Harry Renton Bridges was born Alfred Renton Bridges in Melbourne, Australia on July 28, 1901. At just 15 he persuaded his father to let him work on a ship sailing from Melbourne to Tasmania, a notoriously rough ocean crossing. His father thought it would cure his son of the desire to be a sailor but it had the opposite effect and Bridges spent the next six years working as a seaman. In 1920, Bridges moved to San Francisco, working on boats up and down the West Coast. After two years he settled in San Francisco as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks. At that time, all longshoremen on the San Francisco waterfront were represented by a company union. Although supposedly there to protect the rights of the workers, in reality, the Blue Book union system (named for the color of the membership book) only served the interests of the shipping companies. Longshoremen who didn’t work fast enough were replaced, individuals that attempted to form or join a different union faced retaliation or were blacklisted, and workers without a clean “book” were not selected for work. In 1933, Harry Bridges led a campaign to form a San Francisco local of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA). Within six weeks, the overwhelming majority of longshoremen had deserted the Blue Book and signed with the ILA. In March 1934, in an effort to force the shipping companies to recognize the union and to implement a coast-wide contract, the ILA membership voted overwhelmingly to strike. After days of escalating police violence, public opinion started to favor the strikers and a General Strike was called with large numbers of San Francisco unions striking in solidarity. The success of the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike is said to have launched the modern labor movement in the Western United States and established Harry Bridges as a well-known and respected labor leader. In 1937, Bridges became president of the newly formed International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, now known as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a post he would hold for the next forty years.

The federal government tried a series of deportation cases against Harry Bridges in 1939, 1941, 1948 and 1953 on the grounds that he was a Communist Party member but ultimately none were successful and Bridges remained in San Francisco. He and his wife, Noriko "Nikki" Sawada Bridges (becoming Noriko Sawada Bridges Flynn when she remarried in 1994 after his death), travelled frequently to attend conferences and meet with ILWU members and leaders.

Harry Bridges married three times. His first two marriages, to Agnes Brown in 1925, and to Nancy Fenton Berdicio in 1946, ended in divorce. Bridges third marriage in December 1958 was to Noriko Sawada, the daughter of Japanese immigrant parents. They had one daughter together and remained married until Bridges death in 1990.

Noriko "Nikki" Sawada Bridges Flynn was born February 11, 1923 in Los Angeles County to Japanese immigrant parents. In 1942, Flynn, along with her family and thousands of Japanese-Americans, was forcibly relocated to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona. It wasn't until early 1945 that the federal government ended the exclusion order and allowed Japanese-Americans to return to the West Coast. The three years Flynn spent in the internment camp and the injustices she witnessed against Japanese-Americans, in the camps and in California, resulted in a life-long dedication to civil rights issues.

Flynn moved to the Bay Area and found work as an assistant to Charles Garry, a well-known San Francisco civil rights attorney. It was through Garry that she met Harry Bridges, founder and leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). They married in December 1958 in Reno, Nevada. At first the clerk refused to issue them a marriage license on the grounds that it violated a 1860s law prohibiting marriage between whites and Asians. It wasn’t until their case went to court that the law was struck down and they were allowed to be married. Bridges and Flynn were married for 32 years and had one daughter together. As an activist in her own right, Flynn often accompanied Harry Bridges to union events and conferences across the United States and overseas.

In 1973, Flynn went back to school, enrolling in creative writing courses at San Francisco State University. Her articles, particularly those about her childhood and internment experiences, were published in national magazines. She continued to fight for redress and reparations for interned Japanese-Americans all her life, and was an active member of the National Japanese American Historical Society and the Women’s Concerns Committee of the Japanese American’s Citizen’s League. In 1988 she was the recipient of the “Women Warrior” award presented by the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area Coalition (PAAWBAC). After Harry Bridges death in 1990, she continued her husband's legacy, helping endow the Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies at the University of Washington's Center for Labor Studies in 1992.

In 1994, she married Ed Flynn, past president of the Pacific Maritime Association. She died February 7, 2003, in Palo Alto.