By James Spinosa
ILWU International President
If you think ratifying a contract with longshore employers that guarantees ILWU jurisdiction is a lock on your job, think again. The shipping and stevedoring companies that make up the Pacific Maritime Association—the employer group under contract with the ILWU—are setting up another organization designed to make an end run around your legal contract and outsource your job.
The ILWU contract developed through decades of wrestling with the employers. Our first contract that established the union after the great strike of 1934 brought us the dispatch hall and protections against unfair and unsafe conditions on the job. The employers didn’t stop assaulting our dispatch halls until we won the bitter strike of 1948. Then the employers reorganized as the Pacific Maritime Association and agreed to our system of cooperation and arbitration.
But today the PMA is moving away from those past commitments to the ILWU. The days the union could work with the employers to build a better industry for everyone seem strained and unclear. A faction within the PMA is trying to frustrate the 2002 contract settlement and undermine it in new and devious ways.
The organization this faction has set up is called the West Coast Marine Terminal Operators Discussion Agreement. They have to call themselves a “Discussion” group and get approval to meet from the FMC in order to avoid prosecution under federal anti-trust laws. But it’s not as if all they were doing was getting together and talking about matters of mutual concern. They are already moving those discussions into ways to violate our jurisdiction, to outsource the work that Section One of our contract defines as ILWU jobs. Without those jobs we will not have our wages, benefits and pensions or a union to defend them.
The Discussion group has formally put out to high tech companies a Request For Proposals (RFP) to develop an electronic tag or transponder to be put on each truck that services the terminals. They will have encoded in it all the information about the contents of the container being brought into the terminal. As the truck enters the gate, this information will be automatically transferred to central command center as the truck rolls past.
These transponders, set up outside the ILWU and the contractual obligations, programmed and serviced by non-ILWU workers will impact clerks’ work at the gate and terminal operations. The contract clearly states that the work of operating the technology documenting the flow of the cargo is ILWU clerks’ work, including any work modified by new technology.
Longshore—particularly Maintenance and Repair—also would find themselves losing jobs. The work of installing and maintaining the employers’ transponders is rightfully theirs.
This whole plan, this whole Discussion organization, is a blatant violation of our contract. All these companies are members of the PMA and they define current and future members of the Discussion group as marine terminal operators in California, Oregon and Washington, that is, the exact geographic area of jurisdiction in the ILWU-PMA contract. This is clearly an alter-ego organization established to avoid their contractual obligations to the ILWU, obligations to confer with the union about the new technology and to have the technology operated by ILWU members.
The legally binding contract that these employers, as well as all the PMA employers, signed sets up a framework on how new technology is to be introduced on West Coast docks. That framework is designed to allow the union a chance to see if the technology simply enhances productivity or if it tries to do that by outsourcing ILWU jobs. For more than a year now PMA has frustrated all our efforts to get the information we need to make that determination. We have had to take them to arbitration several times. Each time we have won. The arbitrator ruled the employers must give us the information on how the technology works because the contract clearly states that was the deal—they get to implement labor-saving technologies as long as we are certain it’s not being done to outsource our jobs.
But the employers’ strategy is what it always has been since they first started with computer technology in the 1980s, that is, to use it to hide and outsource our jurisdiction. The only difference now is they are doing it more aggressively and on a larger scale.
Your Coast Committee—myself, International Vice President Bob McEllrath and Coast Committeemen Ray Ortiz, Jr. and Joe Wenzl—are stepping up to the challenge and will fight this with every weapon in our arsenal. But the best weapon we have is you—the rank and file longshore workers. We need you to always be vigilant when your employer implements new technology. Look to see if there is anything suspicious in how it’s being done and report it to your Business Agent so we can investigate it and, if necessary, arbitrate it. And we need you to stand strong and united—longshore workers, clerks and walking bosses. Together we can enforce our contract and beat back this attack of subterfuge and outsourcing.
The Coast Committee is on the move and has an arbitration scheduled for March 5 on the legality of the Discussion group. We are confidant we will be sustained in our position and set the employers back for now. But even if we do, this is far from the end of this conflict. The PMA has people whose job is just to figure out ways to violate their contractual obligations. If this one doesn’t work, they’ll come up with another.
But again, we can and will prevail, if we stay alert, strong and united.
