Vol. 79/No. 2      January 26, 2015

— Maggie Trowe

Talks between representatives of 20,000 ILWU members and the Pacific Maritime Association began well before the contract expired July 1. The contract covers work at ports from San Diego to Seattle, which handled $892 billion in imports and exports during 2013.

Port bosses have stepped up a propaganda campaign against the union in the big-business press, accusing workers of carrying out a slowdown, resulting in big backups at the ports. “Are West Coast longshoremen spoiling Christmas?” read a Dec. 8 headline in Politico magazine. Peter Friedmann, executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, said if the ILWU tries to keep “antiquated practices such as the hiring hall” and prevent automation of marine terminals, the union will succeed in “accelerating the diversion of cargo away from U.S. West Coast ports.”

The ILWU has organized work at all West Coast terminals since it won hard-fought battles in the 1930s. The union won the right to use its own hiring halls to dispatch workers to fill bosses’ job orders.

The union says the employers caused the backlog by instituting practices that have resulted in a shortage of chassis to haul containers, switching to giant ships that carry more cargo, shortages of rail cars and the companies’ refusal to train enough crane operators. “The men and women of the ILWU will not make up for the current supply chain failures at the expense of life and limb,” ILWU spokesperson Craig Merrilees said in a statement last November.

The Pacific Maritime Association drastically cut the number of workers on night shift in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach Dec. 31. “This is the second round of cuts made by the employer that is making the congestion at the port of L.A. and Long Beach worse,” ILWU Local 13 President Bobby Olvera Jr. told the Long Beach Press Telegram. On Jan. 5 the ILWU called for federal mediation. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service immediately announced that it would enter the talks.

— Bill Arth

Chicken butchers in Israel win pay raise, end to piece work
After three weeks on strike, 65 kosher butchers and their helpers at the Milouoff slaughterhouse near Acre, Israel, won an initial victory Jan. 11.

“We won an immediate pay raise of 30 to 40 percent,” Rafi Kimhi, coordinator in northern Israel of the Koach La Ovdim (Workers Power) trade union federation, said by phone Jan. 13. “And they are going back as direct employees of Milouoff, not of a contractor.” The butchers went on strike after Milouoff fired the contractor they had worked for, but would not guarantee that everyone would be rehired by the new one.

“And instead of getting paid piece work for each chicken slaughtered, they are now getting paid by the hour, which is much better,” he said.

“I don’t want to exaggerate what was won,” Kimhi added. “The contractor is going to court to challenge the preliminary six-month agreement, and we are still negotiating with Milouoff.”

The contract applies to the butchers and helpers, but not some 400 other workers, mostly Arab citizens of Israel, who were not part of the strike. Koach La Ovdim would like to organize all the workers into the union. Milouoff is a cooperative owned by 23 collective farms, or kibbutzim, and produces about 12 percent of the chickens sold in Israel.

The butchers are Haredim — ultra-orthodox Jews — from North Africa.

“Three weeks on strike was not easy for them, because most have seven or eight children,” Kimhi added. “But now we are starting in a good position.”

— Seth Galinsky