Several people have asked for references on the San Francisco General Strike of 1934, sparked by the dockworkers. This is one of many links, some much better than others. 

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/thursday.html
 

San Francisco State University has a labor school, leading labor history tours of the city with some regularity. 
 

The SF general strike, which closed all of San Francisco, was initiated by the dock workers' union desperate battle to organize and survive. The strike was led by communists, the most famous being Harry Bridges who led the labor movement in California for decades. Bridges usually denied he was a member of the communist party. The AFL leadership, which did everything it could to undermine and destroy nearly every significant strike in US labor history, also tried to wreck this one in San Francisco, issuing statements denouncing the communists.(See "Strike" by Jeremy Brecher) And the employers' association launched violent attacks on Communist Party centers, with the help of the police, who used the criminal syndicalism laws to arrest people for their political views. Here is a link http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/thursday.html
 

Even during the depression, facing fascist anti-labor laws which made even discussing a union illegal, with many of their leaders in jail, the communist led Congress of Industrial Organizations won key things that are not taken as common place in US life like:
 

The 40 hour week (many CIO unions won 30 hour weeks with no cuts in pay)

The Social Security Act (the basis of welfare, medicaid, social security, etc)

Child Labor Laws

The Right to Organize and Bargain (Wagner Act)
 

The CIO resistance won, but capital remained in power, and many of those victories were quite eroded before September 11 2001 and the vile terrorist attack led by a billionaire. 
 

Now George Bush is threatening to invoke the Taft Hartley Act and to use federal troops to attack the 2002 dockworker strike. This should make clear the partisan nature of the federal government, especially in the context of an international war of the rich on the poor. Those troops are not going to arrest the owners for trying to use technology, not to make life better, but to make work cheaper. While the long shore workers union is hardly what it once was, the resistance the workers are mounting is resistance that is absolutely necessary in the period ahead, resistance that will spread as the war economy grinds down on people's lives. Here is a link to an LA Times article outlining Bush's threat to use Taft Hartley.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ports8oct08.story
 
 
 

During WWII, the miners' union, led by communists and John L. Lewis, was ordered, under Taft Hartley, to halt a massive work stoppage . Lewis responded, speaking of coal, "Taft can mine it and Hartley can haul it." The strike went on despite a law that says, in essence, you cannot walk away from your job. The miners made gains. 
 

Nixon used federal troops and Taft- Hartley to try to crush the postal workers strike in the early 1970's. The untrained troops scabbed, went into the post offices, and mis-mailed letters all over the world, upsetting banks which count on the mail to process bills. 
 

Perpetual war for raw materials, cheap labor, and markets, invading the world, means tyranny in the homeland, not protection from terror. 
 

School workers, parents, and students all over the US are about to be called upon to give up their educations in order to pay for the economic crisis manufactured by a criminal elite class in the US, and to pay for a perpetual oil war. California's Department of Education is planning to gut an already pathetic school library system. The universities are already planning massive cutbacks, and the likely layoff of many if not most lecturers and adjuncts. 
 

Just as the decaying economy spawns resistance in the industrial working class, so is it creating resistance in schools, where employers seek to strip the minds of educators, replace them with partisan standards and tests, and use school as a training ground for young Spartans, dedicated to war, segregation, irrationalism, and nationalism. School workers are already fighting back, as are kids and parents. Witness the strike against the Big Tests and Curriculum Blueprint in Mira Mesa, Ca. On October 10, students from all over California will be demonstrating to demand that the Governor suspend the High School Exit Exam (which more than ½ of California's students recently failed), until ALL students have access to decent educational facilities and opportunities. 
 

Right now the dockworkers need support, and school workers, the most unionized people in the US are well positioned to give it--in order to learn from those dockworkers and to build solidarity for the future. Bush would like to mimic Reagan, and the destruction of the PATCO (air traffic controllers) union, which set the stage for a series of labor retreats that has never stopped. 
 

In the long run, we need to envision of a society beyond capitalism, where people can lead caring lives, fully exercising their creativity and freedom through friendly connections with other people.

In the short run, we need to fight, and to learn to fight.
 

The docks, whether as an exercise in the classroom, or as a field trip, are a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the potential power of the industrial working class, the role of the government, the history of labor's silenced story, the role of technology used not to improve people's lives but to lay people off, the international nature of capital, and the weak joints that technology and internationalism create, the false neutrality of the bourgeois press, the terrific potential of an international labor movement using the connections of trade and technology that capital offers, and the poisonous nature of racism or nationalism in the workers' ranks. There is, after all, every reason to believe that the leadership of the AFL CIO will be promoting the Oil War under the biggest flags they can find as soon as this strike is over.
 

In the short run, though, the dock workers need support in any way people can offer it, and we as part of the working class need every bit as much to give it to them, not uncritically, but to give it. 
 

Selected books:
 

The Company and the Union by William Serrin (how unions work today)

Yankee Trade Unions Go Home by Jack Scott (US unionism viewed by a Canadian)

History of the Labor Movement in the US (several volumes) by Foner

My Shaping Up Years by Art Shields (a great story teller)

Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology, Kornbluh

Labor's Untold Story, Boyer and Morais ( a history through the eyes of the CPUSA)

Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood by himself (a wonderful if embellished work)

Mother Jones (who fought every boss every where)

Who Built America, ed by Lichtenstein (not as good as most of the above but has a nice cd rom available).

http://www.californiahistory.net/9_pages/hard_strike.htm (Diluted official history) 
 

Some somewhat related kids books:

Farmer Duck

Wodney Wat

Big Annie of Calumet

How Does a Czar Eat Potatoes

Click Clack Moo
 

The unofficial ILWU www site http://www.ilwu.com/