The author compares Longview's battle to the Pittston Coal Strike of 1989, pictured above, in which UMWA miners blocked the entrance to the company's largest coal-cleaning plant in Virginia and waited to be arrested.
The ILWU’s continued protests have made the port difficult to operate, thus hurting the terminal owners’ bottom line. Rarely are unions able to disrupt the operations of a company as the Longview workers have, as labor law strictly prohibits this and imposes heavy fines on unions that engage in such disruptive protests. Most unions therefore choose to take legal, safe route and protect their campaign, rarely engaging in such action and engaging in nondisruptive picketing that does little more than to attract occasional media attention and maintain moral witness.
“The way that labor law is set up, longshore workers had to engage in illegal actions to have any chance of success. To allow an employer to refuse to use ILWU labor and undermine hard-won ILWU standards would threaten unionization on West Coast ports,” says union organizer Joe Burns (a Working In These Times contributor and author of Reviving The Strike). “The problem is, labor law allows an employer to refuse to use union labor and then judges protect the employers with injunctions and threats against the union. Here, longshore workers decided to fight by labor’s rules, not management’s.”
Burns argues that in order for unions to revive themselves, they must get tough and be willing to break labor laws and incur fines in order to win. It looks at this point as if the ILWU is going to disregard the fines and continue to break the law in order to hamper the production at a nonunion facility and force the company to settle.