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CounterPunch
October
3, 2002
"It's All
About Power on the Docks"
A Report from the IWLU Lockout
by TODD CHRETIEN and
SUE SANDLIN
Shipping bosses have thrown down the gauntlet
to West Coast dockworkers--and the entire labor movement. The
employers' Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) has locked out
more than 10,500 longshore workers from Seattle to San Diego,
and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members
are picketing.
With $300 billion of goods passing through
West Coast ports every year, the stakes of this struggle are
clear. As one worker on the picket line in Oakland, Calif., told
Socialist Worker, "It's all about who's got the power on
the docks. We don1t make enough money for them to worry about."
What's more, the Bush administration
has threatened to use the anti-union Taft-Hartley law to ban
any work stoppage--effectively giving management a gun to hold
to the union's head.
"The issues are the survival of
the longshore union and even the very survival of the American
trade union movement," said Jack Heyman, a business agent
in ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco. "Because if the ILWU
goes down the tubes, other unions will follow. The labor movement
must learn from the history of PATCO," the air traffic controllers
union busted by President Ronald Reagan in a 1981 strike. "This
is not a PATCO, a union that had supported Reagan, but a union
with a long tradition of supporting social struggles around the
world."
Ken Riley, president of Local 1422 of
the International Longshoremen's Association, which represents
dockworkers on the East Coast, recalled the support that the
ILWU gave his union during the victorious struggle of the Charleston
Five--longshore workers put under house arrest for nearly two
years after a police attack on their picket line.
Riley pledged to return that support.
"Workers in Charleston recognize the type of solidarity
that was given to them and recognize that we could not have come
out of the South with a victory like that without it," he
told Socialist Worker. "We are forever joined at the hips."
The AFL-CIO Executive Council has pledged
to support the ILWU, and the San Francisco Labor Council authorized
member unions to honor the picket line of ILWU Local 10.
In July, ILWU President James Spinosa
offered changes in the contract that would cost hundreds of union
jobs due to technology changes and outsourcing. But the PMA--and
big U.S. importers like Target and Wal-Mart in the West Coast
Waterfront Coalition--want much more.
The bosses want to break the union's
control over the pace of work by weakening the hiring hall system
and speeding up the number of containers loaded and unloaded
per hour. These changes would endanger workers' lives. Several
workers died in just the past few months because of speedups
and old or missing safety equipment.
The PMA has also used the "war on
terror" as a cover for its union bashing. With the contract
due to expire July 1, Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge called
the ILWU to say that any job action could damage "national
security."
Although Spinosa declared that the ILWU
wouldn1t be intimidated, he has adopted a conservative strategy
in the face of the PMA onslaught. ILWU officials hoped that their
concessions at the bargaining table would satisfy management's
greed--and that support from Democratic lawmakers would force
the White House to back off threats to intervene.
For weeks, Spinosa opposed job actions--and
he still refuses to call a strike authorization vote. Instead,
he has tried to claim the mantle of "national security."
The ILWU is "the first line of defense for anything that
may happen like September 11 again," Spinosa said in a September
30 press conference. The ILWU, he said, has "told the military
that our obligation to this country and to our military effort
is one that we will not move away from."
In fact, the military isn1t part of the
PMA and is unaffected by the lockout. And trying to wrap the
ILWU in the flag will only help justify intervention on "national
security" grounds.
What's more, Spinosa is opening the door
to government intervention by agreeing to meet with a federal
mediator--something that he had vowed repeatedly never to do.
Tensions on the waterfront have been
building since the old contract expired July 1. The agreement
was extended on a day-by-day basis through Labor Day until negotiations
broke down, and the ILWU refused to extend the deal. That gave
the union the right to take job actions such as a work-to-rule--but
union leaders at first refused to authorize them.
Meanwhile, the employers pushed harder
and harder at the terminals, imposing speedups and firing workers
without cause--until anger from the rank and file began to break
through.
In a series of spontaneous actions that
stand in the best traditions of the ILWU, workers in Portland
protested management's decision to terminate night shifts. Some
workers in Oakland refused to work excessive overtime, and individual
ILWU locals began passing resolutions to enforce the safety code.
This anger from below at employer speedups,
along with stonewalling from the PMA at the bargaining table,
finally forced the ILWU leadership to call for a "work safely"
campaign last week.
The PMA immediately charged that this
was a work slowdown--which is legal when there is no contract--and
locked out the workers. After first announcing that the lockout
would last only 36 hours, the PMA declared that it would continue
indefinitely.
Now, the fight is on--and the union has
to make up for lost time by mobilizing. Every shift on every
gate will need picket captains and a plan to mobilize dockworkers
and supporters in case the PMA tries to pick out strategic gates
to open with scabs.
If union leaders refuse to act, the rank
and file should take the initiative. And now is the time for
union leaders who have pledged to support the ILWU to put their
money where their mouths are--and mobilize members of all unions
to support picket lines and organize rallies and marches up and
down the coast.
The ILWU motto--"an injury to one
is an injury to all"--has never been more fitting.
Todd Chretien
and Sue Sandlin write for Socialist
Worker, where this article originally appeared.
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October 2,
2002
Carol Wolman,
MD
Is the
President Nuts?
Diagnosing Dubya
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Something
Rotten in Klamath
Linda S. Heard
Might Sharon
Nuke Iraq?
Joanne Mariner
When
the Judge Says:
"I Botched It"
Peter P. Mahoney
A Vietnam
Vet Makes the
Case Against War on Iraq
Mark Engler
From the
Quarantine
Agaisnt Greed
Uri Avnery
Manufacturing
Anti-Semites
Jennifer Berkshire
Converging Against Capitalism
October 1,
2002
Benjamin Shepard
On the
Road Again:
IMF/World Bank Protest
Reveal a Revived
Movement for Global Justice
Dr. Susan
Block
Cockfight
at the
Baghdad Corral
Krystal Kyer
Growing Union Opposition
to War
Ron Jacobs
Born Without a Spine
Scott Loughrey
Mysteries
of 9/11
Jeremy Brecher
Collective
Security is Working
Brenda Norrell
Troy
Black Feather on
the American Flag
Sam Bahour
Wake Up
and Smell
the Occupation
Richard Harth
Contrary
to Reason:
Adieu, Hitchens, Adieu
Carol Norris
Rumsfeld
the Surrealist:
Things Related and Not
Ben Tripp
Lists Upon
Lists
September
30, 2002
Rep. Barbara
Lee
Alternatives
to War
Kurt Nimmo
Iraq: The
Vision
of the Velociraptors
Zeynep Toufe
"We
Own the World, We Ignore the Children"
Dave Marsh
The Troubador's
Highway
Tariq Ali
Taking
It to London's Streets
Neve Gordon
Bush's
War of Self-Adulation
September
25 / 29, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
The
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the Bears of Wall Street
Ben Tripp
Hunting with George
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Haywire: Boeing's New Navy Fighter Fails Bomb Tests
Joanne Mariner
Naming Genocide
James T. Philips
Riding to Maine
Anis Shivani
Life of a Bum
David Vest
Too True North
Jacob Levich
Case of the Missing Terrorist
William MacDougall
British Immigration Tests
Edward Hammond
Pentagon Develops Illegal Chemical Weapons Capability
Molly Secours
Bush's "I" Words:
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Edward Lazarus
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Lee Sustar
Employers Attack
Anthony Gancarski
Ledeen's Mad World
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Bush the Magician
David Wiggins
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September
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Chet Batsmack,
American
The American
Century
Paul de Rooij
Smear Mongers
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Jack Wheeler
Janet Reno: America's Saddam?
Linda S. Heard
Portrait
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Gary Leupp
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Germany
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