Labor Notes gives a comprehensive and highly recommended look at the battle to protect middle-class jobs from multinational EGT. Read the full article at this link. Excerpts:
Every other major grain terminal on the West Coast is operated by ILWU labor, and the union asserts that EGT’s goal is to break the union, ending generations of good jobs.
After the September 8 action, police began plucking members out of their homes, off the streets, and out of parking lots. Ten days later, about 35 had been arrested, mostly on misdemeanor trespassing charges. All have been released, and the union is paying their $250 to $500 bail.
“They’re rounding us up like we’re murderers,” said Dan Coffman, president of the Longview local. Five police dragged one union official out of his car by his hair, roughed him up, and slammed him into the back of a squad car. Another member was hauled away while caring for his children, two and seven years old, leaving them to fend for themselves in an empty house. Yet another, a part-time minister, was arrested by police wielding assault rifles.
Insisting the one-by-one manhunt was unsafe, ILWU attorneys approached the Cowlitz County sheriff to coordinate the orderly surrender of the entire membership of Longview’s Local 21—all 200 members.
The 200 marched silently in two lines from the hiring hall to the courthouse, accompanied by a third line of family members and retirees. Coffman offered his membership up for arrest.
According to workers listening to the police radio band, 30 officers in full riot gear waited inside while the unionists waited outside.
WHO’S VIOLENT?
Union members have shown considerable restraint in the face of a tough situation and constant provocations from police and EGT employees. An EGT worker ran his car into two ILWU members without penalty. A longshore worker allegedly kicked a car that followed, dented it, and was charged with a felony.
The union says allegations that workers held six security guards hostage for four hours were a fabrication of the Longview chief of police. Coffman confronted the chief about the lie.
“He denied he said it and tried to modify his story,” said Leal Sundet, one of four ILWU officers on the union’s coast committee.
The mainstream press latched on, publishing inflammatory pieces decrying the violence. “I’d be surprised if it wasn’t set up purposefully by the PR firm hired by EGT,” Sundet said. “Anything that labor does is portrayed as some kind of act of violence.”
EGT has also hired Special Response Corporation, a security firm based in Maryland that specializes in strikebreaking.
NLRB A ‘TOOL OF COMMERCE’
The authorities’ attempts to quell the uprising in Longview have not quashed it. Workers defied the initial temporary restraining order, sought by the NLRB, that banned any picketing that blocked cars or trains.
After the grain-dumping, the NLRB sought an injunction against the protests. EGT wanted to force the union to order its members to cease any picket activity.
“We don’t care what the board thinks,” Sundet said. “We have no respect for it. It’s a tool of commerce.” At an injunction enforcement hearing, the judge ordered the union to pay for the ruined grain and damage to the terminal pending a study of the cost.
Initially EGT wanted to operate its facility without a union. But the company settled on a subcontractor that hires through Operating Engineers Local 701, a black sheep organization expelled from the Oregon building trades council for previous raids.
Union members put about as much stock in the AFL-CIO to resolve the conflict with the Operating Engineers as they do in the NLRB. Motions passed in the Washington and Oregon state labor councils and the Southwestern Washington building trades convention failed to budge Local 701.
AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka ruled the dispute a jurisdictional matter, but ILWU won’t pursue charges, because it will entertain no argument that any other union has rights to longshore work. Sundet noted the irony of Trumka’s quietude while the ILWU fights for its life.
As president of the Mineworkers, Trumka led the 1989 Pittston mine strike, which used waves of mass civil disobedience to occupy the mine, resulting in injunctions and fines that—on paper—bankrupted the union.
“The tactics they used were successful at the end of the day,” Sundet said.