By Steve Stallone
In a globalized economy the workers who mine, process and transport the resources that feed the world’s industries can exercise enormous power. Holding the first links of the global supply chain in their hands and sharing the same multinational employers, they can shape the ways those industries work and distribute the wealth they create. Recent experience has shown just how much the workers along that resource supply chain can help each other in times of need.
More than 200 officers and rank and filers representing more than 30 mining and transportation unions from 10 countries gathered in Long Beach, Calif. May 22-26 to better understand their connections and maximize the strength those offer. Through four days of presentations, debate and networking the delegates made good on the gathering’s slogan of “Globalizing Solidarity” and ended the session by unanimously pledging to stand together against global capital and to take the offensive against their multinational employers.
The first Mining and Maritime Conference took place in New Castle, Australia two-and-a-half years ago, convened by the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), the Australian miners union. Australia’s economy depends on the extraction and export of resources, bringing the connection between mining and maritime into sharp focus. The MUA and the ILWU co-sponsored this year’s meeting, attended by delegates from Chile, Vietnam, Australia, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Japan, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. ILWU International President James Spinosa set the tone and orientation in his opening remarks.
“We should not just get together when we have a problem, when we are locked out or on strike as companies try to outsource our jobs,” Spinosa said. “We should always be ready. We should always be confident we are not alone. We must educate ourselves so we understand where we have to be when the calls come from each other.”
Paddy Crumlin, national secretary of the MUA, followed Spinosa and put the issues of globalization and solidarity in the perspective of the assembled unions’ experiences.
“We’re the people that deliver the goods and that’s why we’re under the hammer,” Crumlin said. “There’s no room in free trade for the worker. There’s no room in free trade for unions. And there’s especially no room in free trade for strong transport unions.”
Crumlin went on to recount the story of how in 1998 private police ran 2,000 Australian wharfies off the docks with attack dogs at midnight. Locked out of their jobs, the wharfies watched from outside the gates as scabs did their work. The entire Australian labor movement and ordinary citizens joined them on the picket line. ILWU longshore workers in Los Angeles refused to work the first and last scab-loaded ship calling on the U.S. West Coast, and that solidarity won the workers back their jobs and saved their union.
“As long as we organize ourselves in our workplaces and unions, between our industries,” Crumlin concluded, “as long as we are proud to be called the enemies of corruption, elitism and greed, as long as we are proud to be called the enemies of that corporate and state power that is destroying genuine democracy, as long as we do and are proud of these things, we will prevail.”
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, a third-generation miner who rose through the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America to become the number-two leader in the American labor movement, welcomed the international delegates to the U.S. “where justice and prosperity are always just around the corner for working people.”
Trumka told the delegates they need to “connect the dots” between the widening gap between workers’ wages, the obscenely high pay of corporate executives and the people determining policy and law.
“The cold reality for workers and our unions in the United States is that corporations and their executives are picking our pockets with one hand and controlling our government with the other,” he said.
He went on to name the investment companies and CEOs who are funding the effort to privatize Social Security and steal American workers’ retirement for their own gain. He suggested ways to deny these “corporate conspirators” their victory—better organizing, better political action, better legal and regulatory strategies, more coalitions for workers’, civil and human rights and, most importantly, better solidarity.
“Working together we can discover new ways of winning, all of us together,” he concluded. “Workers and leaders from many different unions, from many different countries, with many different cultures, but one set of values, building one movement, speaking one powerful, one undeniable voice, demanding a better place not for some, not for a few, not for just the rich, but for all of us, working together struggling together, standing together, fighting together and winning together in solidarity.”
With that the delegates started their real work of sharing information about their situations and searching for ways they could better them together. First the mining unions laid out their current situation. John Maitland, the national secretary of the CFMEU, noted that the connections between mining and maritime are not intuitively obvious. But in a globalized industrial economy the workers who mine, process and deliver the resources create the wealth of society and deserve a bigger share of it and are in a position to make that happen, he said.
Gino Govender, of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), which includes 144 mining affiliate unions from 85 countries, presented an overview of the global mining industry, exhorting the delegates to “know your enemy.” He said the industry is experiencing a boom right now, and the biggest mining companies are flush with cash and are merging into larger conglomerates. These circumstances make this is a good time for workers to take action to end the huge gap in wealth between the people who own the mines and those who live in the mining countries.
Frank Leys, the new secretary of the dockers section of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), noted that four major terminal operators—A.P. Moeller, Hutchison, P&O and PSA International—now handle more than half of all global trade at their facilities around the world. The ITF is trying to work with union affiliates at their terminals to develop and negotiate framework agreements, contracts with minimum international standards that take into consideration the basic conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO).
This echoes the ITF’s 50-year Flag of Convenience (FOC) campaign. Ship owners sail their vessels under the flags of countries with lax if any labor regulations or tax laws. Seafarers aboard these ships, usually from poor developing countries, often work under abysmal conditions. The ITF tries to get the ship owners to sign contracts guaranteeing minimum pay and conditions, including a clause prohibiting the sailors from doing dockers’ cargo-handling work. In mutual solidarity the dockers help the seafarers enforce those contracts when they come to the ports. But, Leys pointed out, some ships’ captains are using the new international security regulations to keep dock workers off the ships and make seafarers do cargo handling.
Leys also mentioned another new solidarity collaboration between the ITF and the ICEM—a global alliance of oil and gas production and transportation workers. Much like the mining and maritime alliance, this initiative aims to follow oil from the point of production through to the final point of distribution figuring that often the workers best placed to assist a group of oil transport workers may not be other transport workers, but those involved in oil production.
Bob Hayden, national secretary of Australia’s Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU), spoke of how his members are a key link between mining and maritime, carrying the resources from “pit to port.” During the big 1997 miners dispute in Australia with the notoriously anti-union company Rio Tinto, the rail workers of the RTBU ran no trains from the mines to the docks, providing crucial support for the miners’ eventual victory. Similarly, during the Australian waterfront dispute in 1998, RTBU members made sure not one freight train made it to the ports. Hayden said his union is now working with other transportation unions in Australia to map out the strengths and weaknesses of their mutual employers and to work on joint organizing, member education, lobbying and corporate campaigning.
WORKSHOPS
On the second day of the gathering the delegates broke into four smaller workshops—on maritime, mining, women’s issues and pensioners—for more detailed discussions.
The maritime workshop focused mostly on issues of port security and how new security measures are being used to bust maritime unions. After 9-11 the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO) developed the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS) allegedly to protect maritime trade from terrorist attacks. Its implementation has varied country to country as national unions have, with different degrees of success, worked with or against their governments to protect workers’ rights.
Dean Summers, the ITF Coordinator in Australia, explained how the MUA beat back the most onerous aspects of the security code. The Australian transportation worker identification card will include none of the “smart” electronic information features employers and government officials wanted. Instead it will just be a simple plastic photo ID card. And the criminal background checks will only search for convictions on crimes related to terrorism.
By contrast Canadian maritime unions are fighting draconian measures currently proposed for Canada’s waterfront, said ILWU Canada President Tom Dufresne. These proposals include extensive and intrusive background checks that require only a rather subjective finding of “reasonable suspicion” to deny even longtime longshore workers access to the ports and their jobs.
“It’s a complete invasion of our members’ privacy,” Dufresne said. “And it’s one more step on the path to a police state.”
Dufresne said the unions are working together to develop a program that employers and elected officials can support that will demand changes to define the criteria and rationales for screening decisions and create an independent and transparent appeals process. He added that Canadian and American unions are asking the ITF to file a formal complaint with the International Labor Organization (ILO) on their governments’ abuse of the ISPS code.
Mike Mitre, the ILWU’s director of port security, told the workshop that in the U.S. real port security is being ignored in favor of measures like the Transport Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) card to control the workforce and hamstring unions. Still, the criminal background checks are the worst part of the new security measures for ILWU longshore workers, but the union has been working in Congress to lessen the impact. Mitre said with employers now worrying that these policies may negatively affect their trained and productive workforce, and with the Bush administration wanting to fast-track the TWIC card, the union may get the narrower background checks and the appeal process it has been lobbying for all along.
During the maritime workshop Vo Van Nhat, the deputy director of Vietnam General Confederation of Labor’s (VGCL) International Dept., presented a report on the state of unions in his country. Vietnam adopted an “open door” economic policy 15 years ago, allowing foreign investment to develop the economy. In 1995 it adopted a Labor Code defining the rights, obligations and responsibilities of employers and workers and laying out procedures for handling labor disputes, grievances and sanctions. Vietnam has also ratified 16 ILO Conventions.
The VGCL, the umbrella organization for Vietnamese unions, currently comprises 20 industrial unions and has 4.5 million members. The unions support the government’s bid to join the WTO, but understand that globalization brings both opportunities and challenges for Vietnamese workers. To deal with the possible negative impacts, the unions know they need to ally with other worker groups nationally and internationally, Nhat said.
The miners’ workshop discussed mobilizing a global solidarity action across the resource chain involving miners and maritime workers. They agreed to identify a campaign target—a high-profile company—and set goals that revolve around clear demands for the right to organize and to bargain, and for worker health and safety. The campaign should include a mass grassroots education plan on the current practices of corporate greed and link workers in the global production and supply chain in an international day of action.
The women’s workshop, including women union activists from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., was meant to build on the women’s accomplishments at the First Mining and Maritime conference. Then the women’s caucus got the conference to pass a resolution pledging to increase women’s future participation in ongoing conferences to 10 percent and to enact training and mentoring programs for women.
Terri Mast, national secretary-treasurer of the Inlandboatmen’s Union, the ILWU’s Marine Division, and the ILWU’s representative on the ITF’s Women’s Committee, reported on that ITF committee’s work. Established in 1994, the ITF’s Women’s Committee has already made progress in raising, defining and studying women’s issues within the transportation industry and in developing programs to deal with them.
Lorraine Ryan from the MUA reported how her union had established a women’s committee three years ago, setting up a national email message network and regular conference calls to deal with gender issues facing them. Now they are encouraging women in New Zealand and the U.S. to do the same in their unions.
The committee passed a resolution asking the conference to go on the record supporting forums in every union for women to discuss issues of concern.
The MUA veterans and the ILWU pensioners, along with some active members of the Maritime Union of New Zealand who are moving to establish their own pensioners group, discussed the role of retired members as keepers of the history and traditions of their unions and providers of support and guidance for their active members. They resolved to help establish retiree groups in unions all over the world and encourage veteran and pension worldwide solidarity. They also sought and received the gathering’s vow to be included in all future international conferences.
Crises and solidarity around the world
Burma
The immediacy of the workers’struggle intruded on the conference’s proceedings when the ITF’s Frank Leys got a call from the London headquarters in the middle of Tuesday’s session informing him of the assassination of Seafarers’ Union of Burma organizer Ko Moe Naung. The Burmese army had arrested him a few days earlier, tortured him and finally killed him in retaliation for his work organizing Burmese fishermen and migrant workers. The ITF called for the international trade union movement and the international business community to isolate Burma and its military regime both politically and commercially. The delegates voted to dedicate the seminar to Naung’s memory.
Chile
The president of the 6,000-member Chilean dock workers’ union, Jorge Silva Beron, recounted how his members went on strike Oct. 5, 2004 demanding a raise from $29 a day to $32. They were met by police and military who attacked the workers and him specifically, beating him exclusively on the head and then leaving him to almost bleed to death.
After 20 days on strike the Chilean dockers finally won their demands. But now the employers are suing the union for the money lost in those 20 days and the government is prosecuting Beron for leading an organization that stopped production at the port. He is facing a five-year prison sentence and his case will not be decided by a judge, but by a navy admiral.
Understanding the desperation of the situation, the delegates raised $6,000 from among themselves to donate to Beron’s legal defense fund.
Australia
All the Australian unionists present sounded the alarm on the new crisis awaiting them upon their return home. Prime Minister John Howard’s ultra-conservative “Liberal” Party won majorities in both houses of the Parliament in recent elections. Howard declared that when the new government takes office in July, it would use its power to “reform” the country’s labor laws in what the CFMEU’s John Maitland called “the greatest attack on workers rights since our country was born.”
Employers will be legally able to offer workers “individual contracts” rather than bargaining collectively with them. Combined with the elimination of the country’s unfair dismissal laws, the choice workers will face is clear and stark: Accept the bosses’ terms or be sacked. Howard also plans to lower the minimum wage and eliminate the right to refuse overtime or irregular hours.
The delegates passed a resolution opposing Howard’s plans and supporting the Australian unions, pledging each union present to do all it can to help beat back this attack. ILWU Canada President Tom Dufresne said he would take the resolution to the upcoming Canadian Labor Congress’ meeting to get the support of the entire Canadian labor movement.
Blue Diamond almonds
In a presentation on organizing along the marine cargo-handling chain, Peter Olney, the ILWU’s director of organizing, pointed to one of the union’s latest organizing drives—the Blue Diamond almond processing plant in Northern California—as an example of using the power of the ports for workers. Almonds are the largest agricultural export in the state and Blue Diamond is the largest processor, with 70 percent of its product exported around the world. The company began an aggressive anti-union campaign as soon as its more than 600 workers started organizing for better pay, conditions and health care.
All the unions at the gathering signed a letter to the CEO of Blue Diamond encouraging him to respect his workers’ right to organize and to deal with their demands. They informed him they would all continue to “monitor this situation and receive regular updates from the ILWU. If your negative conduct continues then we will do anything within our rights and legal power to assist the ILWU in bringing justice to the Blue Diamond workers.”
At the end of the meetings the delegates crafted, refined and voted unanimously for a resolution committing the participating unions to develop a communications network of union leaders and rank-and-file activists able to provide a global rapid response to political or industrial conflicts affecting any one of them and to identify an appropriate corporate target to be the focus of a recognition campaign. (see sidebar: “The Long Beach Declaration.”)
Throughout the week the ILWU Host Committee, comprised of rank and filers from the Southern California locals 13, 63 and 94 made the guests feel welcome. From picking up visitors from the airport and returning them at the end of the event, to putting on dinners and parties several evenings, to a host of daily outings, the Committee, led by its chair Local 13’s Sunshine Campbell, provided the utmost in hospitality and did the union proud.
