PMA Brings Armed Thugs to Federal Mediation Meeting

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 788, 4 October 2002.

As we go to press, we have learned from a 1 October ILWU press release that ILWU officers walked out of talks with the PMA and federal mediators in Oakland when union representatives were “greeted by gun-toting security guards under the employment of the PMA.” As ILWU International president Jim Spinosa declared: “This is an outrageous action taken by [PMA head] Miniace and the PMA. This shows how they approach negotiations, hiding behind the government and armed thugs. PMA’s lockout is holding a gun to the head of the American economy and now they move to aim real guns at us. We will not be intimidated by these kinds of tactics and we will never reach an agreement as long as the PMA acts as if it can force a settlement at gun point rather than negotiate.”

West Coast Shipping Bosses Lock Out Longshore Union

Defeat PMA/Government Union-Busting! Victory to the ILWU!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 788, 4 October 2002.

OAKLAND, October 1—As of 6 p.m. Sunday, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), representing shippers and terminal operators, has indefinitely locked out members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) from all West Coast docks. Union members have no intention of sitting idle while the bosses attack them; over the weekend, union members in Oakland mobilized to stand “curbside to keep a 24-hour watch on behalf of the union, making sure the cranes stayed still during the lockout” (San Francisco Chronicle, 29 September). To prevent the PMA from using non-union labor to move cargo, the ILWU set up pickets outside the docks in ports up and down the coast.

The entire labor movement must mobilize in solidarity with the longshore workers to ensure that nothing moves in or out of West Coast docks.

The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) has indicated that any picket lines set up by ILWU members at East and Gulf Coast ports to stop diverted ships would be honored. Especially given the interconnected character of “intermodal” shipping, the solidarity of transport workers—from Teamsters to railway workers to port truckers—is key. The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) has expressed its solidarity with the ILWU against “anti-union bullying,” while the Maritime Union of Australia reaffirmed an earlier pledge of “full financial, political and industrial support.” With dock workers under assault globally, workers in every country must come to the defense of the ILWU. This is particularly important in Canada, where ILWU members work under a separate contract.

A 36-hour lockout of the ILWU was first imposed last Friday, a provocative action which the PMA arrogantly called a “cooling-off period.” Then after workers had been back at work for only one shift, the PMA announced it was re-imposing the lockout until the union either agrees to extend the old contract, which expired on July 1, or accepts a new one. Negotiations which began in May have stalled over the PMA’s determination to break the union by outsourcing jobs generated through new technology to non-union personnel. This is a direct attack on the union hiring hall which is key to defending working conditions.

The Bush administration has been threatening the ILWU for months with government strikebreaking, from invoking a Taft-Hartley anti-strike injunction to militarizing the docks. While the government has not yet intervened, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer warned that if the lockout “goes on for even a short period of time, it’s a problem for the economy. We’re monitoring it carefully.” This is nothing but a thinly veiled threat against the ILWU. The government has also tried to strong-arm the ILWU to agree to federal mediation, another form of state intervention that would hamstring the union and effectively take away its power to struggle.

If the PMA and government are allowed to break the power of the ILWU, every reactionary attack on the working class—from assaults on blacks and working people at home to U.S. imperialism’s increasingly aggressive foreign adventures—will be intensified. At the same time, the PMA’s lockout, in attempting to punish the workers for their determination to defend themselves through the union, has graphically demonstrated the organized workers’ potential power by bringing the ports to a grinding halt. The Journal of Commerce (30 September) reported that there were approximately 100 ships paralyzed in the ports or at anchor by Sunday night alone. Robin Lanier, executive director of the West Coast Waterfront Coalition, which represents importers and exporters, complained: “It’s bad. In a word, it sucks” (Oakland Tribune, 1 October).

Blood and Profit

The initial lockout came the day after the ILWU Negotiating Committee passed a resolution which “calls on longshore workers to follow all safety procedures including speed limits, to refrain from working extended shifts, working through lunch hours, or doubling back” (ILWU Web site, 26 September Weekly Member Update). “Doubling back”—working two shifts in a 24-hour period—results in exhausted workers who are in grave danger of injury. The ten-mile-per-hour speed limit on the docks is critical with the huge equipment used to move containers in tight spaces.

PMA head Joseph Miniace called the ILWU’s request that its members follow the employer-sanctioned Pacific Coast Marine Safety Code a “strike with pay.” This only underlines that the billions in profits the shipping bosses make are stained with the blood of workers maimed and killed on the job. As the Partisan Defense Committee said in a 30 September protest letter to the PMA: “Your claim that this constitutes a ‘slowdown’ merely reflects that the PMA-associated stevedoring and shipping companies normally drive the workers on the docks to work long hours, often in double shifts, operating container haulers and cranes at breakneck speeds in total violation of any concern for safety.”

In fact, longshoremen have been moving record levels of cargo through West Coast ports. According to the Journal of Commerce (25 September), “The Port of Los Angeles reported a 30 percent increase in loaded inbound containers in August, while imports through Tacoma increased 26 percent.” As ILWU spokesman Steve Stallone stated, “The companies have instituted the biggest speedup that ever happened, and it’s dangerous.”

The ranks of the union have grown increasingly angry with the speedup and provocations of the employers on the docks. Just one week earlier, the PMA threatened to lock out the ILWU in the ports of Long Beach and L.A. over union action at the notoriously unsafe Stevedoring Services of America terminal in Long Beach, where a worker died on September 3 (ILWU statement, 18 September). As ILWU president Jim Spinosa wrote in a letter to the PMA, “The industry has seen five people die from industrial accidents since the start of these negotiations” (ILWU press release, 20 September). But the bosses are utterly indifferent to how many workers die; they want massive speedup, and the union is in the way.

The Need for a Workers Party

The attacks on the ILWU are integrally linked with the current U.S. imperialist war moves. Navy crane operators are already stationed in San Diego and are ready to move into the ports as other U.S. troops are being prepared to unleash war against the Iraqi masses. Today, in the midst of an economic collapse brought about by the capitalist profit system itself, Wall Street and Washington aim to restore profits by driving down the living standards of the workers while they move to secure their domination around the globe. The so-called “war on terror” is in reality a war on the working class and the oppressed, both at home and abroad. Support to flag-waving patriotism only undermines the union’s ability to struggle.

In answer to administration threats, the ILWU tops lobbied Democratic Party government officials to intercede with Bush, but Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have both “declined to take a stand” (Oakland Tribune, 1 October). The union’s 26 September Weekly Member Update claims that a letter from the Bush Department of Labor “denied outright in writing that they have any intention of intervening in the ILWU/PMA labor negotiations.” The exigencies of preparing the nation for war, including Washington’s determination to keep up the flow of trade with Asia, may have temporarily shielded the union from an aggressive government intervention. But whether run by either capitalist party, Democrat or Republican, the government is not neutral—it administers a state machine of repression dedicated to defending capitalist property and profits.

A strategy of relying on Democratic Party “friends in high places” will cripple the union’s fight to defend itself. Don’t forget that the last invocation of Taft-Hartley against a striking union was Democrat Jimmy Carter’s unsuccessful attempt to use the measure against the miners in 1978. As we wrote in “Capitalism USA: Pink Slips and Pension Theft” (WV No. 787, 20 September):

“The Republicans flaunt their close ties to Wall Street and the Fortune 500 corporations while touting the virtues of unfettered ‘free market’ capitalism. The Democrats are the ‘soft cops’ of American capitalism. They appeal to a different constituency, using a different rhetoric. The particular role of the Democratic Party in American bourgeois politics is to convince the working class and the oppressed black and Latino minorities that they, too, can benefit from the capitalist system with the right kind of government policies and regulations.”

The ILWU can’t both maintain the Democrats as “friends” and mobilize the union and its allies in the workers movement for class war against the capitalists.

Labor solidarity is key to the ILWU’s struggle to defend its very existence. But that solidarity has been undercut by a jurisdictional dispute between the ILWU and the International Association of Machinists (IAM) over which union’s members get mechanics jobs on the docks. According to the Los Angeles Times (14 September), in early September the IAM “threatened to cross ILWU picket lines if a strike were called unless the jurisdictional questions were resolved.” The same article reports that the IAM and others “torpedoed a resolution of solidarity with the ILWU” at a California Labor Federation meeting in San Francisco this summer. The 1970s organizing battles of the United Farm Workers (UFW) in California, in which Teamsters joined gun-toting company goons to intimidate pro-UFW farm workers, were among the more well-known examples of how such jurisdictional disputes are fatal to the interests of the labor movement.

The PMA’s lockout of the ILWU is also an attack on the livelihoods of the heavily immigrant port truckers, many of whom have their own trucks and are paid by the load. The government’s “war on terror” was directed in the first instance at such workers, and they are targeted by the proposed “port security” acts which just passed Congress. So, too, are the members of the ILWU. Longshoremen must reject the attempts by the ILWU bureaucracy to set up the truckers for victimization as security risks and instead fight to unionize the truckers and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

Jurisdictional disputes and anti-immigrant bigotry reflect the outlook of the trade-union bureaucracy, which accepts the framework of capitalism with its craft divisions, pitting one group of workers against another in a struggle over a shrinking pool of jobs. What’s needed instead is a labor fight to organize the unorganized and for a sliding scale of hours, reducing the workweek with no cut in pay to provide jobs for all.

A victory for the ILWU would be a victory for all the workers and oppressed. It could well spark the kind of class struggle that needs to be waged against the rulers of this country. The social power of labor that is evident in the current conflict on the docks must also be mobilized to fight for the broad social needs of the working masses—jobs, education, housing—and against the racial oppression of black people that is the bedrock of capitalism in this country. That calls for a leadership in the unions that stands independent of the bosses and their parties. To extend the fight beyond defensive trade-union actions requires the construction of a revolutionary workers party that will lead the working class to become, as Karl Marx called it, the gravediggers of capitalism. Victory to the longshore workers!