After 15-Week Lockout

Boron Settlement—Setback for ILWU

The lockout of nearly 600 borax miners in the small desert town of Boron, California by Rio Tinto, a notorious international union-busting mining conglomerate, generated widespread sympathy from workers across Southern California and around the world. But this sympathy was never translated into working-class struggle against the company’s drive to destroy the miners’ union, Local 30 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Instead, the misleaders of the ILWU kept other members of the union on the job, processing and shipping scab borax throughout the lockout, which began in early February. Having strangled labor solidarity—most importantly, “hot-cargoing” and building mass pickets to stop all shipments of scab products—the ILWU tops are now hailing a six-year contract settlement that was reached on May 14 as a “victory.”

While Rio Tinto did not get away with enforcing its first contract offer, which would have completely eviscerated the union, the deal the ILWU tops rushed through for approval by the Boron miners was no victory. Its provisions effectively gut seniority, which is vital to the union’s defense of its members against the caprices of the bosses. An article in the ILWU’s Dispatcher (April/May 2010) reports that seniority was maintained in the case of layoffs, but the settlement allows the company to retain “skilled employees... irrespective of their plant seniority, as it deems necessary” in the event of a “reduction in force.” For promotions and job transfers, seniority counts only if the company determines that other “qualifications” are met. Moreover, the settlement allows Rio Tinto to contract out work to non-union labor during supposedly busy periods.

The new contract replaces guaranteed pension benefits for new-hires with a 401(k) plan. At the ratification meeting, Local 30 members cited in the Dispatcher article correctly argued that “this ‘two-tier’ retirement plan could undermine unity between new-hires and veteran employees, erode the pension funding base for current employees, and will eventually eliminate the defined benefits pensions for the next generation of workers.” In short, while the Boron miners’ union local was not destroyed, this deal puts in place contract terms that undermine the unity and solidarity that are vital to the union’s preservation.

Promoting the settlement, ILWU International press spokesman Craig Merrilees declared: “With a union that had a reputation for being a strong and militant union, [to fail] would have had massive implications for workers everywhere” (In These Times, 19 May). But far from bringing the strength of the ILWU to bear in defense of the Boron miners, the ILWU bureaucrats blocked the mobilization of union power. The bureaucrats set up one section of the union to undermine another. Local 20 members processed scab borax at Rio Tinto’s privately owned processing terminal on the docks in Wilmington, California. Local 13 longshoremen at Los Angeles-area docks, and perhaps other ILWU locals, shipped scab Boron products, although the longshoremen were not informed that containers of scab borax were moving through the port. This will indeed have “massive implications,” particularly for the ILWU.

Next in line for the Rio Tinto bosses are members of Local 20, whose contract is up next year. These workers continued to process scab borax throughout the Boron lockout, but this was not for want of solidarity. As we wrote in “ILWU: Don’t Handle Scab Borax!” (WV No. 956, 9 April): “These ILWU members have been kept on the job by the union misleaders who bow in homage to the bosses’ laws banning hot-cargoing and other ‘illegal’ labor actions.”

If the ILWU tops were serious about struggle, they would have at least negotiated common contract expiration dates for Locals 20 and 30, which face the same employer. Instead, the contract settlement with Rio Tinto at Boron in 2004, which cut health benefits by 20 percent, set a pattern for the same cuts in the Local 20 contract two years later. Allowing the bosses to pick off the smaller ILWU locals sets the stage for the port employers of the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) to go after the key longshore and clerks divisions when their contract comes up in 2014. That the ILWU’s largest local, L.A./
Long Beach Local 13, shipped containers of scab borax throughout the lockout will not be lost on the PMA in assessing the fighting capacity of the ILWU.

The Real Lessons of the Boron Lockout

An article in the same issue of the Dispatcher, “Lessons of the Lockout,” points to the tens of thousands of dollars in food and money that was raised for the Boron workers from the ILWU and other unions. The “Docks to the Desert” food caravan, organized by integrated unions from the L.A. region in the early days of the lockout, overawed this tiny Mojave Desert mining town. But real solidarity is more than a charity drive. The workers’ power lies in their numbers, solidarity, and above all their ability to shut down production. While trucks of food rolled into town, Boron workers counted the trucks with containers of scab borax rolling out of the mine. These containers, reportedly in the thousands, went to L.A.-area ports. More scab product was shipped by rail to non-union docks on the Gulf of Mexico, particularly Houston, according to ILWU workers.

ILWU International organizing director Peter Olney told Labor Notes (4 June) that the reason Rio Tinto was “able to hang on is the inventory they built up before the lockout.” In other words, the company was only able to keep the miners locked out for over three months because the ILWU itself kept shipments of this stockpiled inventory moving! Olney himself points out that a central reason for Rio Tinto even coming back to the bargaining table was that production by the outfit of scabs the company had hired was at a mere 35 percent—i.e., inventory was running out. But as a May 14 leaflet put out by left-talking ILWU bureaucrat Jack Heyman and others reported, the ILWU tops blocked Boron miners and other union members who wanted to set up pickets at the L.A. dock to stop these shipments.

A motion authored by Heyman calling on transport workers to refuse to handle scab cargo from Boron was passed in the union’s Bay Area Local 10. A similar motion was passed in the Portland local. Yet when this motion was put forward by a Portland delegate at an early April meeting of the Coast Caucus of the ILWU’s longshore division, the assembled bureaucrats resoundingly voted it down. Instead, a standing ovation was reportedly given to the ILWU leadership for its “public relations” strategy, which was based on portraying the Boron miners as helpless victims of a “British-owned” company. This line was carried out in American flag-waving protests against Rio Tinto at British consulates around the world and at a Rio Tinto shareholders meeting.

In the early days of the lockout, workers from South Africa, Turkey and Australia who themselves have engaged in struggle against Rio Tinto’s rapacious union-busting sent delegates to Boron to show their solidarity. But the potential for real international working-class solidarity was undermined by the red-white-and-blue patriotism promoted by the ILWU misleaders. Instead of appealing to transport workers internationally to refuse to handle scab borax, the bureaucrats portrayed the fight against Rio Tinto not as a fight of the working class against its capitalist class enemies but as a defense of America against a “foreign-owned company.” Such chauvinism is nothing more than an alibi for America’s imperialist rulers, who are second to none in subjugating the workers and oppressed in the U.S. and internationally to their drive for profit and world domination—from the murderous occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the racist cop terror meted out to blacks and immigrants at home.

The ILWU tops promote their “relationships with politicians who are willing to stand up for working families” (Dispatcher, April/May 2010). This encapsulates a fundamental lesson of the Boron lockout: the role that the labor bureaucracy plays in subordinating the interests of the workers to the interests of U.S. capitalism, particularly as represented by the Democratic Party. So strong are the bureaucrats’ ties to the capitalist order that they renounce the class-struggle means through which the unions were built in favor of “corporate campaigns” based on winning the “hearts and minds” of the capitalist media, corporate shareholders and bourgeois politicians.

For a Class-Struggle Leadership!

Heyman presents the current International leadership as trampling on the union’s “militant history of organizing mass pickets on the docks” (see Heyman’s “Bad Strategy in the Boron Strike,” Socialist Worker, 27 May). The union’s founder and longtime leader, Harry Bridges, is often invoked as the exemplar of this tradition. However, it was none other than Bridges himself, as ILWU International president, who stabbed the Boron miners in the back during their 1974 strike, at the cost of 400 jobs. As the “Longshore-Warehouse Militant,” published by a class-struggle opposition in the ILWU which was supported by Workers Vanguard, stated following this defeat:

“At Boron the International allowed a militant local to be defeated by company scabherding. The International allowed things to degenerate so far that Local 20A [now Local 20] went back to work processing scab Boron products while Boron Local 30 was still striking. The International then refused to authorize the longshore division to stop scab borax shipments. Boron was a landmark defeat for our union and Fortune magazine, December 1974, has written the strike up as a management manual for future strikebreaking.”

For all of Heyman’s talk about the need for labor action by the ILWU and transport workers internationally to defend the Boron miners this time around, he never challenged the policies of the bureaucracy that undermined such action head-on. Instead of fighting the ILWU International’s grotesque patriotism, which is counterposed to international labor solidarity, in an April 15 leaflet he merely declared that “flag-waving will not win this battle.” Similarly, in the May 14 leaflet Heyman described the bureaucrats’ “corporate campaign” simply as a “failed strategy.” But this strategy was born of the bureaucracy’s pro-capitalist worldview, which must be fought if the unions are to actually struggle against their exploiters. Instead, the likes of Heyman provide a more “militant” gloss for the class-collaborationist policies of the ILWU bureaucracy of which he is an integral part.

The defense of the livelihoods of the workers against powerful corporations like Rio Tinto is no easy task, particularly in the midst of an economic crisis with millions of jobless. Any real fight is going to come up against the full arsenal of the ruling class, from anti-strike propaganda to naked repression by the courts and cops. To revive the fighting strength of the unions and to bring the mass of unorganized workers into their ranks will take a hard fight against the capitalist class enemy. In the course of this fight must emerge a new labor leadership based on a program of class struggle.

There are real lessons to be drawn from the Boron lockout. First among these is that if the working class is to struggle in its own interests it must be mobilized independent of all the political parties, state and other agencies of the capitalist class enemy. Equally important is the understanding that the workers’ fight is international, based on active solidarity with their class brothers and sisters around the world against the increasing depredations of capitalist imperialism. This needs a political expression: the forging of an internationalist multiracial workers party, whose purpose is to link the struggles to improve the present conditions of the workers and oppressed with the revolutionary aim of sweeping away the entire system of capitalist wage slavery in which their exploitation and oppression are rooted.