The dispute that has snarled West Coast shipping revolves around a rarity in American business — a small but mighty union.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union represents 20,000 dockworkers, a fraction of the organized ranks of teachers, truck drivers or healthcare workers. But the port workers — who still queue up at hiring halls daily for work and spend years earning full membership — stand guard over a crucial chokepoint in the global economy.
For decades these “lords of the docks” have been paid like blue-collar royalty. Their current contract pays $26 to $41 an hour, with free healthcare for members. Some earn six figures with overtime. Even as a growing chorus of business groups clamor for a resolution to their months-long contract talks with the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents shipping companies, the union sees little need to back down.
“They have unique skills that aren’t easily replaced,” said Goetz Wolff, who teaches about labor and economics at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “They’re not going to roll over and play dead.”
They went back to work Tuesday, after a holiday weekend port shutdown that left dozens of ships parked off the Southern California coast. They also returned to the negotiating table, where U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez is now trying to broker a deal.
The talks have dragged on since May, but tensions have ramped up in recent days, with the shippers group all but closing the ports over the weekend and each side accusing the other of slowing operations. Both parties say they want to avoid repeating the 10-day lockout of 2002, which then-President George W. Bush stepped in to end. They have reportedly agreed on many major elements of a new contract but remain at odds over finer points, including the job of a particular arbitrator who handles disputes on the Los Angeles and Long Beach docks.
The same forces that have pulverized private sector unions in other industries — overseas manufacturing, lower transportation costs, global markets — have strengthened the hand of the ILWU, said economists who study global trade.
“Every day, ship owners have to pay a lot of money for a ship. The cranes are very expensive, and if they’re not being used, that’s wasted money,” said Marc Levinson, an economist and author of “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.” “Containerization made the shipping industry very capital-intensive, and that effectively gave power to the union.”
So did two decisions by ILWU’s founder and longtime president, Harry Bridges.
The first was negotiating a single contract covering every port from San Diego to Bellingham, Wash. That prevents shippers from playing one West Coast port against another, as sometimes happens on the East Coast, said Peter Olney, a former organizing director at ILWU.
The other was a 1960 agreement that embraced the arrival of containerization, essentially agreeing to shed thousands of jobs manually hauling crates and bags from ships’ holds in order to save thousands in the higher-tech — and higher-paid — work of operating forklifts and giant cranes.
As container traffic boomed in the decades since, that tough choice paid off, Wolff said.
“It was a brilliant quid pro quo,” he said.
But the industry faces a new round of changes.
Ever-larger ships are dumping more cargo at once on the docks, creating more congestion even when the work is going smoothly. That’s increasing the demand for automation, said Levinson, who noted that ports in Europe and Asia increasingly use robotics to move goods that union longshoremen handle today on the West Coast.
Another threat is the widening of the Panama Canal, scheduled for completion next year. That will enable some larger ships to pass more quickly to the East and Gulf Coast, though experts disagree on how much that could hurt Southern California.
Still, the ILWU shouldn’t overplay its hand, Levinson said.
“The employers and the union both have a common interest in the success of L.A.-Long Beach and in keeping the port as efficient as possible,” he said.
As the dispute drags on, the union’s solidarity could be a key factor.
The ILWU is known as an aggressive union — forged in violent strikes on San Francisco’s Embarcadero in the 1930s, booted from national labor groups in the McCarthy-era 1950s for being “too red,” and willing to shut down the docks several times in recent years in solidarity with smaller unions. That’s what happened in 2012, when clerical workers at the L.A.-Long Beach docks went on strike and clogged the ports for several days.
Today’s workers come up steeped in tales of that sort of militancy, Olney said, and they see how well it pays off in their wages and company-paid health insurance.
“In the port towns, everyone has a friend, a brother, a cousin, a niece who works in this industry and benefits from the power of the union,” he said.
That’s true in Wilmington, where blue ILWU signs can be seen stuck into fences along Harry Bridges Boulevard, past the massive port complex, and in San Pedro, where nearly every restaurant and store on 6th Street downtown sports a sign in its window: “We support the ILWU and They Support Us.”
At the Lighthouse Deli & Cafe a little further down the peninsula toward the ocean, longtime server Lisa Finney said the ILWU generates good jobs that bring good money to the harbor towns. She would know. Her husband is a union foreman on the docks, and the job affords them a nice house and a comfortable life.
“They keep us going,” she said. “There isn’t anyone here who doesn’t support ILWU.”
Many more would like to join.
Membership is typically earned only after years of so-called “casual” work, which involves showing up in the early morning at the cracked parking lot next to a junkyard in Wilmington, where day labor jobs are doled out — if there’s work to go around — at the lower end of the pay scale.
Log enough hours, and eventually you qualify for full membership, with better hours and full benefits. When they open the rolls to new casuals, Olney said, “the lines are thousands of people long.”
It’s good, if sometimes dangerous, work, said Roman Brink, a longshoreman who lives in San Pedro. For him it’s a family business. His grandfather started working the docks in the late 1940s, when they still hauled crates out of ships’ holds with hooks. He’s had uncles, cousins — in all, probably 50 family members — who worked there over the years, and he counts his fellow dockworkers as an extended family too.
“It’s a brotherhood,” Brink said.
And it’s one he hopes his sons will someday join too, the next time hiring opens up.
“We’ve got to bring them in,” he said.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ports-labor-20150218-story.html#page=1
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ports-impact-20150218-story.html#page=1
Once again, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) are striking and using the impending arrival of even more sophisticated and efficient containerization, which will shed more thousands of jobs, to negotiate more income and benefits for those workers who still will have jobs. The ILWU union, as with ALL other worker unions, ONLY sees earning an income through a JOB. This is limiting and will result in further job destruction as corporations further automate, using sophisticated robots and super-computerized-automated operations in order to remain competitive on a global scale. This is the result of constant shifts in the technologies of production, which destroy jobs and devalue the worth of labor, as more and more workers compete for less and less jobs.
The labor union movement should transform to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for economic democracy––EVERY worker an OWNER. They should play the part that they have always aspired to––that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.
Unfortunately, at the present time the movement is built on one-factor economics––the labor worker. The insufficiency of labor worker earnings to purchase increasingly capital-produced products and services gave rise to labor laws and labor unions designed to coerce higher and higher prices for the same or reduced labor input. With government assistance, unions have gradually converted productive enterprises in the private and public sectors into welfare institutions. Kelso stated: “The myth of the ‘rising productivity’ of labor is used to conceal the increasing productiveness of capital and the decreasing productiveness of labor, and to disguise income redistribution by making it seem morally acceptable.”
Binary economist Louis Kelso argued that unions “must adopt a sound strategy that conforms to the economic facts of life. If under free-market conditions, 90 percent of the goods and services are produced by capital input, then 90 percent of the earnings of working people must flow to them as wages of their capital and the remainder as wages of their labor work…If there are in reality two ways for people to participate in production and earn income, then tomorrow’s producers’ union must take cognizance of both…The question is only whether the labor union will help lead this movement or, refusing to learn, to change, and to innovate, become irrelevant.”
Unions are the only group of people in the whole world who can demand a real Kelso-designed ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), who can demand the right to participate in the expansion of their employer by asserting their constitutional preferential rights to become capital owners, be productive, and succeed. The ESOP can give employees access to credit so that they can purchase the employer’s stock, pay for it in pre-tax dollars out of the assets that underlie that stock, and after the stock is paid for earn and collect the capital worker income from it, and accumulate it in a tax haven until they retire, whereby they continue to be capital workers receiving income from their capital ownership stakes. This is a viable route to individual self-sufficiency needing significantly less or no government redistributive assistance.
The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today––wages, hours, and working conditions––and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.
If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, governments will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that products and services are actually produced.
When labor unions transform to producers’ ownership unions, opportunity will be created for the unions to reach out to all shareholders (stock owners) who are not adequately represented on corporate boards, and eventually all labor workers will want to join an ownership union in order to be effectively represented as an aspiring capital owner. The overall strategy should assure that the labor compensation of the union’s members does not exceed the labor costs of the employer’s competitors, and that capital earnings of its members are built up to a level that optimizes their combined labor-capital worker earnings. A producers’ ownership union would work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments and broaden ownership. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.
Kelso stated, “Working conditions for the labor force have, of course, improved over the years. But the economic quality of life for the majority of Americans has trailed far behind the technical capabilities of the economy to produce creature comforts, and even further behind the desires of consumers to live economically better lives. The missing link is that most of those unproduced goods and services can be produced only through capital, and the people who need them have no opportunity to earn income from capital ownership.”
Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers, expressed his open-mindedness to the goal of democratic worker ownership in his 1967 testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress as a strategy for saving manufacturing jobs in America from being outcompeted by Japan and eventual outsourcing to other Asian countries with far lower wage costs: “Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth, which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.
“If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing [through wider share ownership] cannot be said to have any inflationary impact on costs and prices.”
Unfortunately for democratic unionism, the United Auto Workers, American manufacturing workers, and American citizens generally, Reuther was killed in an airplane crash in 1970 before his idea was implemented. Leonard Woodcock, his successor, nor any subsequent successor, never followed through.
