Herb Mills

In 1963, Herb dropped out of graduate school and became a San Francisco Bay Area longshoreman. On countless occasions, he declared it was “the best decision I ever made!” In 1968 his friend Cleophas Williams, the first Black man elected president of Local 10, granted Herb a year’s leave of absence to complete his PhD at the University of California, Irvine. Herb went right back to the waterfront and became active in the ILWU, being elected shop steward, chairman of the stewards’ council, business agent and finally, secretary-treasurer of Local 10. He took injury- related retirement in 1991. In January 2018 Local 10 presented him with a lifetime achievement award (https://youtu.be/ E12VKEk84Iw?si=jZtP634C3Ufkp1Hc)

Herb was a leader in major conflicts with the longshore workers’ employer, the Pacific Maritime Association. He helped lead the 1971-72 strike, the longest in U.S. longshore history. He also led efforts to protect worker health and safety, including a major campaign on the handling of asbestos.

As a union officer, he was the key leader in the ILWU’s 1978 refusal to ship military cargo to post-coup d’état Chile, winning support from 175 members of the United States Congress and a final decision by the Carter Administration to cancel the shipment. A similar effort in 1980 stopped military cargo from going to the El Salvador military junta.

When the military government of South Korea announced plans to execute democracy movement leader Kim Dae-jung, Herb took the lead in getting the ILWU to threaten a Pacific Basin refusal by longshoremen to unload South Korean ships. It stopped the execution. Seventeen years later, when Kim was elected South Korea’s president, Herb and ILWU President Brian McWilliams were invited to his inauguration as honored guests.

He led efforts to tie the assassination of two young Filipino officials of Seattle ILWU Local 37 to the Ferdinand Marcos’ regime.

Herb Mills (1930 – 2018) was a long-time leader in Local 10 of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU). He earned a PhD in political science from the University of California (Irvine). When asked what he valued most in his life, he would name the ILWU, saying “Thank God for the union,” his three children, Sarah, Lydia, and Jon, and the grandchildren. Together with their mothers Rebecca Mills and Deanne Burke, he built a blended family life. He had a great love of nature, and regularly took his children fishing, hiking and camping.

Growing up in Dearborn, Michigan, Herb worked in Ford’s legendary River Rouge plant, where he learned about labor unions, and decided to go to college. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of Michigan. He then went into the Army and, after being honorably discharged in California, he went to graduate school, studying political science at University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Herb taught and became active in the student movement organization called SLATE. In 1960, he served as the picket captain for the Student ACLU picket line at the demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) at San Francisco’s City Hall.

As a result of this work, their heirs filed a wrongful death suit against Marcos’ widow Imelda Marcos and received a $2 million judgment.

In addition to writing the novel Presente, he wrote numerous articles and papers about longshore work and the ILWU, acted in two films, and completed an oral history: (https://www.foundsf. org/index.php?title=Oral_History:_Herb_Mills)

Many of his monographs and articles can be found on his web site www.ilwu10hmills.com and in the book edited by Mike Miller Herb Mills: A Tribute. Quotations and some of his personal longshore union items are featured in the Transportation exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and in the entrance hall to the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Herb Mills collected news articles and correspondence documenting the historic events narrated in Presente, He published these documents on his website - www.ilwu10hmills.com. They cover the union’s refusal to load military cargo for El Salvador, its effort to save the life of Kim Dae-jung, Herb Mills’ invitation to attend the inauguration of Kim Dae-jung as elected President, and the murder of Filipino union brothers by agents of the Marcos regime. On Herb’s website, click on the “ARTICLES” tab and select #12 for more.

Ghostly ship in the San Francisco harbor by Marc Nelson