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Victory on the Puget Sound Waterfront and for our Entire Labor Movement!
Union Contract Highlights
Despite the Big Business and Bush attack, dockworkers won a union contract that preserves and improves living wage jobs in our community.
- Preserved right to keep new jobs as part of living wage union contract. Stevedoring Services company (SSA) will have to return hundreds of living wage jobs to our community that they had sent to Utah as poverty wage jobs.
- Health plan stays at no cost to workers for six years despite price-gouging by profit hungry healthcare companies.
- Pensions dramatically improved by over 50% despite national trends to switch to volatile stock market accounts. Retirees and widows will get much needed increases to pensions based on pay earned during the days dockworkers were treated like farmworkers are unfortunately treated now.
- The proposed contract still has to be approved by vote of the ILWU membership.
We Beat Back the Bush-Corporate Attack
With alarming boldness, corporations are teaming with the federal government to reinvent weapons against organized working people. Nothing has characterized this threat more than the big business attack on dockworkers. This is what happened:
- International maritime companies created a formal anti-worker alliance with the biggest retail corporations.
- Bush used the military to threaten replacing dockworkers on the job.
- Using an anti-worker Federal law in a new way, Bush violated basic rights to workplace collective action.
- Corporations started a campaign to divide Longshore union unity by trying to change a 70 year labor law.
By enjoining the union from workplace protest ("invoking Taft-Hartly"), Bush brought the full force of the Federal government on the backs of dockworkers. What is new about using this force is that Bush justified it as a result of an employer initiated a lockout of workers. This sets a dangerous precedent for employers to undermine our right to strike. It teaches employers to refuse negotiations, lockout workers, and use a Taft-Hartly injunction to threaten military intervention, jail time for union leaders, bankrupting fines on the union, and undemocratically imposed union contract terms. By no coincidence, the 1947 Taft-Hartly law launched McCarthyism and the decline of the American labor movement.
But through solidarity protests against colluding corporate retailers, mass rallies and marches, picket lines, and grassroots pressure on elected political figures, we beat back this attack and won. Great work to all the JwJ activists who participated at every opportunity in this fight and to our JwJ colleagues in cities across this nation who demonstrated what it really means to “Be There.” Congratulations to the fighting ILWU. “An Injury To One Is An Injury To All.”
The ILWU longshore contract with the employer group, the Pacific Maritime Authority (PMA), expired on July 1st. The large corporations who use the ports most - including Wal Mart, Payless ShoeSource, Home Depot, Target, The Gap and Best Buy - are pushing the federal government to intervene militarily in negotiations. These corporations, as well as the PMA, have formed the West Coast Waterfront Coalition (WCWC) as a way to lobby policy makers and recruit other retailers in an anti-worker/anti-union campaign.
The shipping companies have tried every means to use the federal government to undermine Longshore workers negotiating a fair union contract. First, shippers and retail corporations called for Bush to bring in the US military to replace dockworkers on the job. JwJ activists put these companies on the defensive with national protests culminating with Payless Shoes agreeing to write to the PMA and the other companies in the WCWC opposing any federal intervention or use of troops. Now, the other WCWC companies have successfully called on Bush to invoke the rarely used Taft-Hartley Act to save face for an ineffective lock-out tactic and force Longshore workers back to dangerous speed-up rates at work. The companies are especially desperate to force speed-up work as holiday season approaches. But the companies also don’t want to give dockworkers a fair contract with the right to training and living wage jobs created by new technology especially when laid off because of technology.
The employers have no incentive to negotiate, because the Bush Administration has proven willing to do anything necessary to appease large corporations. The Bush Administration claims that a strike or slow-down would threaten national security. Bush Cabinet members have also threatened to introduce legislation to take away the Longshore workers' right to strike, or to break up their industry-wide contract.
This contract fight not only affects the 15,000 of Longshore workers on the West Coast, but also all other contract struggles coming up - reaching working people everywhere. And west coast Longshore handles cargo amounting to 7% of the gross domestic product, with three million jobs indirectly affected.
Workers Locked Out!
On September 29th, the PMA ordered workers locked out of the port. As of Friday, October 4th, several major shipping companies started breaking the lockout and calling for Longshore union work at Washington ports and other states. Our solidarity pressed some shippers to break ranks with the Pacific Maritime Association lockout, and pay union members to unload cargo. Payless Shoes has written letters to the PMA and WCWC companies urging them to cease their call for federal intervention and troops on the docks.
PMA Rejects ILWU Offer to Return to Work
On Tuesday, October 8th, Eugene Scalia, Solicitor General with President Bush's Department of
Labor, called the ILWU Tuesday morning and asked the union to accept a 30-day contract extension that would reopen the ports. The ILWU agreed, even though it had previously requested a 7-day
extension that was rejected by the employer, the Pacific Maritime Association. Scalia
warned the ILWU that if the union refused the 30-day extension that Bush would go on national television, attack the ILWU and impose the Taft-Hartley "cooling off" period ordering the ports to reopen. The Bush Administration also implied that the PMA was on board with the 30-day extension.
Shortly after the ILWU agreed to the extension, however, the PMA reneged on the deal and rejected it.
Bush Invokes Taft-Hartley - 80 Days Ends on December 26th
The PMA knew Bush would intervene with Taft-Hartley if it continued the lockout and that's been the employer's goal all along!
"The Pacific Maritime Association and (its President) Joe Miniace has always known that this (Taft-Hartley and Bush's willingness to intervene in the dispute) was his ace in the hole," said Del Bates, Vice President of ILWU Local 19 in Seattle. "He's never wanted to negotiate in good
faith." Bush does what the PMA wants him to do.
So President Bush went on television Tuesday shortly after the PMA rejected the 30-day contract extension, and said he was seeking a Taft-Hartley injunction. In making his case, he played the defense card saying the port shutdown could hurt his ubiquitous "war on terrorism" and have a "substantial negative impact on military readiness during a time of national crisis." (It appears the crisis Bush was referring to was the impending war on Iraq and not the fact that the U.S. economy under his steady hand is in the toilet.)
He presented the military readiness argument despite the fact that the ILWU and the PMA have continued to move shipments of all military cargo during the lockout.
5 Dockworkers Dead This Summer Due To Shipping Companies’ Speed-up on Docks
Whipped up by “strike hysteria,” shipping on the West Coast broke records this summer as major corporations stockpiled imported products. As a result, the major shipping companies imposed a brutal speed-up of work that put many dockworkers in danger but generated huge company profits. Five Longshore union members died in separate incidents as a result of this speed-up. (Check out the detailed account below – rated R). While bargaining a new contract, union leaders called for a “work safely” campaign to insure that proper training and protection of health and life comes before record-breaking profits. The big shipping companies retaliated against the dockworker safety campaign and against negotiation for jobs security by locking out all Longshore in every port on the West Coast.
In the last six months there have been five fatalities among International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) waterfront workers, each more horrific than the last:
- On Sept. 3 ILWU Local 26 watchman Rudy Acosta was run over and killed by a top handler at the Pacific Container Terminal operated by SSA in Long Beach.
- On July 23 Richie Lopez, Jr. of ILWU Local 46 in Port Hueneme was run over by a heavy forklift.
- On June 1 ILWU Local 14 member Dick Peters was checking the hatches of a ship being loaded in the Port of Eureka. No one saw what happened, but apparently the ship-board gantry crane swung and crushed Peters against the ship itself.
- On March 15, Mario Gonzalez, a member of ILWU Local 26, was operating a huge mill that shreds cars into scrap metal at Hugo Neu-Prolers’ facility at the Port of Los Angeles . The machine jammed and Gonzalez went in to fix it. But the hydraulic-powered, several-ton door closed on his chest, killing him.
- A day earlier on March 14 foreman John Prohoroff of ILWU Local 94 was routinely preparing a ship to be worked at SSA’s Long Beach terminal. The line on one of the ship’s cranes broke, dropping a 3,000-pound metal ring 30 feet and hitting Prohoroff. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.
“PMA’s constant push for more productivity is making a bad problem even worse,” said ILWU International President Jim Spinosa. “The docks are already dangerously congested, but during these negotiations several terminal operators tried to raise their posted speed limits from 10 or 15 miles an hour to 25. But even with safe limits posted, none of the equipment we are given to drive have speedometers. Accidents occur all too often and that is why one of the demands we have on the table in these negotiations is to have speedometers put in all the power industrial trucks on the docks.” For more info, go to www.ilwu.org.
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