ILA Longshore Workers Under the Whip

Speedup on the Docks

From the outset of negotiations for the new master contract with the employers’ U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX) two years ago, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) leadership has been stoking fears of automation. While technology has claimed jobs in recent years, the bosses are not even threatening to fully automate the terminals under ILA jurisdiction. The purpose of the union bureaucracy’s fearmongering is nothing other than to pitch even more dangerous speedup for capitalist profit, which has long marked work on the docks. According to a 21 July 2019 ILA press release, at the union’s convention held in Florida last summer, President Harold J. Daggett “challenged ILA members to prove to management that longshoremen could outperform automated machinery to protect ILA work and jurisdiction.” At the very same convention, he pointed out that there have been 14 deaths on the docks over the last two years, a testament to hazardous work conditions that this productivity drive can only make worse.

As part of this drive, the ILA bureaucrats have pledged to increase the rate at which cranes move containers on and off the ships. For example, the 2018-24 local contract for the Port of New York and New Jersey mandates speedup under threat of discipline: an annual increase of one move per hour above the baseline set by management at the start of the contract. In the event that the quota is missed, longshore workers and even entire work crews can be kicked off the job and discriminated against in future hiring. Addressing the union convention delegates, Daggett declared: “You presidents of the locals, you gotta enforce that.” Meanwhile, ILA officials from different locals regularly engage in cutthroat competition against one another for containerized cargo work, offering to have the job done faster in a race to the bottom.

The ILA bureaucracy is pushing longshore workers to the max in the name of contractual “protections against automation.” Truth is, the USMX contract contains no real protections. It only prohibits “fully automated” operations, understood to be “machinery/equipment devoid of human interaction.” Even at the two terminals at the Los Angeles/Long Beach port considered to be fully automated (the only such terminals in the U.S. today), human involvement is needed.

Furthermore, the East Coast shipping and stevedoring companies have expressed no intention of fully automating terminals there. A Moody’s port automation study shows that fully automated terminals are feasible and profitable only in L.A./Long Beach and the largest ports of Europe. The smaller ports of the East Coast are instead candidates for semi-automated terminals, like those in Bayonne, New Jersey, and in Virginia, where remote-controlled cranes stack containers in the storage yards. Nonetheless, these terminals are currently less productive than non-automated terminals (see “More North American Port Automation Expected,” Journal of Commerce, 4 July 2019).

NY-NJ Port: A Case Study in Overwork

Even before the recent campaign for greater productivity on the docks, the work pace was unhealthy and dangerous, not least at the NY-NJ port. Almost all ILA members there are employed by one or another company to regularly work at a specific pier or terminal, and the companies force them to work as many as seven days a week in the busy season or whenever there is a labor shortage. Company intimidation to work when one is sick or exhausted jeopardizes the safety of longshore workers and everyone around them. Rather than working fixed shifts, longshoremen are made to work until a ship is finished. Thus, the “work day” can run 24 hours or more, interspersed with paid rest periods of two or more hours.

This excessive overtime causes fatigue and accidents. But with union dues calculated as a percentage of total money earned by a worker, the ILA bureaucrats act as overtime-hustling labor brokers for the bosses. The previous ILA contract with the New York Shipping Association (NYSA) stipulated that union members could refuse their 8 a.m. work orders if they had worked past midnight the night before. That rule has been all but eliminated from the new contract, which gives management more power to punish longshoremen who work until 5 or 6 a.m. and refuse to go back to work that same morning.

Unsafe conditions—sleep deprivation, the speedup endorsed by the ILA tops, the lack of mechanics and resources to properly maintain the machines, the use of non-union labor and more—make for disasters in waiting. When one occurs, the ILA bureaucrats do everything to evade their own responsibility for failing to uphold safety standards. Four years ago, when Judy Jones was killed on the Elizabeth, New Jersey, docks, their initial response was to imply it was her fault for failing to use a non-existent pedestrian walkway (see “New Jersey Docks: Death Trap,” WV No. 1073, 4 September 2015).

ILA officials rely on company safety departments to adjudicate safety issues. But establishing safe work conditions requires constant vigilance and struggle against the employers. Longshore workers need union safety committees, with representatives who have the authority to shut down unsafe work on the spot, as well as union hiring halls, which would give the union substantial control over job allocation and allow for the equitable distribution of work. Such gains can only be achieved by mobilizing the collective strength of the union in class battle. However, the ILA and other trade-union officials believe problems are settled not by mass struggle but by conciliation of the bosses.

“Partnership” Between Labor and Capital Is a Lie

The capitalist class enemy John Nardi, president of NYSA, was an invited guest speaker at the ILA convention, where he implored longshore workers “to be more productive.” Then, Daggett put his arm around Nardi and pointed his finger at the union delegates in the audience: “If anybody is lazy on the pier, light a fire under their ass, that’s your job.”

This is a sickening display of pure class collaboration, that is, the lie that the capitalists and their wage slaves are “partners” with common interests. Nothing could be further from the truth. Workers, even relatively better-paid ones, sell their labor power to survive, while the capitalists reap fabulous profits from exploiting that labor. The bosses reward class collaboration with a kick in the teeth to the union membership: layoffs, wage cuts and union-busting. On the political level, class collaborationism takes the form of support to the capitalist parties—usually the Democrats, although the ILA bureaucracy pours millions of dollars of union dues down the rat holes of both parties.

The bosses’ drive to increase the exploitation of labor is evident in the USMX contract. Starting pay for new hires, set at $20 an hour under the 2012 contract, will remain fixed at that amount until 2024! Then, new hires will be earning approximately half the top base pay. Wage tiers violate the basic union principle of equal pay for equal work at top rate. The inequality of ILA wages is further aggravated by the inequality of the container royalty check, with newer workers receiving a smaller bonus check or no check at all.

These checks, a cut of which goes to the union locals, were introduced with the advent of containerization in the 1960s, when the ILA misleaders agreed to surrender jobs to automation in exchange for annual payments based on container cargo tonnage to those who remained. “Profit sharing” schemes and productivity bonuses like these checks aim to convince workers to accept speedup and job losses by promoting the myth that they have a stake in boosting profits. These bonuses impose conditions on earnings that should simply get added to the hourly wage.

For a Shorter Workweek with No Loss in Pay!

In recent years, different forms of automation have been rolled out at the NY-NJ port, including in 2014 the commissioning of its first semi-automated terminal, in Bayonne. Much automation currently taking place is computerization that eliminates jobs for Local 1, which represents the checkers who track containers and keep other records.

Automation should benefit the whole of society. But under capitalism, it is used to maximize profits and eliminate jobs. Against the unemployment created by the capitalist system, it is necessary to fight for a sliding scale of hours to divide the available work among all workers with no loss in pay. This fight will run up against the resistance of the bosses, posing the need to get rid of the entire system of production for profit.

There should be no illusions that the pro-capitalist ILA bureaucracy will take up any such struggle. A class-struggle leadership of the unions must be forged. Such a leadership would break all ties between the unions and the capitalist parties, champion the cause of black freedom and immigrant rights and launch a campaign to organize the unorganized, including the non-union terminals and non-union workers at the ports—port truckers, computer technicians, office staff and janitors. This perspective requires a political expression: a workers party, built in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans, to lead the fight to abolish the system of wage slavery through socialist revolution.

When those who labor rule, the means of production will be taken away from the capitalists and made the collective property of the working class. In such a society, labor-saving technology would mean less time spent at work and a vast improvement in conditions of life for the population as a whole. Moreover, technological progress would be greatly accelerated under a centralized planned economy and an international division of labor. A world socialist order would lead to an enormous expansion of production and the elimination of scarcity, laying the basis for the abolition of class society with all its barbaric inequality, racism and war.

The Eight-Hour Day: Some Buried Labor History

By compelling workers to toil for long hours with few days off, the bosses have in effect turned back the clock to the 19th century. Back then, such onerous conditions galvanized the American labor movement into taking up its first great cause: the fight for an eight-hour day. May 1 is the international workers’ holiday born out of the heat of strikes in the U.S. for a shorter workday and ensuing street battles against cops and armed company thugs.

The 1880s movement for an eight-hour day was a struggle to work fewer hours with no loss in pay. The slogan was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will!” Workers sought to win free time for leisure and—most importantly for the militant workers of the day—free time to read, study and organize themselves in the fight to abolish capitalism and build a new society where the workers rule.

Ira Steward, an anti-slavery abolitionist who later became a revolutionary Marxist in the Workingman’s Party of the U.S., was a leading organizer of the movement for the eight-hour day in Boston. In 1878, while advocating this fight, he explained:

“All Labor Reformers should bear in mind that any relief to which capitalistic rule gives consent will only be nominal—never real! They should remember that any real relief must come through the rule of the workingmen alone. It is evident, therefore, that the first duty of the Labor Reformer is to organize the working class into a political party by which means alone they can assume the power to make the laws by which labor or capital will be obliged to obey.”

—quoted in “Ira Steward and the Eight Hour Day,” Science & Society, Spring 1956 [emphases in original]