Free and open debate on all issues is healthy for the ILWU. I doubt that there’s another trade union that posts this kind of democratic discussion. It’s too bad that Mulcahy’s last diatribe went overboard. That kind of invective stifles the necessary discussion of differences within our union. There are good, dedicated union members on the different sides of the election debate. No one side has a monopoly. Whichever presidential candidate wins – McWilliams or Spinosa – a rank and file committee must be organized coastwide based on a militant program to fight the employers and not afraid to expose betrayals by union officers.
The question now is which candidate for International President has a better PROGRAM to lead the ILWU. It has been a tough question for many members to answer. Mulcahy has spent a lot of time blasting McWilliams but hasn’t said very much in support of Spinosa’s program. His last posting called McWilliams an “employer disguised as a union official”. That’s ridiculous. It’s the kind of exaggeration that undermines his valid points.
McWilliams’ program grasps the importance of organizing workers in all divisions of the ILWU and of international solidarity actions. That rankles the employers. Spinosa, on the other hand, preaches “love boat” cooperation with the employer. The way I see it is: We have a choice of voting for an incumbent president with a decent program but mixed track record or a challenger with a traitorous program of partnership with the employers.
It wasn’t until after the Journal of Commerce, the shipowners’ newspaper, published a hit piece on the ILWU, giving backhanded support to Spinosa (which he has not yet denounced) that I decided to support McWilliams, while criticizing him. That article appeared in the June 5-11 edition of the JoC, shortly after the ILWU Convention and Caucus concluded and just before our elections.
In 1996, Mulcahy and I worked together with other members in a rank and file committee, Longshoremen for Industrial Organization, to oppose the proposed longshore contract. We were highly critical of the Negotiating Committee, headed by McWilliams, caving into elitist, craft unionist appeals and proposing a 30% wage increase for skilled longshoremen, widening the gap with basic longshore wages for hold and dockmen. However, at that longshore contract Caucus, McWilliams to his credit, successfully lead the fight to eliminate the notorious “side deals” from being one of the union’s negotiating demands. Such a demand can only serve to undermine collective bargaining, a cornerstone of any trade union worth its salt.
Yet, in the 1999 negotiations headed up by Spinosa,“side deals” became codified in our contract, a contract that he boasts is the “best ever”. Mulcahy and I, along with 22% of the rank and file, voted against this contract too. The leadership, McWilliams and Spinosa, called for ratification of both contracts. Mulcahy and I were right in opposing craft unionism and “side deals”.
Mulcahy seems to be overly focused on the SPD lifetime “language” fight and it’s preventing him from seeing the bigger picture. I think Mulcahy is well-intentioned, but this issue is a ruse to remove McWillliams from office. If successful, the ILWU will be led by a conservative, craft, business unionist, Spinosa. Or as the Journal of Commerce put it in their May 15 editorial: “Changing more than 60 years of adversarial tension (betweeen the ILWU and PMA) will not be easy. ” Brothers and sisters this would be a sea change in the direction of the ILWU.
Part of the trade-off for the ’61 Modernization and Mechanization (M & M) agreement was guaranteed lifetime benefits. Mulcahy, who like myself is a critic of the M & M agreement, demagogically accuses me of blaming Bridges, the architect of M & M, for the lifetime benefits problem. What I said was that the “ILWU should have demanded funding for those benefits in the ’60’s and ’70’s. . . when Bridges was president. But it’s easier to blame Brian McWilliams than Harry Bridges. ” I stand by that statement. I’ve always maintained that it will take rank and file coastwide action to win the billion dollar funding for lifetime benefits. It’s not going to be handed to us on a silver platter by judges or arbitrators. And it’s not a matter of right or wrong. It’s a matter of power to force the PMA to pay what is rightfully ours. At the Feb. /March ’99 Caucus I raised the idea of making it a strike issue, but it didn’t get support.
During the ’71 strike, which Bridges opposed and which was directed against the M & M agreement, the funds ran out and members had to self-pay for their benefits. Bridges was aware of that. Prior to that he had told the employers that he wasn’t interested in the formula the employers would use to fund the benefits – whether by man/hour or tonnnage. It was, he said, their responsibility to fund it. Clearly, the companies did not fully fund our lifetime benefits and that was not made a condition of the settlement of the ’71 strike. This is when the funding problem first became apparent to ILWU members and it hasn’t been resolved yet, nearly 50 years since the employers first agreed to lifetime benefits in ’51. In any case McWilliams was wrong to have sections of The ILWU Story referring to lifetime benefits edited out and he was wrong to co-sign the letter with Miniace. Worse yet was his letter to Local #1 at the Crockett Sugar Refinery suggesting that Local 10 would cross a picket line. When he’s making unprincipled moves, he needs to be criticized sharply.
Bridges took plenty of heat over M & M at union meetings in Seattle, Portland, LA and San Francisco. My criticism of M & M some 25 years after the fact wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans. But Bridges did invite me to his house for talks several times between 1984 and 1987 because he liked the role I played in the IBU strikes and in the San Francisco longshore anti-apartheid action.
One thing that Local 10 longshoremen objected to, and Bridges certainly would have agreed with, was the 1998 picket line by Alaska longshoremen in San Francisco against a ship with famine-relief cargo bound for North Korea. It’s not that our members didn’t sympathize with the plight of our fellow workers in Alaska who had lost their health care benefits. We raised money at our local meeting for them. I invited John Bukoskey (he decined) to speak on his struggle at the July 22, 1998 mass rally for the Neptune Jade defendants. What angered our members was the target chosen, a ship with humanitarian cargo, hit on a day when there were many ships in port to picket. Three hard-working, non-political Local 10 longshoremen even appealed to then-President Larry Wing in his office, but to no avail. He had an ax to grind against International President McWilliams and the government of North Korea. Trying to fend off angry criticism for stopping food shipments to dying children in famine-stricken “communist” North Korea, Wing in his Officer’s Bulletin shortly after the picket resorted to the most vile red-baiting. Bridges would’ve opposed that action and Wing’s slander sheet.
Alaska longshoremen had a right to picket on the Coast, but McWilliams was right about their target in San Francisco. It was “reckless and irresponsible”. Once again a legitimate longshore workers’ issue was being used for ulterior political motives. Expedient “quick fixes” are no solution to our crisis of leadership. The ILWU will rue the day the “employer pick” becomes president of our union.
A vote for McWilliams is a vote for the proud tradition of the ILWU.
Jack Heyman #8780
