Seattle, Aug. 15 –In a
stunning betrayal of the militant rank-and-file ideals upon which the
ILWU was founded, Local 19's officers duped a tiny minority of the
local's membership present at last Thursday's stop-work meeting into
a sell-out of unparalleled proportions.
On August 9th, on behalf of the Port
Labor Relations Committee, President Herald Ugles tabled a
"Continuous Operation Document" between the
local union and Stevedoring Services of America Terminals, which will
eliminate unit breaks at Terminal 18 in the Port of Seattle. The
motion to adopt the new work rules, in exchange for at most five more
jobs on container operations—although the memorandum's language
itself is so vague that even this slight gain in manning is not even
for sure—was passed by a slim majority at the tiny and
unrepresentative meeting.
The underhanded tactics used by the
Ugles/Manwell/Ventoza regime to ensure the membership meeting would
be tiny and then to blackmail those members who did show up into
passing the give-back measure have been the subject of lively debate
around the Seattle waterfront in the days since the August 9th
meeting.
These new work rules will make it
basically impossible for semi tractor drivers and other equipment
operators on gangs to communicate with each other regarding safety
code and contract violations and thereby keep them from working
together to enforce their contract rights on the job.
Moreover, these new rules clearly
violate the provisions of Section 2.3 of the Pacific Coast Longshore
Contract Document, paving the way for a further erosion of the
Coastwise master contract and raising the specter of port-by-port or
company-by-company agreements, just in time for early Coastwise
contract talks, set to begin early in 2008.
Waterfront rumors have it that SSA will
begin implementing these new work rules today, Wednesday, August
15th.
To make matters even worse, had a
single brave Local 19 member not called for the quorum and thereby
shut down the stop-work meeting, the next thing on the agenda was to
have been a Port LRC motion to install computer screens in the
dispatch hall—an ominous step towards the electronic
dispatching of longshoremen's work. This narrowly-averted motion
would have represented a first step towards the total dismantling of
the union hiring hall.
Unions around the world admire the ILWU
for its democratic hiring hall and its tradition of effective job
control, in which dispatchers are elected by the workers themselves,
and which allows workers to pick their jobs on a daily basis. This
system allows individual longshoremen a freedom which is unparalleled
among other members of the American workforce. It has long been a
dream of the West Coast maritime employers to do away with the hiring
hall system that the ILWU won through militant strikes beginning in
1934.
This past year, our brothers and
sisters of the ILWU Canada, the organized longshore workers in
British Columbia ports, began contract negotiations with the British
Columbia Maritime Employers Association, the Canadian subsidiary of
the Pacific Maritime Association. The employers tabled a set of
unheard-of demands, including continuous operations, port-by-port or
company-by-company agreements, and electronic or phone dispatching of
workers.
The members of ILWU Canada considered
this set of employer contract demands to be a declaration of war, and
vowed a fight to the death to preserve the historic gains of the ILWU
which the employers had indicated their desire to eliminate.
An April resolution of the ILWU
International Executive Board states the policy and
the determination of the Union to support "ILWU Canada's
struggle against the BCMEA's attempts to impose fundamental changes
on Canada's West Coast waterfront that would alter basic conditions
of production and employment.... Canadian waterfront workers have
struggled for nearly a century for union rights, fair bargaining and
safe conditions and these will not be abolished by the employer
group's shortsighted pursuit of profits at the expense of workers'
living standards."
It seems that the officers of Local 19
Seattle have decided to assist our mortal enemy, SSA, and the other
PMA companies, in implementing their most perverse fantasies and
realizing their wildest hopes five months before Coastwise longshore
bargaining is even set to begin. The passage of these new work rules
giving away our union coffee breaks—a violation of the Coast
agreement on its face—by a tiny minority of Local 19's
membership, puts into question the level of basic union democracy
that still exists in Local 19, and brings the corruption of the
Seattle longshore union's officers into sharp relief.
Only the rank and file of the
ILWU—through militant job actions and a vigilant commitment to
attend every union meeting, stop these abject sell-outs by this
clique of petty dictators, and rescue union democracy in the ILWU—can
turn the tide and keep the ILWU from finally being transformed into
its opposite, a company union.
Here is the memorandum between ILWU Local 19 and SSA, in its entirety.