No romance on the water.

‘Waterfront Slaves Who Are “Barge Captains” by John L. Spivak from the Daily Worker. Vol. 10 No. 121. May 20, 1933.

THEY call them barge captains, but they are really laborers with a high-sounding title, and there are 4,000 of them in New York harbor. Half of them have their families on board with them, emaciated women and sickly children. Most of them live in indescribable filth and squalor and all of them exist from hand to mouth.

They are the forgotten people of a great city. They are as cut off from life by the ropes that moor them to the docks as though they were in another world, for a barge captain must never leave his boat lest a tug comes to tow him, and not finding him ready wait, and thus increase the cost of the tow to the barge company. There have been barge captains who were fired because they left the boat to buy food and a tug came while they were away.

10,000 Men, Women, Kids

No one has taken a census of these waterfront people. They are at one pier today and another tomorrow, but a conservative estimate places their number at some 10,000 men, women and children.

It was at the foot of 95th Street and the East River that I first saw the inside of a coal barge cabin. The huge, wooden bulk lay on the full tide straining at its tight lines. Its hatches were filled to the brim with coal. At one end was a typical cabin, some six feet by ten of pine planks pointed dark green and four tiny, curtained windows to supply light and air to the occupants.

IN the doorway was a two-year-old child, its faces, legs and arms covered by a mass of sores. Another boy, four years old, in a ragged pair of overalls and with a face so grimy from coal dust that it was difficult to tell whether he was white or black, peeked out from behind a greasy door at the stranger’s approach.

The mother was a scrawny woman looking far older than her years. Through the open door I could see her bent over a washtub placed on the kitchen table. Without looking up from her work she kept crying shrilly to the children not to go too near the low rail. The year before, I learned, the boy had fallen over the rail and the swift tide had almost carried him away. The father sat on the bit used to hold ropes, staring moodily at his bare-footed children.

He earned a dollar a day for working 24 hours a day, seven days a week and no holidays at any time. Out of this he had to feed his family, clothe and dress them. That is why most of the furniture on a barge is picked up at the city dumps and the clothes from the refuse scows.

Despite the four windows, the cabin was dark and gloomy. That may be because it was painted the same dark green that the boat was for the coal barge companies rarely supply their captains with paint for the inside of the cabin and since the captain cannot afford to buy paint, he usually uses the boat paint for the inside of his home.

There was little space to move around in. The cabin was divided by green planks into a sort of living room and kitchen and a bedroom where the father, mother and the two children slept on one large double bed. There were no sheets on the mattress and the blankets were a dirty gray. There is no use trying to keep things clean, the woman explained, what with the coal dust sifting in always and the husband and children bringing in dirt and dust on their persons.

IT is not the coal dust that bothered her the most. It was the cockroaches and bed bugs that they could not seem to get rid of. Once they had spent some of their hard-earned money for a bucket of sulphur to fumigate the place three times, but the barge tied up near another and the roaches and bed bugs swarmed over to them again. So in their helplessness they decided not to try to fight the vermin. They always came, like the myriads of ants come every summer and swarm over the food and the children in the night.

There was a time not so long ago when young men would not take a job on a barge even for a hundred dollars a month which the company used to pay. The hours were too long and there was never a holiday. Young blood would not stand the “prison life” as the captains call it. Single men found it hard to cook their own food and keep the cabin clean.

Only old men, those over fifty who would normally work as watchmen, would take the job of barge captain. but since “prosperity” hit this country like a southern tornado and young men found it difficult to get jobs, younger men were taken and the older ones fired. Barge companies want young men, especially family men, for rather than risk being fired and being left homeless with their wives and children they will do carpenter work around the boat and thus save expenses for the company.

“Ought To Be Grateful”

From $100 a month the pay slid to $90 and so on down the scale until now, depending upon the company, the average pay is less than $2 a day when loaded and being towed and one dollar a day when the barge is empty and rocking on the river front. And with prosperity as it is today most of the barges are empty.

There are companies which, knowing that most of their captains are either too old to look for another job and dare not leave, pay the dollar a day when loaded and nothing when unloaded.

“They ought to be grateful we give ’em a place to stay,” one barge company official explained.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1933/v010-n121-NY-may-20-1933-DW-LOC.pdf