Longshoremen's Union
The Longshoremen’s Union is a fixture on the wharves. Operating out of an unassuming storefront facing the wharves, this group employs every sweating stevedore unloading the ships on the wharves, whether burly human, grim-faced orc, or dim-witted troll. The truth is, anyone who wants work on the wharves must first join the union. Those who think they can get away with not paying their dues face a cordial but firm welcoming committee, who soon arrive to clarify the need for joining the brotherhood. Woe to those who refuse.
A person has one chance to join. If they don’t, they’re beaten—and if they still refuse, then they disappear. Those fools who try to break the union with scabs or try to cut wages are in for a full-scale strike—one that effectively shuts down the city and thus the city’s trade. To date, no one has dared cross the Longshoremen’s Union.
Usually, the bruisers who make up the union are locals with a reason to stay on dry land: strong family ties, a surreptitious weak stomach, or just a desire to live a normal life. They’re big and burly, but while they blow off some steam now and again, they don’t often raise the same kind of ruckus visiting sailors do. Freeport is their home, after all, and not just a way station.
Architecture
The Longshoremen’s Union has a small office that fronts the wharves. Plain and serviceable, the offices are merely functional. Emaya Passos, Poppy’s widow, refuses to let union funds go toward beautifying the place, just as her husband did for many years. The building is two stories, with a meeting hall on the main floor, along with an office and a records room where the union keeps its contracts and funds in a thick iron vault. A staircase leads upstairs to more storage rooms and offices. The only thing that separates this building from those around it is a white flag hanging out front bearing a red silhouette of a muscular man pulling on a rope.
History
Among the movers and shakers of Freeport, there’s a lot of scorn directed at the Longshoremen. The Captains' Council and no few local merchants decry the union, claiming it is little more than a gang of thugs and extortionists, worse than the cutpurses haunting the rest of the Docks. Despite the mutterings, though, the Longshoremen are in fact one of the few relatively honest organizations in town. This wasn’t always the case.
For years, the Longshoremen’s Union was a joke. The bosses lined their pockets with sweet deals that left the workers out in the cold. While these corrupt officials got rich and ship captains paid starving wages to the workers to offload their ships, the people of The Docks suffered. So long as the Captains' Council got their cut, though, they ignored the plight of the stevedores and longshoremen, allowing the exploitation and terrible conditions to persist.
Everything started to change about a decade ago, when Poppy Bragg, a member of the union, grew disgusted by the corruption. Then Bragg met Emaya Passos, a sailor’s daughter and a bit of a militant, and the rest is history: She was just as tough and plain spoken as any of the dockworkers Bragg had known, and she had seen a lot in her time. Freeport was an embarrassment, she believed; the upper classes were decadent, and that base behavior had wormed its way down to the wharves. She was the moral compass Bragg had been waiting for his whole life.
They married, and within five years, he’d fought his way to the top of the union. Through sheer force of will, and the occasional judicious use of force, he built a network of allies and gave the dead wood their walking papers. He championed the cause of the worker. He met with merchants and ship owners and laid down the law, tearing up the old contracts and hammering out tough new ones. He built a union to be feared and respected. At the same time, he insisted his members pull their weight—he’d make sure everyone could eat, he was fond of saying, but he’d be damned if he’d let anybody get fat.
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