Jimmy Herman; San Francisco Labor Leader

Jimmy Herman, 73, one of San Francisco’s most respected labor leaders. Herman served as president of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union and head of the city’s Port Commission. Herman also served as head of several local unions, including the clerks union and seamen’s union, before taking the helm of the ILWU in 1977. He succeeded Harry Bridges, who had organized the West Coast longshoremen’s union after a 1934 waterfront strike that shut down the Pacific Seaboard for more than two months. Herman retired from the union in 1991. He was a longtime supporter of the Delancy Street Foundation, a drug rehabilitation center, and lived there the last six months of his life. In San Francisco on Friday of a heart attack.