At the Matson terminal in Oakland, California, dockworker Clarence Wagoner, also an ILWU member, said, "We’re all safety minded--we’re not going to kill each other because they say our productivity is low." He explained, "We’re not doubling out," referring to working two eight-hour shifts in a row.

These and other West Coast dockworkers were responding to the shipping and stevedoring bosses’ charges of a union-organized job action. The employers’ Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) has accused the ILWU of engaging in a "concerted, systematic work slowdown" and has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene against the union, claiming it is violating the Taft-Hartley law.

Ten days into a lockout organized by the shipping bosses, the federal government intervened in the fight by 10,500 dockworkers for a contract on October 8 by invoking the antilabor Taft-Hartley law, under which an 80-day "cooling-off" period was imposed. Under the law, the terms of the previous contract are reinstated and the unionists are required to work "at a normal and reasonable rate of speed."

Longshore workers are "really mad about government intervention," said Mark Downs, an ILWU member in Seattle. "We are especially concerned about safety. There were many collisions on the docks even before the lockout." Safety is a major issue in the unionists’ contract fight. In the name of "modernization," shipping bosses have been speeding up production.

Ben, a 30-year veteran from the Ben Nutter terminal in Oakland who gave only his first name, said, "When I first learned driving the crane, we handled 22 or 23 containers an hour. Now they want us to grab 30 an hour. That’s one container every two minutes."

In their push against the dockworkers, the shipping bosses now are hoping the federal judge overseeing the dispute, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, will declare the ILWU guilty of waging a slowdown, in which case he could fine the union or charge its officials with contempt of court.

The PMA alleges that productivity per worker dropped by one-third in the first week after the docks reopened. The union rebutted the charges saying they were baseless.

"PMA mismanagement is causing the backlog," the ILWU said in a statement to union members.

In its campaign to force the government to intervene, the PMA, echoed by the big-business media, exaggerated the effects the lockout was having on the economy.

A recent study states that the widely circulated figure of $1 billion to $2 billion in daily costs are false. The author of the study, Patrick Anderson, from the Anderson Economic Group, says "[We] view a figure of $1 billion to $2 billion per day as closer to the economic impact of sinking the ships than delaying them." The figure actually came from a study done one year ago for the PMA. Few big-business dailies have reported the findings from the study.

The Anderson Group report noted that the effects on consumers and businesses were relatively mild; "nowhere near the exaggerated numbers reported in the newspapers. Factories by and large kept humming, retailers kept selling, workers kept working."

Besides using the Taft-Hartley law, government officials are weighing other moves that would undercut the ILWU. One is a proposal to bring the ILWU under the anti-labor Railway Labor Act, which would give the White House greater powers to stop a walkout. Another proposal, strongly opposed by ILWU members, is to adopt legislation breaking up the union into separate bargaining units, one each for the 29 ports. The West Coast dockworkers are currently organized in one bargaining unit.

"Splitting up the union’s contract would offer ships alternate West Coast destinations should laborers at one or more ports strike. This would place union members in competition with each other, weakening the ILWU’s greatest leveraging tool--its solidarity," the Los Angeles Business Journal reported.

A good example of this solidarity was the dockworkers’ response to a one-day nurses’ strike at Long Beach Medical Center (see article on page 3). Together with members of other unions, they walked the nurses’ picket lines and spoke at two of their rallies on October 23.

The following day the Medical Center locked out the 1,300 registered nurses, who are members of the California Nurses Association.

"We know what being locked out is all about," said Dave Beamon, a leader of the ILWU here during a October 23 rally in front of the hospital. "We will support you to the end."

Bill Kalman in San Francisco contributed to this article.  
 
 
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