Grain Export Bosses Gunning for ILWU

The owners of the grain export terminals in the Pacific Northwest are gearing up for a showdown with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Negotiations over the master grain handlers agreement, which had been set to expire on September 30, were extended until mid October. But the companies are clearly out for blood. The Portland Oregonian (25 September) cited reports from the director of the Columbia River Steamship Operators Association that “managers of four Portland-area terminals and two near Seattle are hiring security forces and making arrangements with nonunion labor” to keep grain shipments moving “in anticipation of locking out striking longshoremen.” Backing up the bosses, the Coast Guard promised that “if there are any indications that protests may occur on the water, the Coast Guard will be on the water to ensure safety of all users.”

Underscoring the arsenal aimed at the ILWU, on September 28, the same day the contract was extended, the union’s International president, Robert McEllrath, was convicted in a retrial on charges stemming from the union’s fight last year against a union-busting offensive by the giant EGT grain export conglomerate in Longview, Washington. McEllrath’s conviction was the latest installment in a vindictive campaign of persecution by the cops, courts and prosecutor’s office against ILWU members, particularly those from its Longview Local 21. One Local 21 member, Sonny Halladay, is now serving 60 days in jail, coerced into copping a plea to several misdemeanor charges for fear of being nailed on bogus felony charges. When the word got out that McEllrath had been sentenced to one day in jail and an 89-day suspended sentence, ILWU members in many West Coast ports walked off the job in protest, with work halted at the Oakland port for two hours.

In their battle with EGT, longshoremen and their allies throughout the region mobilized in early September 2011 in the kind of class-struggle labor actions that built the unions in this country. They backed down an army of cops who had earlier attacked ILWU mass pickets, including manhandling McEllrath. Tons of grain shipped by rail into the EGT terminal were found dumped on the tracks. But this initial militancy ran straight up against the class-collaborationist policies of the ILWU International bureaucracy, which pitched the fight against EGT not as part of the class war between the workers and their exploiters but as a defense of “our grain industry,” i.e., the profitability of American agribusiness.

EGT did not succeed in driving the ILWU out of its Longview operation. This was a not insignificant achievement when unions like Wisconsin public-sector workers are being mowed down by the capitalist union-busters. The union also prevailed in its demand that EGT pay into the ILWU/Pacific Maritime Association health and welfare fund as well as pension plan. But this came at a not insignificant price, with a deeply concessionary contract including 12-hour work shifts and the serious undermining of the union hiring hall and other hard-won union gains. In preserving jobs it has held for over 80 years in Longview and its coastwide organization, the ILWU lived to fight another day. But fight it must, or the EGT contract will become the standard for the ILWU’s bulk grain handling work in the region.

Going into negotiations, the Pacific Northwest Grain Handlers Association pointed to the “much more advantageous” conditions secured by EGT, arguing that “leveling the playing field and avoiding extreme competitive disparities among Northwest grain shippers and ports is vital.” These companies are literally rolling in dough. Among them, U.S.-based Cargill raked in over two billion dollars in profit last year alone, while profits at CHS, a Fortune 500 company, rose a whopping 91 percent. Like the recent savaging of union workers’ wages, pensions and working conditions at Caterpillar, which is reaping record profits, this shreds the myth that workers who sacrifice in “hard times” will be rewarded when things get better. The bosses, as always, are aiming to take more out of the hides of the workers. And now the grain export giants are grabbing the union-busting guns to do so.

Behind the grain bosses stand the container shipping companies in the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), whose contract with the ILWU is up in 2014, shortly before the expansion of the Panama Canal is scheduled for completion. Playing to fears that the companies will send their container ships directly to the East Coast, the PMA bosses will be aiming to squeeze concessions out of the ILWU in the name of maintaining the West Coast’s “competitive edge.”

Better to Fight on Your Feet Than Die on Your Knees!

The stakes in the battle against the Northwest grain terminal owners are high. At the same time, the ILWU has immense potential social power. It is the height of harvest season, and grain is rolling into the region’s terminals, which handle nearly half of U.S. wheat exports and one-quarter of other grain and soybean exports. As was seen in Longview last September, the power of the union lies in its ability to stop these shipments. That means going up against the battery of anti-labor laws outlawing mass pickets, “hot-cargoing,” solidarity strikes and other actions that are crucial weapons of labor in the class war. In the event a battle is joined, solidarity action by other workers in the vast grain cargo chain, not least by rail workers who drive the trains, will be vital.

The most elementary precondition for mobilizing the fighting strength of the union and its allies is the understanding that the employers are not the “partners” of longshoremen but their class enemy. But the ILWU bureaucracy continues to sing the same song of its partnership with the employers. In an article in the September issue of the ILWU’s Dispatcher titled “Grain and Greed in the Northwest,” Leal Sundet, an ILWU Coast Committeeman and co-chair of its grain negotiating team, promotes the union’s role in making the Northwest “one of the most productive grain export regions in the world.” Said productivity, which generates golden profits for the grain export magnates, is based on the exploitation of longshore and other labor. The bosses are out to ratchet this up by shredding union gains.

Waving the red, white and blue, the article attributes the grain bosses’ offensive to “multinational greed.” Busting unions to jack up profits is as American as apple pie. The U.S. grain industry is the biggest and most profitable in the world. The profits of these monopolies are secured through driving up food prices as high as possible, at the human cost of the starvation and death of millions across the globe. The ILWU could—and needs to—win crucial allies from workers in other countries, particularly in East Asia, the largest booming market for U.S. grain exports. But the prospect of such solidarity is poisoned by the union leaders’ defense of the very grain industry that uses food as a weapon against the workers and oppressed masses of the world.

ILA Caves

Most recently, the leaders of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which organizes East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, made their own pledge of allegiance to the national interests of American capitalism by agreeing to a 90-day extension of their master contract, which had been set to expire the same day as the ILWU’s grain agreement. In the words of the federal mediator called in to head off a showdown, the ILA and U.S. Maritime Alliance, which is demanding massive concessions, agreed to this extension “for the good of the country.” Looming even larger from the vantage point of the trade-union bureaucracy was the impending presidential election.

Like the rest of the AFL-CIO officialdom, the ILA and ILWU have thrown their support behind Democratic president Barack Obama. Playing on justifiable fears of the in-your-face Republican union-busters, the bureaucrats sell the Democrats as the only alternative for the working class. But the tattered myth that the Democrats are some kind of “friends of labor” could have really gone up in smoke in a confrontation between the ILA and the shipping bosses. Just as Obama’s Coast Guard and other Homeland Security forces had been mobilized to put down any battle to stop the first ship from being loaded at the EGT terminal in Longview, there is little question that the Democratic Party president would have come down on the side of the shipping bosses by invoking Taft-Hartley against the union. So the ILA leadership pulled back, sacrificing the union’s critical leverage at the height of the Christmas goods shipping season—the most lucrative of the year—as a gift to Obama.

Simultaneous strike action by the ILA in the eastern and southern ports and by the ILWU in the Pacific Northwest could have electrified all of labor. These are two of the most powerful unions in the country. But the ILA caved. This came on the heels of the two unions promising “mutual support” when they announced the formation of a Maritime Labor Alliance (MLA) between the ILWU, ILA and four other maritime unions in mid September. It was clear from the start that this alliance was far from a vehicle for uniting port workers in struggle against the employers. On the contrary, the main battle cry of the press release announcing the formation of the MLA was to “vigorously protect our jurisdictions.” A recent example of what this means can be seen at the Portland port, where the ILWU has been going after the equivalent of two container maintenance jobs that have been held by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) for over 30 years. In its bid for these jobs, the ILWU filed a joint suit with the PMA bosses against the Philippines-based ICTSI shipping company, which now runs the terminal that employs these workers.

Such jurisdictional fights to grab a shrinking number of maintenance-related jobs are the bureaucrats’ answer to the projected loss of traditional longshore jobs due to the increasing automation of work at the ports. This means driving other unions like the IBEW and International Association of Machinists, whose members currently do maintenance and mechanical work at some terminals, off the ports. All of the port unions should be fighting together for jobs at the highest union pay, benefits and working conditions, and for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work around. While pitting union against union, the ILWU and the ILA are themselves increasingly isolated outposts of organized labor at the ports, surrounded by tens of thousands of low-wage, non-union workers, from trucking to the vast inland warehouse empires and intermodal rail facilities. The crucial battle to preserve and extend the unions’ strength is to organize the unorganized!

As we wrote in “Lessons of the Battle of Longview” (WV No. 996, 17 February):

“Let those union militants and their allies who fought so courageously draw the lessons to prepare for future battles. If the unions are to be instruments of struggle against the bosses, they must break the chains forged by the labor misleaders that have shackled the workers to the interests of the capitalist exploiters and their political parties. The continued existence of the ILWU as a powerful industrial union cries out for a class-struggle fight to unionize the masses of unorganized workers, such as the port truckers, which would require combating anti-immigrant chauvinism and organizing them at full union pay, benefits and working conditions....

“The red-white-and-blue bureaucrats must be ousted in a fight for a class-struggle leadership, one whose banner will be the red flag of working-class internationalism! Such a leadership will arm the workers for some hard-fought battles against the capitalist exploiters and lay the basis for forging a multiracial workers party, one that will fight for a socialist revolution to uproot the whole system of wage slavery, racial oppression, poverty and imperialist war.”