Dispute Shows a Union Firmly Anchored at West Coast Ports

Along with enviable wages, generous pensions and work rules that hark back to an earlier generation, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union retain another relic of blue-collar America -- the proud swagger of being in charge.

“Longies” have owned the West Coast waterfront for six decades, through years that saw the U.S. labor movement grow strong and bold, then fragmented and weak.

The union represents just 10,500 dockworkers -- a fraction of its peak membership and a tiny pool compared with the numbers of unionized auto workers or machinists. Yet its power is gargantuan, as demonstrated by the recent labor dispute that brought ports from San Diego to Seattle to a standstill and drained billions of dollars from the U.S. economy.

Shipping company officials closed the ports for 10 days after presenting evidence of union slowdowns that cut productivity 50%. Under pressure from retailers and manufacturers, President Bush last week invoked the rarely used Taft-Hartley Act to get the ports open again.

Part of the union’s power comes from being dealt a good hand. The union represents crane operators who move multi-ton containers off ships and forklift drivers who stack the containers onto rail cars and trucks.

Those are skilled jobs that cannot be shipped to Third World sweatshops, and they have become more important as the U.S. economy goes global.

Perhaps more significant, however, are the foresight of the union’s founders, who ensured members’ control of the Western seaboard, and the pit-bull-like determination of their successors to hold on to that legacy.

Union leaders view their current contract battle with the shipping industry as part of an old and justified struggle to retain the jurisdiction and control that keep them strong. In this case, they worry about holding on to jobs that could be chased off the docks by computers and the Internet.

“If you don’t have the jobs, you don’t have the wages, you don’t have the benefits, you don’t have the pensions and you don’t have the union to protect them,” said union spokesman Steve Stallone.

Once vulnerable day laborers, longies have become working-class icons, earning wages that range from $28 to $40 an hour, with high premiums for night or early shifts, for jobs that require no college education. Salaries for veteran clerks and supervisors easily can top $150,000 a year.

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Rivals’ Resentment

Union leaders don’t apologize for those high wages and benefits, explaining that their perks were earned through a bargain made decades ago, when employers offered to share the fruits of increased production if the union would accept drastic job cuts that would come with the implementation of contain shipping.

They also note that most members earn their union cards by putting in several years of apprentice-like “casual labor,” a time of unpredictable hours and no benefits.

There is no question, however, that the ILWU’s good fortune has evoked envy and resentment. Members of rival unions, terminal managers and truckers who move through the docks every day maintain that the union’s long success has bred a culture of entitlement and greed.

And they say that change, more than intransigent employers, could be its undoing.

“It’s really disappointing that collectively they don’t see how good they have it,” said Jim, a payroll clerk at a Los Angeles terminal who, like many union critics, said he feared repercussions if he used his full name.

“It’s insanity down here,” he said. “They work half the time of most people and make twice the money and gripe about it all day. And any loss, any concession -- it’s like drawing blood from a stone.”

Such grumbling is nothing new, said David J. Olson, a political science professor at the University of Washington who has made a specialty of studying the ILWU.

“People have been making the same kinds of charges for decades -- that the union is arrogant, strong-headed, too militant, too possessive of the space it occupies on the docks,” he said. “I see greater consistency than differences here. It’s been a fundamental principle of the ILWU from its first breath that the union controls the production process on the terminals. They see themselves as lords of the docks.”

Nothing about the International Longshore and Warehouse Union can be understood fully without a look at its history, particularly its legendary founder, Harry Bridges.

Bridges was a scrappy laborer from Australia who worked the San Francisco docks when the job was demeaning, dangerous and barely provided a living. In 1934 he became active in a series of violent waterfront strikes and emerged as the leader of the union that was born out of them. On July 5, during a dramatic confrontation between striking longshore workers and police on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, two men were shot dead and 30 suffered gunshot wounds -- a day remembered by longies ever since as Bloody Thursday.

Bridges realized that his fledgling labor group needed two things to survive: a union-controlled hiring hall that would bypass corrupt bosses on the docks and a bargaining unit that spanned the entire coast so shipping companies couldn’t play one port against the other.

Those principles, maintained to this day, are at the root of the union’s success. A charismatic consensus builder who ran the union until 1977, Bridges contributed one more keystone: the Modernization and Mechanization Agreement of 1960. That contract, still viewed as a model, embraced the new shipping mode of containerization on the expectation that it would eliminate thousands of union jobs. Before cargo was packed in containers, freight was packed piece by piece in the ship’s hold, a slow and labor-intensive process.

In return for the union’s acceptance of containers, employers agreed to keep under union jurisdiction all cargo-handling jobs that remained and to share the wealth created by the increased productivity with union members.

Harley Shaiken, a labor expert at UC Berkeley, said dockworkers on the East Coast chose another strategy, fighting modernization in small skirmishes and losing their power in pieces.

Bridges’ memory is honored by the union through the Harry Bridges libraries it maintains at most major ports and the paid day off that marks his birthday each year.

He was equally admired by those who sat across from him at the bargaining table. “Harry worked for my grandfather going into the ’34 strike,” said G. Scott Jones, a former Los Angeles terminal operator and director of employer group the Pacific Maritime Assn. for 32 years.

“When he finally got the union going he was a god, and justifiably so,” Jones said. “He was a very tough negotiator, but always with a civility that you don’t see today. And he enjoyed the full support of the rank and file. That was very important.”

Bridges was succeeded in 1977 by his top lieutenant, Jimmy Herman, who presided over the union for 14 years. Then began a series of political coups that saw the union’s leadership pass from San Francisco to Southern California and change four times in a decade.

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The union now is led by James J. Spinosa, who has taken the stance that the union will continue to “work safe” -- the management group says it’s code for working slowly -- as the ports come back to life.

All of Bridges’ successors have felt increasing pressure to deliver perks for his constituents, said Jones and other close observers of the union. The shipping lines, in turn, gave in to most demands, prizing peace at the docks over all else.

After acceding to union demands in contract negotiations in 1996 and 1999, several shipping executives said, they had to draw the line and fight for the introduction of labor-saving technology that would enable the ports to run more efficiently.

Union officials view the history differently. Though they acknowledge cutthroat politics and high turnover at the national level in the last decade, they see the real source of conflict in the employers’ group.

Bent on breaking the union, they say, hard-line carriers and terminal operators sought a new president of their own -- Joseph Miniace -- who has not shied away from staring down a tough union at the table.

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Public Rancor

By either account, the stage was set for confrontation on a grand scale when contract negotiations began in May. Through nearly five months of contentious negotiations, the rancor often broke into public view.

Then late last month, in response to what he said were union slowdowns, Miniace ordered the first lockout of dockworkers on the West Coast.

With the intervention of President Bush, the ports are operating again, at least for an 80-day cooling-off period supervised by a federal judge.

Negotiations are expected to resume this week, and some observers believe the two sides will reach an accommodation. With global trade booming, there is too much at stake for both sides for the standoff to continue.

“All of the expectations are that both parties will come out of this more than whole,” said Ezunial Burts, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 1984 to 1997. “Longshore members will make more money and shipping lines will get more productivity.

“There may be some hurt feelings and bruised egos, but the system will continue pretty much as it has,” Burts said. “When it’s all over, I guarantee, you won’t hear people saying the longshore union ‘used’ to be powerful.”