Manila's waterfront used to be run by a combination of the tough Union de Obre-ros Estivadores de Filipinas (U.O.E.F.) and certain employers and politicians who played ball with U.O.E.F. The union capataces (work-gang leaders) collected money from the shippers, paid off the workers themselves. In the days when there were as many as 25 ships in the harbor, the capataces' rake-off amounted to $25,000 a week.
The U.S. Air Force was the first to buck the U.O.E.F. successfully. In 1949 it insisted that workers unloading cargoes for Clark Field should be paid direct, not by the capataces. This year the government dealt the U.O.E.F. its second blow. It let the pier haulage contract to Delgado Bros., who signed up Associated Workers' Union (A.W.U.) labor and began paying the workers direct.
High Road & Low. The A.W.U. is a new waterfront organization sponsored by a burly Jesuit priest named Walter B. Hogan. Philadelphia-born Father Hogan was in the Philippines before the war as a teacher. In 1946 he was sent back to found the Ateneo de Manila's Institute of Social Order, to promote Catholic labor unionism. An outspoken opponent of Manila's big business bosses, whom he accuses of exploiting the workers, Hogan won labor's respect last year when he walked a picket line in the strike of ground personnel against Philippine Air Lines, owned by Brewery (George Muehlbach Brewing Co., Kansas City. Mo.) Tycoon Andres Soriano (TIME, May 22).
Hogan came into the waterfront picture when 300 tugboatmen came to him for advice, after they had been beaten up for trying to break away from the U.O.E.F. Assisted by Johnny Tan, 28-year-old law student, Hogan got the tugboatmen jobs and brought their case to court. It was lost. "We didn't have a chance against their political backers," explained Hogan later. "But it got us warmed up for a good long fight." Father Hogan then set about building the A.W.U. Johnny Tan took the low road: talking to workers, studying their problems; Father Hogan took the high road: in his Ford jalopy (he says it runs on prayers and Scotch tape), he visited influential groups and individuals. By last week hundreds of workers had deserted the U.O.E.F., signed up with Hogan's A.W.U.
God's Senator. Among Hogan's influential friends was British-born Francis ("Paco") Gispert, secretary-manager of the Associated Steamship Lines, which has a membership of 46 shipping firms and four stevedoring companies. Gispert helped Hogan by putting up a pay office in the pier area to pay checkers, who, with stevedores and watchmen, are still controlled by the U.O.E.F. When the U.O.E.F. blacklisted the pay office, Gispert took the case to court, won it early last month. In the meantime he had been threatened, his home had been broken into, he had been beaten up, and his personal bodyguard had been murdered. One day last week, while he was walking up the narrow staircase to his office, Gispert was waylaid and shot through the heart.