Blue Diamond workers win one at home
SACRAMENTO, CA—It seemed the Sacramento City Council would never stop droning on at its Dec. 5 meeting. It plodded through parking meter contracts, stadium restoration, intermodal site acquisition.
The boredom ground hard on the 40 Blue Diamond Organizing Committee members in the room. Day shift had started at 6:30 a.m. and they knew they had to start at 4:30 the next morning. But in the last two years they have taken their fight to join ILWU warehouse Local 17 all over the state and all over the world, and they were determined to see their hometown City Council vote on the resolution supporting their efforts.
The measure calls on Blue Diamond Growers (BDG) to sign a neutrality agreement with the ILWU, and condemns the almond co-operative’s nasty anti-union campaign. The NLRB found Blue Diamond guilty of more than 20 labor law violations last spring. The company never admitted it did anything wrong. The board issued more complaints against BDG in October, and is investigating more charges filed by the ILWU in November.
“It’s simple,” Blue Diamond Organizing Committee member Randy Reyes said. “We have a set of rules to follow at work. Blue Diamond has a set of rules to follow too, called the labor law. They need to be accountable.”
The resolution came up last month, but the Council members agreed to postpone their vote so Mayor Heather Fargo could meet with Blue Diamond management. The delay gave the company time to call out its troops and work on its spin. The Dec. 5 Council session turned into a showdown between business and workers’ interests.
An editorial in Sacramento’s daily paper the day before scolded the City Council for “telling the company how to handle its internal labor relations.” AM-radio talk show host Tom Sullivan made nice with Blue Diamond’s head of PR while he fumed about “‘The Union’ marketing its services and trying to bypass the pro-employee policy of secret ballot elections.” (He never dignified the ILWU with a name and spoke in scathing generalities about “The Union.”)
Blue Diamond got the spin going in the plant as well, circulating an anti-union petition and mobilizing workers to attend the Council meeting. Rows of people in company blue alternated with rows of folks in sunny union yellow. The numbers seemed almost equal—though many of the blue shirts were leads and supervisors. Blue Diamond also brought out the heads of the local and state chambers of commerce, and its own CEO Doug Youngdahl.
It seemed at first the meeting wouldn’t go well for the union supporters. Council member Robbie Waters tried to scuttle the resolution, claiming the city had no jurisdiction. His motion failed.
The head of the Metro Chamber got up and ran the usual warnings about Sacramento being tarred as “unfriendly to business,” and Youngdahl got up and waved the flag.
“The bottom line is that we will not give up our workers’ right to a secret ballot election. It’s a fundamental American right,” he said.
Council member Kevin McCarty didn’t fall for that. He reminded listeners of the recent history.
“You can’t deny that Blue Diamond violated the National Labor Relations Act. We’re talking about a card-check neutrality agreement, and the third word is the important one here. You can’t have a fair vote without it.”
Mayor Fargo offered a watered-down compromise resolution. That failed. And on the final roll-call vote, the Council voted 6-3 in favor of the original proposal. The council chamber erupted in clapping and cheers of “Si se puede!”
Cheers broke out again at 4:30 the next morning, when the workers in their yellow shirts gathered in the cafeteria before their shift started and celebrated some more.
“It was awesome,” committee member Gloria Hessel said. “I didn’t think we’d get this far with all that’s gone on. We’ve tried so many times to talk to them across the street and we never hear back. We need a voice.”
—Marcy Rein
Local 13-A wins fat deal from new boss
Discouragement hung heavy on the new ILWU Local 13-A members at the Shell refinery in Carson, Calif. as they headed into talks for their first contract. But with a little help from their 13-A brothers at Pier G in the Port of Long Beach and other Harbor Area ILWU members, they pulled together, acted together and emerged with a stellar contract. They reached agreement with their employer Oct. 27.
“Our employer saw the big picture of union togetherness,” bargaining team member Alex Cano said. “We had support coming from everywhere.”
The 25 men who store and transport petroleum coke at the Shell facility used to work for Oxbow Carbon and Mineral. Oxbow ran three coke operations in the LA/Long Beach area: the one at Shell, one at the Mobil refinery in Torrance and one at Pier G in the Port of Long Beach.
Petroleum coke is a by-product of oil refining. Raw oil goes into 100-foot tall drums and gets heated to 900ºF. It vaporizes. The vapors get sucked off to become gasoline, petroleum and diesel. The leftovers become coke. The workers operate the cooling drums and high-pressure water valves for cutting the coke out of the drums.
“You have water shooting out of a T-pipe that goes round and round with 2,500 pounds of pressure,” said Cano. Once the coke is cooled and cut, crane operators load it on trucks and send it to the barn. There they separate the lumps from the fine coke before sending it to the harbor. The work takes skill and experience. The least senior operator has 10 years at the facility. Cano has 20.
In 1996, the Oxbow workers joined the International Union of Public and Industrial Workers (IUPIW), a non-AFL-CIO outfit known for making sweetheart deals. They got no help with grievances and earned far below the area standard. In February 2005, they booted out the IUPIW and joined Local 13-A.
Then in November, while their contract talks plodded on, Oxbow announced it was giving up the Shell and Mobil contracts. The nine men at Mobil went over to Pier G. Toronto-based Marsulex took over at Shell, and the workers could only watch as their brothers at the harbor tied down a first contract in May 2006.
“They lost heart when the sale happened,” new Local 13-A Business Agent Alex Galvan said. “They thought they were going nowhere. But the harbor guys came and gave them a lot of testimonials about what is possible.”
Over the next several months, the harbor crew would be there with the Marsulex workers as they rallied and barbequed at the refinery gates, met regularly to go over contract proposals, and attended the negotiations in force. Some 15-20 people would come each time to back up the bargaining team of Javier Chavez, Juan Villegas, Rob Vega, Cano, Galvan and ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney.
Because the Marsulex reps would only come down from Toronto two or three days a month, almost every session turned into an 18-20 hour marathon.
“We had to make those two days worth it,” Galvan said. To prod the slow-moving talks, the workers took a strike vote Oct. 25.
“Two days later it was a done deal,” Chavez said.
The agreement they reached Oct. 27 included 50 percent raises for some workers, 100 percent employer-paid health insurance, an extra week of vacation and the first sick days the workers ever had.
“By the end of the contract, we’ll be in the middle of the scale for this type of work in this area,” Cano said. “Before, the people cleaning up in the refinery [working under the PACE contract] made almost the same as we did.”
They also won minimum staffing levels and the right to refuse unsafe work.
“The contract gives us a lot of power to work safe,” Chavez said. “We even have the right to strike if we have to if the boss tries to make us do unsafe work.”
The last negotiating session ran round the clock, just as it had for the Oxbow workers at the harbor.
“The first thing we did when we finished at 6 a.m. was to call Carlos [ILWU International Organizer Carlos Cordon],” Galvan said. “The seeds he and Rudy [Organizer Rudy Gutierrez] planted on us kept us going all this time.”
“It’s amazing to see what came together,” Cano said. “We’ve come a long way.”
—Marcy Rein
