"Here It Is"

TERRITORIES "Here It Is"

Flanked by burly Hawaiian longshoremen and buried up to his pencil-sharp nose in flowery leis, Harry Bridges stood smiling on a ramp at Honolulu Airport one morning last week. "Well, Harry," said a dockworker, "we'll expect you back in 1951. We'll really give 'em hell then."

That should have been a hint to the assembled newsmen, but it escaped them. Harry Bridges was on the way back to San Francisco, presumably because he had been unable to reach a settlement of the Hawaiian waterfront strike. The newsmen, the longshoremen and Bridges stood talking idly a few minutes more. Harry was expecting a phone call, he said. Finally the airport loudspeaker blared out that Bridges' plane was loading. "Well," said Harry, "there hasn't been any phone call so here it is." He cocked a foot up on a nearby bench and began talking slowly so that reporters could get it all down: "I have negotiated settlement of the longshore strike . . ."

Harry Bridges grinned as reporters began racing for telephones.

For an uncomfortable 90 minutes, officials of Hawaii's seven struck stevedoring companies insisted that "no settlement has been reached." But finally they got together and grumpily confirmed what they considered to be Bridges' rudely premature revelation. The I.L.W.U. and the stevedoring firms had come to terms on the 159th day of a strike which had crippled the islands' economy. The terms: an immediate 14-c--an-hour raise for longshoremen (to $1.54 an hour) and an additional 7-c- boost beginning March 1. The total was 11-c- less than the I.L.W.U. had first demanded. The 7-c- raise next March was again for the longshoremen, but the companies had offered the immediate 14-c- raise three months ago.

Some dock operators fought hard against the settlement, finally gave in at the insistence of the hard-hit Matson Navigation Co. (with 18 freighters and the luxury liner Lurline immobilized) and sugar planters (plagued by $61 million worth of raw sugar piled up in the islands). The strike had cost the islands an estimated $100 million loss in business and wages. Even with the settlement accepted by both sides, Hawaiians had to wait a while before normal shipping was resumed: the union insisted on clearing up some fringe issues before letting its stevedores go back to work.

The sighs of relief in Honolulu at the news of the settlement were tempered by the bitter "What next?" of people who knew that Party Liner Bridges, with his union firmly implanted in the islands' rich pineapple and sugar industries, as well as across its shipping link to the U.S., could make life miserable again whenever he chose to do so.

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