The Last Stand

Just about every woman here, Connie Chaney says, pointing her lacquered talons at co-workers on the 6 p.m. shift, belongs to the Family. At the Port of Los Angeles, you’re either descended from longshoremen or you’re not. And her father was a mail driver.

Doesn’t bother me, Chaney shrugs. Just let me do my job. But more than a few boneheads around here aren’t always so open-minded. Has she got stories? One after another spills out, and the anecdotes gel into a theme: bosses with major estrogen phobia trying to push her into a career change so a man can take her place. If she were part of the Family she could just hail a man--her father, spouse, brother--and he would take on the angry male like a bull sea lion defending a harem. Outsiders can’t do that. “I wouldn’t have called anyway,” Chaney says.

Instead, she returns fire. Goes toe to toe. Blasts them with some smart mouth chased by a recitation of the union rules they’ve just broken. And after 13 years on the docks as a longshoreman and now a marine clerk, she knows how to leave tormentors gulp-sputtering for a comeback. “I love rules,” Chaney says. “What’s the next rule?” Hey, she adds, her tone mellowing, this is about equality: “Just make sure everybody adheres to the rules.”

On this balmy evening, the men treat Chaney with icy deference, still bitter that she and virtually every other woman on the docks are here because a federal consent decree almost 16 years ago forced the unions to hire them. So what if Chaney’s bulldog style in defending that decree has left many--plenty of women too--feeling as though she’s chewed on their ankles once too often. Fine. Let them all stew.

About the only thing Chaney confronts tonight, though, is the lineup of ships from Asia at Terminal Island’s Pier 300, home to the port’s newest cargo facilities. She reports to work a yardstick away from a spot where 18-ton “cans” yo-yo between the holds of ships and the concrete docks. Even closer to the drop site, in the shadow of a giant hammerhead crane, sits another woman behind the wheel of a small truck cab called a UTR. She watches a side-view mirror the size of a skateboard, waiting for the signalman to flag the crane operator. On cue, the can silently plunges eight stories and stops just shy of the UTR’s flatbed. One end of the can tips and catches two pins on the flatbed; metal scrapes metal. The cab driver jostles as if rear-ended. The rest of the can drops with a violent shudder, flinging the young woman’s long hair about her shoulders.

“I tell them to get out of the cab if it gets too rough,” Chaney says in a voice equal parts hurt and exasperation. They’ve all heard her stories of drivers thrown about their cabs and mangled, but they’d rather endure the shocks than look scared. From her post in a fragile golf cart-type vehicle, she types on a keyboard the ID numbers on the cab, container and chassis. The central computer in turn relays a parking spot assignment to the UTR display screen. The driver delivers the can, picks up an empty flatbed and starts over, one in the convoy that in 1997 sent $73 billion in goods on their way to Wal-Mart or wherever. (The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together account for 25% of all ocean-borne U.S. imports.)

It’s the open-air physicality that Chaney loves. The high pay and freedom to work whenever she pleases easily offset the danger and the bullying. Careful not to put too noble a point on her assumed role of forcing fairness where it may not exist, she brings up her father’s accounts of bigotry in segregated Army barracks. “I’m very prejudiced,” she says with shrill conviction. “It’s called right and wrong. That’s what I worked for to come to the waterfront. That’s what I’ll leave the waterfront with.”

Chaney, 48, entered this world without an agenda, oblivious to the 1983 Golden Decree that offered women a better shot at getting onto the docks. When a longshoreman in her longtime Carson neighborhood encouraged her to apply for a union slot, she saw it as a chance to reinvent herself as a blue-collar Rockefeller. A UTR driver can earn $90,000 a year by working extra shifts, a common practice known as double-backing, while crane operators can pull down $130,000. In some cases, half a shift draws full pay. And a child can essentially inherit a union membership if a parent dies on the job. Outsiders typically get in the hard way, by paying their dues at the casual hall, a trailer in a Wilmington parking lot where union bosses dole out the day’s unfilled shifts to nonunion workers. Those who log the most hours as “casuals” get first crack when the union registers new members. It can take years of sometimes drawing only a few shifts a month to earn a card. In the winter of 1985, Chaney bypassed all that and got her first assignment, stationed under a crane hook. As swingmen, she and a friend twisted open the locks holding empty cans to the chassis as each truck rolled up. After 16 years in clerical desk jobs at the county Sheriff’s Department and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a slave to stockings and heels, she felt exhilarated, eager to sample every job--lash containers to decks, drive UTRs, run the crane.

In early evening, the last truck drove away and the two women sat on the ledge of berth 228, looking out toward San Pedro as the sun set. “I think I like this,” Chaney told her friend. “I’m coming back.” She left the hospital the next day, exchanging its sterile civility for a workplace where some men urinated wherever the urge struck. Prostitutes trawled for customers, and drinking and drugging were endemic. “It was wild to me,” Chaney recalls. The crude behavior was nothing, though, compared to the boneheads’ stunts. They scrawled “Bitch Go Home” in chalk on the cranes and buildings, she says. And some bosses invented petty excuses to keep her off a job site.

Chaney retaliated by wielding the rules like sabers. She insisted on--and got--portable toilets with locks, per the rules. She refused to drive damaged UTRs. One day, a boss with a loose grasp on fairness and the rules pointed to her white tennis shoes and ordered her to change, forgetting that most of the men also were wearing, ahem, sneakers. Chaney marched to her car, laced up her black steel-toed shoes and insisted that everyone else do the same or she would shut down the job, per section 17 of the safety manual. All complied--unhappily .

Elsewhere, though, rules offered no protection. In the casual hall, the dispatchers played “stupid games,” Chaney says, to cheat women out of hours and keep them on the slow track into the union. They handed out the best jobs to their brothers and left the scraps to “sisters,” who they knew often would turn down the more physical jobs such as lashing containers or hauling boxes. “That’s news to us,” says Marc Coleman, attorney for Local 13. “I’m not aware of any grievances that have been filed over that.” Well, of course not, Chaney says; the women are afraid to jeopardize what they perceive as a tenuous toehold. But Ramona Galindo, a dockworker since 1990, says Chaney’s rants about unfairness and discrimination are based on fiction. “It does not exist on the docks,” Galindo says. “We’re family down there. The solidarity is strong.”

As Chaney got to know her way around the docks, she learned that a hotly contested agreement called the Golden Decree had pried open the door to longshore jobs for women. It had also shut out the sons of men whose entry into the union had been paved by their fathers. And in their minds, fairness to women meant unfairness to men.

In 1980, the two unions at the docks--the longshore worker’s Local 13 (whose members load and unload the cargo ships) and the marine clerks Local 63 (who monitor the cargo and manage the paperwork)--together counted seven women among more than 3,000 men. Deborah Golden and six other women trying to win union cards contacted the Center for Law in the Public Interest, L.A.’s ground zero for cases involving Title VII, the 1964 civil rights law prohibiting employment discrimination. With the center’s most experienced attorney, A. Thomas Hunt, as lead counsel, the plaintiffs sued the two unions and the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents the shipping companies and terminal operators.

The litigation lasted two years. Hunt says the unions’ resistance came down to politics: “The union officers were concerned that if they made a deal like this, that they would be voted out of office.” They finally settled, he believes, to avoid shelling out a possible huge back-pay award to women kept out of the unions if they lost at trial. (Golden still works as a marine clerk but keeps a low profile.) The resulting Golden Decree mandated that women make up 35% of Local 13’s next 900 new enlistees and account for 20% of the total membership within 15 years. Similarly, 30% of the longshore workers earning transfers to the marine clerks local, a promotion of sorts, were to be women, with a long-range goal of 25% overall.

Chastened, the unions officially developed a magnanimous attitude toward women--without ever going out of their way to recruit them. “The Golden Decree has done a lot to integrate the waterfront,” longshore worker’s attorney Coleman says. “The men--I’ve talked to many, many of them--have no problem working with women,” says dockworker Galindo. But their enthusiasm is often tempered, she concedes, by watching women leapfrog over men with more hours.

For Chaney, the decree was rule-making at its best. “But it was wild to me,” she says, “because I kept thinking, ‘This is crazy. The civil rights movement really hit around 1964 and it took these people all these years to get on the freight train?’ ” Of course, some had climbed aboard early on. Many male bosses accepted the women, and Chaney swept unharassed through a variety of jobs, her compact body slowly hardening as she hauled 40-pound boxes of bananas or lashed containers to ship decks. The freewheeling docks also encouraged a natural independence that unsettled her husband, Chaney says. Their divorce left her free to work the more lucrative night and weekend shifts--or not at all. She could go to the dispatch hall and pick up either a single shift or “comebacks” that lasted several days. If offered an assignment she didn’t want, she could “flop” and wait for something better. Or she could just hang out with friends. She bought a house and a red Corvette.

The high wages and unstructured lifestyle compensated for the danger. And she figured her by-the-book vigilance would save her from the accidents that mangled or killed people. (The waterfront is widely recognized as one of the world’s most dangerous workplaces.) In 1986, a crane operator’s mistake shattered that notion. Chaney was behind the wheel of a UTR when a dangling container snagged a bent pin on a damaged chassis and upended the entire truck. She went down hard, dislocating her shoulder. Surgeries to install three different artificial shoulders--wearing steel, as she calls it--kept her out of work off and on for more than four years before she was transferred to the less physically demanding marine clerks union. The work there is far more safe and nowhere near as fun.

All along, Chaney had been keeping tabs on the registration numbers. In 1991, with seven years to go on the decree, neither union had hit its target. Here was one more rule, she thought, that had to be enforced. So, after Hunt, who had handled the original suit, resigned from the state bar amid accusations of fraud in several unrelated cases, some 300 waterfront women elected Chaney and four others to hire a new one. Soon after, Chaney says she found syringes surrounding her Corvette’s front tire. Someone just might blow up that sports car, barked a male co-worker. “Just make sure my ass is in it,” she snapped back.

“Connie has no problem standing up there and mouthing off,” says Michelle A. Reinglass, the Laguna Hills attorney tapped to shepherd the Golden Decree case. “Not a lot of women are like that.” True. A dozen other female dockworkers who quietly support the decree declined to talk for this story. The reason most often cited: fear of retribution. “I don’t blame them,” one male longshoreman says, requesting anonymity. “A lot of people on the waterfront want it to be a man’s world. They don’t want no women down there.” Hypersensitive to that vibe, the women do their best to blend in. Though the union last year dropped the gender-specific “men” from its official name, the women proudly call themselves longshoremen. Forget the namby-pamby longshorepersons or even longshore workers. And some women not only chide Chaney for her rhetoric but openly blast the decree altogether. “There’s a lot of intelligent, articulate women down there,” Galindo says. “And they believe in 100% fairness. To them, this is wrong. It’s biased. It’s unfair. It’s unconstitutional to another gender.”

On the final deadline last spring, the longshore union came up short. It counted 565 women among 3,347 men, or just less than 17%. The marine clerks union had reached its target two years earlier by siphoning longshoremen like Connie Chaney into its ranks. That stream of transfers, attorney Coleman says, left Local 13 with a Sisyphean task and well shy of its goal. Aggressive recruiting could have offset those losses, union critics say. But Beth Ross, attorney for the San Francisco-based International Longshore and Warehouse Union, argues, “The union has made every effort to bring women into the longshore local and to create conditions under which the women in L.A. can compete in those jobs.” Local 13 now faced a contempt of court charge, plus a trial to determine whether it has discriminated against women, an allegation in the original Deborah Golden lawsuit. After months of discussion, all parties in September agreed to a proposal that stipulates an even higher percentage of women as well as the fast-tracking over the next two years of 250 beyond the long-term registration goal. Along with hundreds of men who see themselves as victims, Galindo is seething. At press time, the dissenters and their various lawyers were preparing for their day in court. U.S. District Judge Robert M. Takasugi was scheduled on Jan. 14 to hear a volley of protests that this updated settlement would not only push aside men but also punish women who had spent years accumulating hours in the casual hall just to see others fly right past them. When the same judge heard the same basic arguments almost 16 years ago, he signed off on the Golden Decree. If he does so again, Galindo warns, “I have every intention to file with the Supreme Court.”

Meanwhile, Chaney will continue watching the registration tally. Despite what the decree so far has delivered, “there is no women in my opinion,” she says coldly. And she’s said as much--in her usual style--during union talks. Some of the women on the same negotiations panel complain that Chaney comes off as anti-union. But she says she supports the union ideal. Her problem is with its apparent inability to bring enough women into the fold.

With hiring mandates largely seen in the ‘90s as a bane on the free workplace, and perhaps even illegal, the decree represents a last stand of affirmative action. “The Golden Decree is an example of the great success of affirmative action in opening opportunities to persons who have historically been excluded from well-paying occupations,” says ILWU attorney Ross, noting that this is her personal opinion.

Chaney is skeptical. Boneheads abound, she says. “The thing I want is equality,” she says, her voice rising, as if she’s asserting another rule. “And I don’t think I’ll ever see it without a Golden Decree or something hanging over the industry’s head.”