yearning to breathe free. Ironically, as soon as we got off the bus, we proceeded in an orderly, single-file line to another form of transportation: the boat.

Specifically, we boarded the Catalina Explorer, a 75-foot high speed, triple engine, single motor vessel normally used to ferry tourists to and from Catalina Island. The two-man crew, decked out in matching festive Hawaiian print shirts, ushered us aboard their rig with a smile, a few encouraging words of greeting and a gentle warning that the delicate "head" (nautical speak for the toilet) could only accept minimal amounts of toilet paper.

As we slowly motored away from the dock, the next-door boat neighbors told us not to "come back, you hear." It appeared they were joking though, which was quickly confirmed after they responded positively to the traditional two-fingered sign for peace.

Our tour guides from the HBI and ILWU began their lecture with an open disclaimer that they represented a pro-labor point of view and a few statistics about the LA-Long Beach ports. The standardized metal shipping containers (referred to as "cans" by those in the industry) that come through either LA or Long Beach contain about 10% of all merchandise sold in the U.S. and 60% of all containers shipped to the West Coast.

Greg Mitre, a licensed U.S. Coast Guard captain and longshoreman of 17 years, attributed LA-LBC’s importance as a port to the rapid turnaround possible from ocean to land transport. Nowadays, a container could make it from China to Chicago by way of LA-LBC in approximately 16 days.

This shortening of the time required to get goods from one place to another comes largely from improvements in technology, such as faster ships, that increase the efficiency of the process. Another one of the tour guides, Dave Arian, argued that these improvements come at the cost of fewer job opportunities for the working class man. No longer are the days when a guy like Rocky Balboa could go down to the docks to get an honest day’s work.

In fact, Arian said that the technology exists to completely replace human labor with computers on "the dock side." Although the technology has not yet been implemented in the U.S., the labor force is nonexistent on "the dock side" in Singapore, where all-powerful machines rule, carrying out the big-business Emperor’s orders.

Our tour guides also spoke about some of the effects of trade agreements such as the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Mitre mentioned his surprise in the 1990s when U.S. firms started shipping more exports, especially what he called "pleasure items" (bicycles, toys, and the like), to other countries, including China. But he displayed a sound knowledge of the ISLM Keynesian model of macroeconomic theory when he pointed out that as the dollar appreciated in value, exports once again declined as U.S. goods became relatively more expensive to goods produced in other countries. He said that currently, "all we ever usually send back are empty containers."

Throughout their talk on what shall be referred to as the "Day of Transit"–by bus, by foot and by boat–the speakers related some stories about the ability of unions to protect their workers against exploitation. The most powerful story was about ILWU’s founding by the Australian-born Harry Bridges.

Back in the Great Depression, the shipping owners treated their workers with no respect since they had thousands of unemployed people willing to work. They could pay incredibly low wages, but no one would complain since that would only result in getting fired and placed on the owners’ blacklist.

To help alleviate the situation, Bridges helped to organize a dock workers’ union on the West Coast to try to collectively bargain with shipping owners for rights and protection. After owners repeatedly refused to even acknowledge the new union’s existence, Bridges led a strike that began May 9, 1934.

Shipping on the West Coast and in Hawaii was virtually shut down by the strike, which included an unprecedented number of minority workers, who were attracted by Bridges’ genuine promise of equal opportunity for dock jobs. Shipping owners didn’t worry too much because they thought they would be able to hire scabs, including former oil workers called "roustabouts," until the experienced dockworkers began to starve and ended their strike. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the determination of the union workers to maintain solidarity and continue protesting at large rallies, in the face of harassment from the ship owners’ allies, the police.

On July 5, the police became violent and attacked striking workers at rallies in Seattle, San Francisco and LA. The incidents prompted a large show of support from other unions who also went on strike up and down the West Coast and Hawaii, nearly resulting in a complete general strike. The fat cats realized the severity of the situation and finally gave in to the union’s demands.

And now to this day, dockworkers in LA, maybe even nationwide, enjoy an unofficial holiday every July 5 in commemoration of "Bloody Thursday."