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	Workers Vanguard No. 1019	8 March 2013

Union Busting Grain Bosses Up Ante Against ILWU

MARCH 4—On February 27, the United Grain Corp. in the Port of Vancouver, Washington, locked out members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Managers and other scab labor brought in by the professional strikebreaking company J.R. Gettier & Associates began loading grain on the ship in port while three other vessels lined up on the Columbia River. Scab tugs are on hand to get the ships in and out of the terminal. Standing behind this operation is the armed might of the U.S. Coast Guard, whose sights are aimed at any union protest that would interfere with the ships’ passage. This is an open declaration of war against one of the few remaining bastions of labor power in this country!

For months, the grain bosses have been out to break the back of the ILWU, which has worked the terminals in the region since the 1930s. When union members voted down the “last, best and final” contract offer from the Pacific Northwest Grain Handlers Association in late December by a resounding 93.8 percent, the grain export goliaths told them to shove it. Either they were to work under the terms of this offer—which shreds union working and safety conditions and undermines the hiring hall and other gains won in hard-fought struggle—or they wouldn’t work at all. The ILWU tops caved in to this ultimatum, banking on trying to use to their advantage the very laws whose purpose is to subordinate the unions to the interests of the bosses.

At the same time, the union bureaucrats looked for leverage by pursuing separate negotiations with the grain terminal owners TEMCO, a joint venture between the Minnesota-based Cargill and CHS Inc. On the same day the union was locked out by United Grain, the ILWU issued a press release announcing that an agreement had been reached with TEMCO. Although few details have been released, according to the president of Vancouver ILWU Local 4 it extends work shifts to a deadly dangerous 12 hours and eliminates the union’s supercargo clerks, who oversee the loading and unloading of ships. These jobs would be handed over to management, giving the company a greater whip hand over the workforce. Even leaving these and other concessions aside, the TEMCO agreement explicitly states that it “is subject to modification given the details of a final agreement between the ILWU and the Pacific Northwest Grain Elevator Operators.” In other words, however bad it is, the other grain companies can make it worse!

United Grain—whose Vancouver terminal has the largest grain storage capacity in the region, shipping out 16 percent of U.S. wheat exports—gave its answer by locking out the union. Claiming that it had employed a former FBI agent to investigate “suspicious incidents involving equipment failure and damage,” the company fired a Local 4 official, charging him with efforts to “sabotage and destroy company property.” United Grain’s CEO declared, “Deliberate attempts by an ILWU leader to damage equipment, disrupt operations and put co-workers at risk cannot be tolerated.” Oddly, this alleged “sabotage” is said to have taken place over two months ago, on December 22. But only now are they trotting out this “investigation” by an agent well-schooled in the dirty trade of fabrications and other deadly set-ups. It is a convenient tale to further the aim of breaking the ILWU.

On the first day of the lockout, the ILWU shut down the whole Port of Vancouver, stranding a car carrier ship loaded with 1,800 Subarus. But that stopped the next day when an arbitrator for the Pacific Maritime Association ruled the walkout illegal. The rest of the port is now up and running with ILWU labor, even as grain is being worked by scabs. Once again, the ILWU bureaucracy looks not to mobilizing the social power of the union and its allies to meet this union-busting attack through, for example, building mass picket lines that no scabs would dare to cross. Instead, the union has just filed an “unfair labor practice” suit with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The injunctions and massive fines brought by the NLRB against the ILWU when it actually fought to defend itself against the EGT grain consortium in Longview, Washington, in 2011 should make it more than obvious that this agency’s whole purpose is to enforce anti-union laws, not to be “fair” to labor.

After ILWU officials had agreed to the union working under the terms of the overwhelmingly rejected contract with the Grain Handlers Association, we observed in “Longshore Unions Under the Gun” (WV No. 1015, 11 January):

“There is no question of the stakes faced by the longshore unions, particularly now the ILWU. But one thing is for sure: playing by the bosses’ laws is a losing game. The whole reason these laws exist is to outlaw labor from mobilizing its social power based on its collective strength to stop the flow of goods and shut down production. But this truth is obfuscated by the bureaucrats. Instead, they have whipped up fear that if the union goes on strike, the law would permit the companies to permanently hire the scabs. By these lights, it is better to accept a company lockout that supposedly precludes such a union-busting outcome.

“It’s not the bosses’ laws, but the relative strength and determination of the opposing forces that decide who wins and who loses in any strike, as in any conflict. By working the rejected contract terms, the ILWU is creating ‘facts on the ground’ that will be harder to reverse.”

The whole aim of the Vancouver lockout is to force the union to sign on to the concessions in that contract or be busted. Indeed, the spokesman for the Pacific Northwest Grain Handlers Association is gloating that the number of managers and other scabs used to work the first ship shows that the task can be done with fewer workers than the longshore union dispatched under their previous contract. Now the ILWU International is pleading with the grain bosses to return to the bargaining table. A letter from Leal Sundet, co-chair of the union’s grain negotiating team, pointed to the TEMCO agreement as evidence of “the union’s commitment to reaching a deal that maintains American industry standards and working conditions while addressing the concerns that elevator operators bring to the table.”

ILWU International president Robert McEllrath (whose home local is Local 4) promoted the union’s deal with TEMCO as having been “achieved because American companies, farmers and workers recognize a common interest in our country’s resources and economic well being. That common interest is not reflected in the grain companies that have unilaterally implemented a contract that undermines American working standards at their competing facilities.” The ILWU tops’ chauvinist appeals to the union’s “common interests” with the U.S.-based grain bosses against their foreign-owned competitors are deadly dangerous for workers. Such expressions of red-white-and-blue patriotism shackle the interests of the union to the profitability of American imperialism and are poison to the struggle of workers around the globe against their common class enemies.

International labor solidarity is especially vital to longshore workers, whose very jobs depend on world trade. A January press release from the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) reported on the solidarity with the ILWU expressed by members of the Japanese Seamen’s Union crewing a grain ship at the United Grain terminal in Vancouver: “As union members themselves, who are among 4.5 million workers united as affiliates of the ITF, they knew the players involved as well as the high stakes for workers.” Imagine if the Japanese Seamen’s Union had declared that its interests lay in defending the Mitsui owners of United Grain in order to advance the “economic well being” of Japanese imperialism!

The world’s grain supply is controlled by a handful of agribusiness giants, including U.S.-based TEMCO. Their profits are secured through driving up food prices worldwide at the human cost of the starvation and death of millions across the globe. At home, they are purchased through jacking up the exploitation of the working class, which is why all of the grain companies are out to break the back of the ILWU. What the grain bosses get away with will set the stage for the shipping bosses of the Pacific Maritime Association, whose contract with the ILWU is up in 2014.

Two roads lie before the ILWU. There is the bureaucrats’ promotion of the lie of a partnership between labor and capital, which has seriously undermined the union’s strength and now threatens its potential destruction as an industrial union. Or there is the class-struggle road of mobilizing the power of the working class in necessary battles against the capitalist class enemy. It is in the crucible of such struggle that a new leadership of the unions will be forged. This is not simply a question of militancy but of a leadership that will arm the working class with a revolutionary understanding of the nature of capitalist society and of its own power and historic interests as a class fighting for itself and all the oppressed. That struggle requires a political expression—a revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not simply to defend the working class against the scourge of its own devastation but to rid the planet of the source of that devastation, capitalism itself, and the state power that preserves it.