43rd Annual LA/Long Beach Harbor Labor Coalition Parade and Rally

The Los Angeles / Long Beach Harbor Labor Coalition presents the largest Labor Day event in the western half of the United States, Sept. 5, at Wilmington’s Banning Park. The labor solidarity parade will march on the streets featuring dozens of unions, labor organizations, and schools.

The 43rd annual Labor Day Parade arrives following a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Union members, supporters, and their families are all expected and the public is invited to the parade and rally from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

There will be plenty of free food and soft drinks, live music from the one of the most legendary and longest running bands in the South Bay, The Topics. 

While politicians are welcome to show up, they are not allowed to make political speeches or pass out campaign literature. This is Labor’s Day, the one day of the year where only labor issues are addressed.

The Harbor Labor Coalition, the parade’s originator and organizing sponsor, was brought together by one struggle in 1979, involving the Inland Boatman’s Union (IBU) fending off an attempt to impose an inferior Florida-based contract onto the Los Angeles Harbor Area workers, and was consolidated the next year in support of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) in the midst of a bitter strike. IBU coordinator David O’Day and Treasurer Robert Forrester were able to organize ten unions in support of their dispute, including David Arian who had just joined the ILWU Local 13’s executive board.

What makes this parade unusual is that during the period of the late 1970s, Labor Day parades were gradually being replaced with picnics throughout the country. Detroit, long the site of some of the biggest Labor Day parades, ended the tradition by the 1980s. The Harbor Labor Coalition, not to be dissuaded, would be the vehicle by which a Labor Day parade, once held long ago in San Pedro, would be brought back to life in Wilmington, California. Though a conservative act, it was wholly in keeping with that go-their-way-attitude of so many of the unions in the harbors, whether from the ports of Los Angeles or Long Beach.

The Carter administration was intransigent in its approach to squelching problems within the economy of the late 1970s. President Jimmy Carter did this through a price-wage combination, which focused primarily on forcing down wages. 

This infuriated the AFL-CIO’s President Gearge Meany and sparked a war of words through the media and a standoff at the bargaining table. The test came with OCAW’s new contract negotiations, and later with the Teamsters contract under its then-president, Frank Fitzsimmons. The Carter administration was able to claim victory in its confrontation with Big Labor during the Teamster contract negotiations.

Read more of this history at https://tinyurl.com/43-Year-Coalition