Oral History: Stan Weir

Oral History

Interviewed by Chris Carlsson in Mission District flat in 1997

Stan Weir, 1921-2001, was a longtime labor radical... called "Red" during his days as a longshoreman, he led 57 B-Men in a Kafkaesque struggle with Harry Bridges and the ILWU Executive Committee, after they were cashiered over breaking rules that had been developed secretly and imposed retroactively! Weir's many writings covered rank-and-file union politics, focusing on as he liked to put it, "unions that stay on the job." In this 2 hour interview/discussion with Chris Carlsson, himself a longtime publisher and writer (Processed World, Shaping San Francisco), many ideas about contemporary strategies for organizing, facing technical change, automation, etc. are broached.