Shape up at Pier 92, with longshoremen looking for a day’s work crowding around.

The busiest port in the world for the first half of the twentieth century, New York’s docks were well known as corrupt and exploitative places to work.  Attempts to organize by rank-and-file workers were crushed time and time again.

Image from the New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, Library of Congress, photograph by  Al Ravena.

See this image in the Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives exhibit.