Navy-Yard-views

In 1801 President John Adams authorized the purchase of a small, private shipbuilding facility on the west side of Wallabout Bay, a swampy inlet of the East River that pushed into northern Brooklyn. On its shore the newly-formed Navy Department established one of the country's first navy yards, popularly known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard.¹ For the next 165 years, as the Yard grew around and into the Bay, it gained renown for constructing such capital ships as the battleships Arizona and Missouri, and for fitting-out, upgrading, converting, repairing, and overhauling naval vessels of all kind.²
[1. The official name of the navy yard until 1945 was the U.S. Navy Yard, New York, and was referred to by the Navy Department as the New York Navy Yard. From 1946 to 1966, it was called the New York Naval Shipyard.]
[2. Fitting-out: finishing a ship mostly built elsewhere, especially its armaments (the Monitor was one famous example); upgrading: installing new technology on an older ship; converting: making over a previously civilian ship; repairing: as in war-damage or accidents; overhauling: periodic maintenance work.]

In a city where manufacturing was limited mostly to small industrial factories (e.g., the garment shops) the navy yard was an anomaly in New York City's economic life in that it was a gigantic, heavy-industrial site. With a workforce of more than 10,000 at the announcement of its closing in November 1964 (and with as many as 65,000 employees during World War II), the Brooklyn Navy Yard was once the largest single-site employer in New York City, the source of thousands of well-paid, skilled-trade, clerical, and professional positions. New Yorkers considered these good jobs—-and patriotic ones at that—-and the Yard helped burnish Brooklyn's image as much as did the Brooklyn Dodgers, and its closing in June 1966 proved to be as much a shock to the borough as the baseball's team flight west the decade before. It was a jolt to the city's economic base and a precursor of the industrial flight from the northeast and mid-west United States that was soon to begin
["There's nothing better than civil service, except federal civil service." Bill Hamill, to his son, Pete, c.1951, on the latter's acceptance to a Yard apprencticeship program. Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994). For a brief narrative of the Yard's history see Arnold Markoe, "New York, N.Y., Navy Yard, 1800-1966," in United States Navy and Marine Corps Bases, Domestic, ed. Paolo Coletta; assoc ed. K. Jack Bauer (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). A good sense of the Yard's role in Brooklyn's self-image is found in Pete Hamill, "Brooklyn; The Sane Alternative," New York, 14 July 1969.]

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Over the course of its history many navy yards have existed in the United States.

These are still operating:
- Norfolk (Portsmouth, Virginia), 1801-
- Portsmouth (Kittery, Maine), 1801 -
- Puget Sound (Bremerton, Washington), 1891-
- Pearl Harbor, 1899 -

These operated for long periods of time before closing:
- Washington (DC), 1799-1961; known as Naval Gun Factory, 1886-1961
- Boston (Charleston, Massachusetts), 1800-1974
- Philadelphia, 1801-1995
- New York (Brooklyn), 1801-1966
- Mare Island (Vallejo, California), 1854-1996
- Charleston (South Carolina), 1902-1996

For briefer periods of time the Navy also had yards at:
- New London, 19th century
- Memphis, 1845-1853
- New Orleans, closed 1912
- Pensacola (FL), 1826-1911; late became naval air base
- San Francisco, 1941-1974
- Long Beach (California), 1941-1997

In peacetime, the major navy yards had their assigned roles. After 1886 the yard at Washington gave us ship building and turned to producing cannon and armaments for the new steel navy. The navy yards at Mare Island and Portsmouth built submarines; the yard at Philadelphia assembled naval aircraft as well as ships; and the smaller yards concentrated on repair work. In the twentieth century the BNY built its reputation first on constructing battleships, then later, aircraft carriers. It also had other special tasks, for instance, it produced a hefty proportion of the fleet's flags and pennants, and in the 1920s it manufactured submarine diesel engines. It was also a formidable repair base capable of repairing and maintaining every type of vessel, from battleships to the smallest auxiliary craft.
[For a bibliography on the navy yards, click here. On assignments to navy yards, see" “Policy for Industrial Navy Yards,” Letter, ASN (Ernest Lee Jahncke), to Commandant, Navy Yard, New York, N.Y., et al., 3 October 1930, with enclosure, “Navy Dept Policy for Navy Yard, New York, N.Y.,” September 1930. RG181; NA-NY.]

From the founding of the Navy Department in 1798 up through the 1960s, when the political mood changed, navy yards existed: first, because the U.S. government and many citizens felt that in order to advance and defend its place in the world the country needed a navy; second, that building and servicing this fleet was best accomplished by having the government itself perform some large share of the task; and third, once established, navy yards became powerful economic institutions in their localities, taking on their own independent political life as their supporters in government, business, labor, and the workers themselves fought to keep them as a source of jobs and contracts for materials and services. The federal government found it could cut back or close navy yards, as well as other military bases, only at great political cost.

In one memo from the late 1920s the Navy said it ran its own yards to: keep work on certain sensitive parts of its warships under its own control; preserve under its control a necessary corps of workers and yards ready for immediate growth in case of war; maintain a standard in quality and price against which to measure private ship production and forestall price-hiking; and allow for experimentation in design without worrying about costs. There were other reasons, mostly political, which defended the navy's right to construct ships. Some segments of the government, navy, and the public believed that if the government owned the final product it should also own the means of its creation. Sentiment also existed in favor of government ownership of yards and arsenals as a way of countering the perceived profit-mongering of private corporations that manufactured military goods. The case for navy yards from the Department's point of view was perhaps best put in this report from Secretary of the Navy Charles Adams: "The constructing, maintaining, repair and operation of naval structures ashore is so intimately related to military control and . . . adjunct to successful control and operation of the fleet in time of war, that to attempt to eliminate such work from military control jeopardizes the Navy's successful operation as a whole.” And, just as important was the economic motivation. In a bow to political reality the Navy instructed their yards to maintain their operation in times of peace "so as to have stable labor employment, . . . as nearly as may be." The pressure that unions and businesses could bring to bear on Congressional representatives to maintain the navy yards through the first half of the twentieth century was substantial.
[Rear Admiral Crisp, “Comparison of Shipbuilding and Ship-Repairing Procedure - Navy Yards,” in The Shipbuilding Business in the United States of America, vol. 2, ed., F.G. Fassett (New York: The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 1948); Extract, from memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy, prepared by Bureaus Construction and Repair and Engineering, 11 March 1927; “Work Load - Assignment of Work, vol.1”; “Cost of building ships in Navy Yards,” Memorandum, W.R. Van Buren, Navy Department, 25 September 1929; “Ships: Construction of”; Letter, from H. Gerrish Smith, President, National Council of American Shipbulders, to Ernest Lee Jahncke, ASN, 8 March 1932; “Ships: Construction of.” All in: RG80; NA-DC. “Hearings before the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry,” United States Senate, 73rd Congress (Washington: GPO, 1934), commonly known as the Nye Committee Report. Letter, from C.F. Adams, Secretary of the Navy, to The Chairman, Committee on Expenditures on Executive Departments, House of Representatives, 28 January 1932; “Policy for Industrial Navy Yards,” Letter, ASN (Ernest Lee Jahncke), to Commandant, Navy Yard, New York, N.Y., et al., 3 October 1930, with enclosure, “Navy Dept Policy for Navy Yard, New York, N.Y.,” September 1930; RG181; NA-NY.]

But warship construction was also, and primarily, assigned to the commercial shipbuilding industry and a fierce rivalry existed between the public and private shipbuilders and their allies. The private shipyards had their own set of arguments justifying their right to build most if not all of the country's warships. One standard argument of theirs claimed that since government production was not disciplined by the need to make a profit, it resulted in inefficiency, high wage costs. And many even questioned whether the federal government as a matter of policy should even be involved in manufacturing. Many naval officers agreed with them, believing that navy yards should be restricted solely to repair work. Command of navy yards was generally given to admirals as their last assigment before retirement and they often found the change to managing civilians a jolting one. One of Brooklyn's commandants, Yates Stirling (1933-1936), wrote a memoir which includes a few, rather dyspeptic pages near the end about his service there and his disdain for being in the construction business. Eventually, the navy yards would lose the argument, but not until the Johnson administration.
[The private shipbuilders’ arguments are laid out in a report by their lobbying organization: National Council of American Shipbuilders, Commercial Shipyards and the Navy (New York: NCAS, 1937). See Stirling's memoir: The Memoirs of a Fighting Admiral (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939). His memoir is particularly noted for his reactionary comments toward native Hawaiians during his term as commandant at Pearl Harbor.]

As a corollary to the creating and maintaining of its navy and navy yards the government itself thereby helped shape the development of various production and administrative processes. The U.S. government is the largest employer in the country [especially if you include the military] and spends hundreds of billions of dollars to pay its own workforce, to buy supplies, and to contract out for goods and services. The switch to a steel navy, for example, the sole owner of which is the Navy and which it shared building with the private sector, played its part in the evolution of the metal-trades and to the standards to which they work. (The Navy was an early supporter of the ideas of Frederick Taylor.) In western states, where urban growth came later, the cities of Vallejo, California, and Bremerton, Washington, grew around the navy yards of Mare Island and Puget Sound and more or less became one-shop towns.

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As to the navy yard workers themselves, they worked within a complex organizational structure.

- Blue-collar trade workers and their helpers worked in the BNY in shops generally organized by trade and these in turn were organized into larger departments. They reported to civilian supervisors in the shops but also took general direction from naval engineer-officers. The upper reaches of management was all naval. It was similar for the white-collar and professional workers except they worked in departmental offices, structured according to administrative function within the Yard.

- Naval administration in the navy yards was both vertical and horizontal. A typical command structure existed in the Yard in which a pyramid of management culminated in the yard's Commandant, who in turn reported to the Assistant Secretary in Washington and then to the Secretary of the Navy, before 1947, a Cabinet official.

- Navy yards were also organized in bureaus which had cognizance over broad areas of production such as manufacturing, ordnance, aeronautics, accounting and such. The officials in charge of these posts in the navy yards reported to their Bureau Chiefs who had their headquarters in the Department office in Washington.

- The Chief Naval Officer, the top military post in the Navy Department also had a say in operations through the assignment of repair work.

- As an executive agency, the Navy Department reported to the President and to Congress, which controlled its budget and set by law its general regulations.

- When questions of law arose they would be directed to the Attorney-General for resolution, and when questions of interpretations of regulations pertaining to working conditions arose they were sent to the Comptroller-General for a decision.

- On top of this, as federal workers, almost all civilian navy yard workers were subject to the regulations of the U.S. Civil Service Commission.

- Pensions and worker compensation was in turn handled by a separate agency.

- As to their own organization, most trade workers and some white-collars were members of the unions that covered their trade or occupation. Trade workers were generally in public-sector locals of otherwise private-sector unions [and until the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 supervisors could have membership in the unions of their respective trades], while most white-collars participated in unions of federal employees that cut across agency boundaries.

- Navy yard locals organized themselves into loose confederations called Metal Trade Councils which reported to the AFL's Metal Trade Department. Due to the uniqueness of these public-sector work sites, the MTD permitted all locals no matter the trade or occupation to belong to their local MTC.

- Periodically in the first half of the twentieth century unions outside of the AFL attempted to organize in the navy yards with little success, until the early 1930s, when the major white-collar local pulled out of the AFL [and the AFL set up a rival union in its place], and in the late Thirties when the breakaway unions of the CIO entered into the navy yards.

- Public-sector unions were subject to labor laws much different from those in the private sector, especially as to their right to recognition and concerted action--like striking--and as such their unions lobbied heavily and often successfully in Congress for their members to make up for their inability to push their agenda in the more traditional ways.

- Veterans and their organizations often proved to be a potent force, especially after World War II.

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Despite its status as one of New York City's historic icons, the historical literature on the Brooklyn Navy Yard is minimal and of what exists there is scant mention of its labor history. This can be explained in part by the disinterest shown to federal-labor history by historians, an interesting omission in that the federal government is the largest employer of labor in America. Labor and working-class history has expanded rapidly in the last generation and historians, attached to liberal and Marxist concepts of labor-value--with its emphasis on the creation and distribution of profit, and to the natural drama inherent in activities such as strikes (forbidden to federal workers), have focused their attention on the private sector to the exclusion of the federal employee.
[A review of the “Forty Year Cumulative Index” in Labor History 43, February/May 2002, shows that of nearly 1900 citations to past articles, only three are easily identifiable as being about American public employees and none are about federal employees. Of close to 2100 book-reviews, nineteen are easily identifiable as discussing the history of public workers: about one-third to one-half cover federal employees in some manner. Joseph McCartin argues that the primary reason historians have neglected the public sector is due to its success in organizing in the last forty years, which runs counter to the accepted notion that the American labor history has been in steady decline since the AFL-CIO merger. (Joseph A. McCartin, "Bringing the State's Workers in: Time to Recify an Imbalanced U.S. Labor Historiography," Labor History 47(February 2006): 73-94.) The history of navy yards in general is rather scant given the general public interest in military affairs and there is little in what is published that mentions their respective labor histories. See the bibliography. There is an extensive literature on public-sector labor, organized and otherwise, in the social sciences. It is, however, oriented towards contemporary issues and is often structural in nature. Much of it is also hostile to organized labor. For example, see the long-running Government Union Review: A Quarterly Journal on Public Sector Labor Relations (1980- ), published by the Public Service Research Foundation, an organization which finds public-sector unionizing an anathema and is hard-pressed to find anything complementary to say about private-sector organized labor.]

Brooklyn Navy Yard workers—as well as other government workers—experienced a working history, that though it shared much with their private-sector brothers and sisters, possessed numerous disparate elements. Foremost is the obvious: that the logic of the private sector is one of profit; it is the reason for its existence, and its labor relations flow out of the resultant struggle between the working-, middle- and the capitalist-classes over who controls its creation and distribution, as moderated by law. The public, government sector in the modern age exists for reasons of politics and administration, its own non-profit economy a secondary factor, although of course run not without concern for operating as efficiently on the taxpayer's dollar as is politically possible. [As to whose interests the government serves is a different question.] Its own labor relations therefore flow from this mix of politics and the desire for administrative productivity. But its labor history and that of the private sector do share the one basic theme of power: how it is acquired, maintained, and contested over by the various parties involved.

To date, theoretical approaches to studying American public-labor history¹ begin with the political concept known as the sovereignty doctrine. In essence, the doctrine, which dates back at least to Thomas Hobbes, claims that the government, as representative of the entire domain, cannot be held accountable to its citizens, individually or collectively, beyond those powers it expressly gives to them. This principle holds true in democracies as well as in authoritarian regimes. In practical and legal terms in democracies, this doctrine generally means that people are not allowed to sue the federal government unless they have been given permission to do so.² It underlies the power of eminent domain, and it justifies the inability of retired shipyard workers to take the federal government to court for damages due to asbestos-related illnesses they incurred while in its employ. In the labor sector the doctrine also condoned the government's refusal to recognize and bargain with employee organizations, such as unions, as it owed a special sovereign duty to the public that would be broached by negotiating with individual groupings of that public.³ As to labor relations itself, it was expressed in mostly a negative fashion and it is not well developed theoretically in the historical literature, although it has been analyzed at length in the social sciences. While President Kennedy partially blunted the force of the doctrine in government labor relations with his partial recognition in 1962 of federal-employee unions and federal-employee locals of mostly private-sector unions, and the federal labor relations system was codified in 1977, the doctrine is still used to this day to keep unions and locals of federal employees as open shops and is the rationalization for what the doctrine is still most famous for in U.S. labor relations: the denial to federal, and most public employees, of the right to strike.⁴ On the other hand, the doctrine, filtered through various laws, civil service regulations, and the citizen's right to associate, also protected the right of federal employees to openly join unions without fear of (overt anyway) discipline or dismissal and to petition and lobby Congress and the President over their grievances.⁵ It also permitted the government to pass labor legislation for its employees that at times gave federal employees benefits superior to those in the private sector, or to exempt itself from laws passed to improve the labor and social rights of private-sector workers.⁶ For instance, federal workers had a pension plan and a workers’ compensation program dating back to 1920; but they also were exempted from the National Labor Act, the Social Security Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act.⁷

[1. As an analytic category, public-sector labor history also includes state and local level governments, and generally the term “public-sector” labor history has come to mean non-federal government employees. See: Robert Shaffer, “Where Are the Organized Public Employees? The Absence of Public Employee Unionism From U.S. History Textbooks, and Why It Matters,” Labor History (43, August 2002), which adopts this terminology.]

[2. The issue of the federal government being able to remain unaccountable to its citizens has once again been raised in the Patriot Act.]
[3. Sterling Spero, Government as Employer (New York: Remsen Press, 1948, reprinted 1971).]
[4. It therefore also prevents the government from using the lock-out weapon.]
[5. For white-collar, solely government unions, from 1912 on. For blue-collar unions, mostly situated in the private sector, back into the nineteenth century.]
[6. On the sovereignty doctrine, see: Ann Ross, "Public Employee Unions and the Right to Strike" Monthly Labor Review 92 (March 1969); B.V.H. Schneider, "Collective Bargaining and the Federal Service" Industrial Relations 33 (May 1964); B.V.H. Schneider, "Public-Sector Labor Legislation in an Evolutionary Analysis," in Public Sector Bargaining, 2nd ed., eds. by Benjamin Aaron, et al. (Washington: Bureau of National Affairs, 1988); Louis Imundo, "Strikes and the Strike Issue in Federal Government Labor-Management Relations" Personnel Management 52 (May 1973); David Rosenbloom, Federal Service and the Constitution: The Development of the Public Employment Relationship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Grace Sternet and Antone Aboud, The Right to Strike in Public Employment, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1982); Kurt L. Hanslowe, The Emerging Law of Labor Relations in Public Employment (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1967); Spero, Government as Employer; Morton Robert Godine, The Labor Problem in the Public Service: A Study in Political Pluralism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1951).]
[7. Howard Samuel, “Troubled Passage: The Labor Movement and the FLSA,” Monthly Labor Review (December 2000); David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Kenneth Davies, FDR: Into the Storm, 1937-1940, A History (New York: Random House, 1993); Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).]