Pascagoula, Mississippi

Victory to Northrop Grumman Shipyard Strike!

MARCH 12—In a key battle for labor in the open shop South, over 7,000 workers at Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, walked off the job on March 8 and set up picket lines. The strikers are taking on the world’s largest naval shipbuilder—and the biggest private employer in Mississippi. Production has been shut down at Ingalls, where Navy destroyers and Coast Guard cutters are built. Today, some 1,000 marchers, members of all the unions at the shipyard, demonstrated their determination along the six-mile route from the shipyard to downtown Pascagoula. Fourteen unions are on strike, including eleven grouped in the Pascagoula Metal Trades Council.

Workers are demanding greater wage increases and no increase in health care premiums. They walked out after having twice decisively voted down contract proposals from the company. The last offer shortened the term of the contract from four to three years but still would have raised wages only a meager $2.50 an hour by 2009 and would raise health care premiums by 50 percent when workers don’t even have dental or vision coverage.

While the company is rolling in money—it did over $30 billion in business last year alone—many of the workers are still struggling to recover from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which exposed the lethal incompetence and racist contempt displayed at all levels of government for the Gulf’s residents. As The Mississippi Press (11 March) reported, “Many workers said that cost-of-living, spikes in gas prices, rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina and other factors led to the 90 percent opposition from union members who voted on the contract.”

Government mediators are pressing the unions to settle, but workers are saying that they are prepared to hold out on the picket lines. Workers have cheered when tractor-trailers approaching the shipyard with supplies for the plant make a U-turn. Every trade unionist should honor the picket line—picket lines mean don’t cross!

This strike follows other walkouts against military contractors, including at Boeing in 2005-06 and Sikorsky Aircraft in 2006, during the U.S. imperialists’ murderous wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. capitalist drive for profits and world domination is behind the war and occupation of Iraq and is reflected at home in a war on workers, black people and immigrants. But the labor bureaucracy pushes the lie that there is a partnership between labor and the filthy rich capitalists who run the country, that American workers share a common “national interest” with their exploiters. Ron Ault, head of the AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department, expresses this view when he complains that the U.S. is losing its “status as the last super power.”

A victorious strike at this large shipyard would be a boon to union organizing throughout the South. Central to this task is the need to combat racist discrimination on and off the job. About half of the shipyard workers are black. Throughout the South, including Mississippi, whose state flag incorporates the flag of the slave-owning Confederacy, black workers and a growing number of immigrants form a major component of the working class.

The big-business media have reported that workers at other Northrop Grumman shipyards along the Gulf Coast—in Avondale, Gulfport and Tallulah—accepted the same contract that the Ingalls workers rejected. What they don’t say is that the workers at the other yards won their first contract in 2001 and only now reached the pay and benefit levels won at Ingalls. A major impetus for organizing these shipyards came from the union stronghold in Pascagoula, exemplified by powerful strikes in 1974 and 1999. Pascagoula Metal Trades Council president Mike Crowley told Workers Vanguard that due to a “me too” contract clause, gains at Ingalls would be passed on to workers at the other three yards. Victory to the Northrop Grumman shipyard workers strike!