The Shipping News

In the second week of a shutdown that has closed 29 ports on the West Coast and is costing the U.S. economy upwards of $1 billion a day, the Bush administration amplified its involvement in the dispute between the International Longshore & Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association, by forming a "board of inquiry."

This is the administration's likely first step toward invoking the controversial Taft-Hartley Act, which would force union workers back to work for an 80-day cooling off period.

On Sept. 29, shipping company representatives locked out 10,500 union members, accusing them of staging an illegal work slowdown.

At issue in the dispute is the PMA's use of new port technology. ILWU spokesperson Steve Stallone says the conflict revolves around a disagreement about roles and who controls technology and information that affects the workers.

"We want to be able to review the data -- usually there are 50 pieces of information on each container and we've found that with 30 percent to 40 percent of the information something is wrong," Stallone says. "We want that to be our work. We want a closed system where only union clerks can get into it and manipulate data."

Shippers, however, want to allow non-union eyes on the data. "They want to use the technology to outsource the jobs," Stallone claims.

According to PMA president and CEO Joseph Miniace, the shippers "guarantee job protection for every registered worker who may be impacted by technology."

What's really at stake, say union watchers, is the survival of what many consider the most politically progressive union in the country.

"We support farmworkers and El Salvador, and even Nelson Mandela credited the union for kickstarting the American anti-apartheid movement," Stallone says. The union refused to allow military cargo to be shipped to the El Salvadoran dictatorship in the 1980s and its dock actions highlighted South African divestment.

The union has weathered repeated strikes, government intervention and employer/government violence since its post-Depression makeover. A 1934 strike led to "Bloody Thursday," in which two workers were shot and killed. Then, shippers employed "goon squads" -- commonly referred to now as "security" -- as well as the National Guard, to rough up strikers. Six men were shot or beaten to death during the strike and hundreds were arrested.

This led to a four-day general strike involving all local labor interests that basically shut down San Francisco. Eventually, the ILWU won its issues in arbitration.

"An injury to one is an injury to all," read a banner hoisted during the 1948 strike. The motto is emblematic of the ILWU's socialistic bent and its methods of organizing alongside other unions. Events leading to that strike caused Congress to pass the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. Included in the Act was a provision, later overturned, that required labor leaders to declare they were not Communists. Accusations of Communist ties became a tool used in corporate and government attempts to destroy unions. ILWU leader Harry Bridges was hauled before the Supreme Court twice in attempts to deport him (he was originally from Australia) for being "a Commie."

Many strikes and lockouts and more violence later, union members can now lead a middle to upper-middle class lifestyle due to hard-fought changes wrought from industry. Still, the work is not full time and it is often bone-crushingly dangerous.

"You don't work a regular job. You go to the hiring hall and if a ship is in, you work," Stallone says. He said some members work full time, mostly at the Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif. docks. And one has to consider the risks workers face to earn their legendary high wages.

"Five people died in the last six months in California," Stallone says. "One was smashed by a machine so badly it took three days to identify the body. ...The docks are full of huge pieces of equipment so when you get hurt, you get hurt big." All the thundering movement of big containers from ships to trucks to warehouses is conducted in a brain-numbing haze of inescapable diesel exhaust.