Port Bosses Sue Union for $5 Million

ILA Under Attack Over Strike to Save Jobs

Labor Must Defend the ILA!

Seeking to punish the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) for a two-day walkout last September, the New York Shipping Association (NYSA) bosses and 18 ocean carriers filed a lawsuit on December 3 in a New Jersey federal court demanding over $5 million in “damages.” In a notable display of labor power, ILA members had shut down operations on the docks in the Philadelphia and New York City areas on September 28-29 to protest Del Monte Fresh Produce Co.’s plans to tear up its contract with Philly-based ILA Local 1291 and move their jobs to a facility with a company union.

The work stoppage—the biggest job action by dock workers on the East Coast since a 1986 strike—was a refreshing example of labor actually fighting back against the bosses’ union-busting attacks. But in the end, Del Monte got its way, and now the waterfront bosses are demanding that the ILA pay for its “illegal” work stoppage. The lawsuit is a dangerous attack on the ILA and all dock workers, as well as a warning to the entire union movement. All of labor must take a stand in defense of the longshoremen and demand: Hands off the ILA!

The September strike pitted members of Local 1291 against both a produce company reviled around the world for its attacks on workers’ rights and the notorious anti-union terminal operators in the Holt family. Del Monte was threatening to shift the unloading of its ships from an ILA terminal in Camden, New Jersey, to a nearby Holt-owned facility in Gloucester City. Facing the prospect of losing 200 or more jobs, Local 1291 longshoremen set up informational picket lines at the ports. Some 4,500 ILA and other workers, including truckers organized by the Teamsters as well as independent truckers, honored the pickets. Twelve ships piled with containers were idled in New York Harbor on the first day alone.

A few hours into the strike, a federal judge issued an injunction ordering the ILA to resume work. But pickets stayed up for a second day in defiance of the injunction, and of top ILA officials who urged longshoremen to stop picketing. Workers ended the job action only after the major shippers agreed to enter into negotiations over Del Monte’s use of non-union labor. But Del Monte was dead set on driving out the union. From closing newly unionized processing plants in Hawaii to brutally harassing and systematically firing union leaders on its plantations in Latin America, this multinational conglomerate is a committed union-buster.

In Camden, according to the union, the ILA longshoremen who unloaded Del Monte’s ships had worked at the same wage rate for the past 19 years and were saddled with the stingiest pension plan in the industry. At Del Monte’s urging, the ILA brass last summer offered up massive concessions, amounting to $5 million per year in wage cuts and other givebacks from Local 1291, in order to keep its contract. Smelling blood, Del Monte and Holt only then announced the shift in port operations. The capitalist snakes were not so much after concessions as the opportunity to deliver a sharp blow to the ILA’s presence on the docks.

For decades, the Holts have gobbled up waterfront property on the Delaware River and conspired to undermine ILA contracts and break the union. At Gloucester City, the Holts, assisted by a Teamsters raiding operation, drove out the ILA in 1993 and in its place set up a “labor” front known as Independent Dock workers Local 1. This classic company union has no existence outside of a single office supplied by Holt at the terminal. Today, under the auspices of “Local 1,” ruthlessly exploited workers are handling the Del Monte cargo for half the pay of ILA longshoremen.

It will take hard class struggle to bring the likes of Del Monte and the Holts to heel—and to organize the longshoremen at Gloucester City. But the pro-capitalist ILA tops are instead pursuing a consumer boycott of Del Monte products, which was announced on Labor Day. This timeworn losing strategy, which seeks to drum up liberal public opinion against the bosses, is an impotent substitute for unleashing labor’s social power: its unique ability to bring production, transport and the movement of goods to a halt.

Local 1291 leaders have also encouraged union supporters to ask Pennsylvania’s outgoing Democratic Party governor Ed Rendell to pressure Del Monte and the Holts to bring back the ILA jobs. One might as well play the lottery. Although they sometimes pose as “friends of labor,” the Democrats no less than the Republicans are representatives of the capitalist class enemy. In fact, the Holts got their start with assistance from Democratic governor Robert Casey Sr. and later were lavished with state largesse by the very same Rendell when he was governor. The simple truth is that the class interests of the workers are irreconcilably counterposed to those of the capitalists and their political parties.

Over the years, the bosses have regularly turned to the agencies of the capitalist state, especially the courts, to shackle the ILA’s power. On November 1, the federal court now considering the NYSA’s lawsuit issued a permanent injunction barring the ILA from threatening or engaging in another work stoppage related to the dispute with Del Monte. Recently, the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor held “investigative” hearings focusing on the ILA, signaling its intent to set up a new round of “anti-corruption” prosecutions, which the Feds have long used to weaken the union. Meanwhile, with its mandatory background checks, the government’s Transportation Worker Identification Credential program has disproportionately victimized black and immigrant workers in the name of securing the nation’s ports from “terror” threats.

The renewed attacks on this industrial union, a stronghold of black labor in the South, are calculated to further undercut wages and working conditions on the East and Gulf Coast docks in advance of a shipping boom expected to follow the completion of the Panama Canal’s expansion, slated for 2014. Upgrades totaling some $827 million are planned for the New York/New Jersey ports alone over the next five years. Already, ILA locals up and down the coast try to underbid each other—as well as other unions and non-union outfits—to secure contracts for “break bulk” (non-containerized) cargo, such as fruit. With industry magnates crowing over “port-to-port competition,” the employers are clearly gearing up to pit ILA members against the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

The situation cries out for one industrial union of all port workers nationwide that fights for equal pay, benefits and protections at the highest standards. The fate of longshoremen on both coasts, who at present are an increasingly isolated bastion of union labor on the waterfront, is inextricably linked to the need for an aggressive campaign to organize the unorganized port truckers, warehouse and intermodal workers. This will require defending the immigrant workers who fill many of these jobs, including against the repressive “anti-terror” measures that target them. It is out of struggles to rebuild industrial unions as battalions of the multiracial working class against the bosses that a new labor leadership must be forged, one armed with a program of working-class independence from the bourgeois state and dedicated to building a workers party that fights for a workers government.