Dockworker union wants employers to ignore work stoppages
LONG BEACH, Calif. – If anyone thinks West Coast longshoremen are ready to quit calling work stoppages over social or political issues in faraway lands, think again.
For decades, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union has engaged in work stoppages and boycotts over issues unrelated to their labor contract with the Pacific Maritime Association.
The practice infuriates shippers and waterfront employers. They note that a containership sitting idle in port can cost a carrier $50,000 a day, and can cost shippers even more in supply-chain disruptions. Waterfront work stoppages also hurt low-paid harbor truck drivers, whose compensation based on the number of containers they haul.
But ILWU President Brian McWilliams said that regardless of contracts or costs to anyone else, the union doesn’t plan to change.
He told a transportation audience in Long Beach this week that the ILWU doesn’t expect waterfront employers to endorse the protests, but he asks that employers refrain from taking legal action when the union appears to violate the no-strike clause in the waterfront contract.
“Don’t stand in front of the train,” Brian McWilliams told the International Trade Club of Southern California. “We just ask that you look the other way.”
The ILWU has a long history of activism on issues involving social justice around the world. Over the years, West Coast dockworkers have boycotted ships from South Africa to protest apartheid, and from Chile after the coup that resulted in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973. In the 1960s they boycotted grapes picked by non-union workers in support of the United Farm Workers movement.
Last November, the ILWU shut down West Coast ports in solidarity with demonstrators at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. The union in recent years also boycotted vessels it charged were loaded by non-union dockers in Britain and Australia.
“This is our legacy. This is our ongoing history,” McWilliams said.
As costs have increased, employers have become less willing to indulge the ILWU in its protests. Through the Pacific Maritime Association, they’ve become increasingly willing to take the union to court to press for damages, especially when the ILWU job actions involve issues unrelated to the workplace.
“The Pacific Maritime Association is aware of the ILWU position on issues like those associated with the World Trade Organization,” PMA President Joseph Miniace said in a brief written response to McWilliams’ speech.
“We cannot endorse job actions that they would take in support of their views that are not consistent with their commitment under our collective bargaining agreement,” Miniace said.
Waterfront employers note that they also oppose social injustice around the world, but say they object strongly when the ILWU makes them the target for policies they can not influence. McWilliams did not attempt to dispute that logic. “You see yourselves as fair employers. You don’t support those policies,” he said.
He pointed out that when the ILWU engages in a job action over social issues, the union usually tries to minimize the impact by giving employers notice so they can adjust their operations. And he said such job actions are usually limited in scope and duration.
ILWU job actions over social justice issues have such a long history on the West Coast that a set of unwritten rules and responses have been established, said David Olson, a professor of labor studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Olson formerly held the Harry Bridges chair on labor studies at the university.
“There is a distinction between the formal, written language of the contract and the informal, non-written conventions and understandings that always arise,” Olson said.
When there is a costly, prolonged strike that disrupts shipping patterns on the West Coast, waterfront employers take appropriate action under the contract. However, when a limited job action occurs, certain unwritten practices take over, Olson said. These actions may include giving advance notice, limiting the duration of the strike to one or two shifts, or ensuring that the action does not escalate beyond the specific purpose of the strike.
This unwritten behavior on the part of labor and employers can be just as important to the smooth operation of the waterfront as the technical language of the contract, Olson added.
Nor is this type of action limited to the ILWU. As industry becomes more globalized, unions representing steel workers, electrical workers, service industry employees and auto workers are taking an activist role on social justice issues.
“My reading is that this is the direction trade unions are taking. There will be an increasing amount of action,” Olson said.
Olson said the protests seem illogical for a West Coast longshore workforce that averaged $100,000 for a 40-hour work week last year. But he added, “If you focus exclusively on tangible rewards of work, you are missing a significant dimension of what motivates behavior among workers.”
The goal of waterfront labor is to get employers to think “outside of the box,” which in the maritime industry means the ocean container, McWilliams said.
Although the emphasis in shipping is to move more containers more efficiently, but more attention should be given to the low-paid, sometimes exploited labor force that produced the goods which are in the containers, he said.
McWilliams said that was why the ILWU joined demonstrators the Seattle WTO protests last fall. He insisted that the union was not protesting fair trade. “We make a good living off of that trade,” he said. Instead, he said the union was protesting low pay, unsafe working conditions and environmental destruction that the union blames on free trade.
“Trade is supposed to result in mutual prosperity and cultural understanding. That’s not what’s happening,” he said.
McWilliams indicated that the ILWU may even surprise employers by supporting an issue that the business community, and especially the shipping industry, strongly favors. The ILWU next month will hold its international convention, and it may break from the stance of organized labor and throw its support behind China’s membership in the WTO.
He said the ILWU finds it hypocritical that some countries with more egregious violations of human rights are members of the WTO, but China has been kept out of the organization. “We may come out with a policy that doesn’t parallel what others in labor do,” McWilliams said.
