His conviction by a federal jury for having lied about his Communist Party membership when seeking naturalization was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1953 as having been prosecuted untimely, outside the statute of limitations.

[citation needed] In 1921, Bridges joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), participating in an unsuccessful nationwide seamen's strike.

The shipowners had created a company union after the International Longshoremen's Association local in San Francisco was destroyed by a strike it lost in 1919.

With the passage that year of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which contained some encouraging but unenforceable provisions declaring that workers had the right to organize unions of their own choice, thousands of longshoremen joined the new ILA local.

[5] This group had acquired some influence on the docks through its publication The Waterfront Worker, a mimeographed sheet sold for a penny that published articles written by longshoremen and seamen, almost always under pseudonyms.

[6] The Albion Hall Group stressed the self-help tactics of syndicalism, urging workers to organize by taking part in strikes and slowdowns, rather than depending on governmental assistance under the NIRA.

Under Bridges' leadership, the group organized a successful 5-day strike in October 1933 to force Matson Navigation Company to reinstate four longshoremen it had fired for wearing ILA buttons on the job.

The Roosevelt administration tried to head off the strike by appointing a mediation board to oversee negotiations, but neither side accepted its proposed compromise.

They recruited rank-and-file opposition to the two proposed contracts that the leadership negotiated and the membership rejected during the strike, and the dealings with other unions during related events.

A four-day San Francisco General strike took place after "Bloody Thursday" on 5 July, when police aided the Waterfront Employers Association in trucking cargo from the pierheads to the warehouses through the union's picket line.

Scores of other men were wounded by police gunfire as well, including a number of bystanders, as the ensuing battle quickly spilled into the nearby downtown area.

Similarly, in 1935, Bridges' opposition did not stop the ILA leadership from extending the union's contract with the employers, rather than striking in solidarity with the seamen.

During this period the ILA commenced "the March Inland", in which it organized the many warehouses, both in the ports and those at a distance from them, which received the goods that longshoremen handled.

[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] The hearings found Bridges did not qualify for deportation because he was not currently — as the Alien Act of 1918 required — a member of or affiliated with an organization that advocated the overthrow of the government.

[25] In September 1941, the special examiner who led the hearings recommended deportation, but the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) reversed that order after finding the government's two key witnesses to be unreliable.

[26] In May 1942, though the Roosevelt administration was now putting its anti-Communist activities on hold in the interest of furthering the Soviet-American alliance, Attorney General Biddle overruled the BIA and ordered Bridges deportation.

With the goal of deportation, in 1948 the federal government tried Bridges for fraud and perjury, for denying when applying for naturalization that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party.

[32] The Supreme Court in a 5-3 decision overturned the conviction in 1953 because the indictment on fraud and perjury charges did not occur within the three years set by the statute of limitations.

[33] The government dropped the criminal charges and pursued a case in civil court in June and July 1955, hoping to overturn Bridges' naturalization because it had been obtained by fraud.

After the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was signed in 1939, the party attacked Roosevelt and Churchill as warmongers and adopted the slogan "The Yanks Ain't Coming."

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bridges urged employers to increase productivity in order to prepare for war.

The ILWU not only condemned the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Employees union for striking Montgomery Ward in 1943—after management refused to sign a new contract, cut wages, and fired union activists—but also assisted it in breaking the strike, by ordering members in St. Paul, Minnesota to work overtime, to handle overflow from the struck Chicago plant.

Bridges later joined with Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, which represented sailors on the East Coast, and Julius Emspak of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, to support a proposal by Roosevelt in 1944, to militarize some civilian workplaces.

He had his own opinions about the Marshall Plan and the application of the Truman Doctrine in Greece and Turkey, as well as participation in the World Federation of Trade Unions, viewing every element from the point of how it would affect his constituents.

Its leadership agreed to significantly reducing the number of longshore workers in return for generous job guarantees and benefits for those displaced by the changes.

Bridges reacted defensively to these workers' complaints, which had additional sting because many of the "B-men" were black and had worked hard to enter the union.

The additional longshore work produced by the Vietnam War allowed Bridges to meet the challenge by opening up more jobs and making determined efforts to recruit black applicants.

They had a child and lived as an unmarried couple for twelve years, and they formally married in 1934 shortly before the West Coast Waterfront Strike began.

Some speculation suggests that Norma Perry was an underlying reason for Bridges' split with Lundeberg during the 1936-37 Pacific Coast Maritime Strike.

[41] Bridges met Noriko "Nikki" Sawada in San Francisco, when introduced by her employer, Charles Garry, a civil rights lawyer.