[ How unions can fight back.]
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ILWU ALUMS TACKLE LABOR POWER AND STRATEGY QUESTIONS  
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Steve Early
March 3, 2023
CounterPunch
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_ How unions can fight back. _

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Workers in the logistics industry often make headlines when their
handling of goods is disrupted by pandemic conditions or labor
conflicts. Thanks to global supply chains, many consumer products are
now manufactured in one country, shipped by sea, rail, or air to
another country, unloaded and trucked to huge distribution centers
(aka “warehouses”), and then delivered to retail store chains or
directly to customers at home by on-line retailers like Amazon. When
workers in any one link in this supply chain have a fight with their
boss—on the docks, at a trucking company or railroad, or even in a
single newly organized warehouse—their chances of winning are
greater if they occupy a strategic “choke point” or can enlist
labor allies, at home or abroad, who do.

The obstacles to developing such union leverage are well illustrated
in two new books by former SF-based staff members of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).  From its founding, after the
San Francisco general strike of 1934, to the present day, this union
displayed has great workplace militancy and affinity for progressive
causes, at home and abroad. In 2016, for example, the Longshore Union
became one of only seven national labor organizations (three of them
based in California) to support Bernie Sanders’ first presidential
campaign. In 2020, ILWU members walked off the job in solidarity with
Black Lives Matter protests. Unfortunately, like much bigger
blue-collar unions, the ILWU’s core membership has aged and shrunk
due to technological change, industry restructuring, and job
elimination through attrition.

For most of the last twenty years, it has remained below 40,000, half
of which consists of dockworkers in 29 west coast ports covered by a
master agreement with the Pacific Maritime Association PMA). That
contract expired last July 1, which has led some shippers to shift
cargo
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East and Gulf Coast ports, where the workforce is represented by the
International Longshoremen’s Association, a more conservative union
affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

The co-authors of _Labor Under Siege: The ILWU’s Fight for
Organized Labor in an Anti-Union Era _(University of Washington
Press) are the late labor historian Ronald Magden and Harvey Schwartz,
curator of the ILWU’s Oral History collection who has done two
previous books on the union or its members. _Labor Under
Siege_  recounts, in highly laudatory fashion, the colorful career
of Robert (“Big Bob”) McEllrath, a six foot four second-generation
longshoreman and former boxer who served as national union president
between 2006 and 2018.

In _Labor Power and_ _Strategy_ (PM Press), former ILWU Organizing
Director Peter Olney has collaborated with Harvard University
Professor John Womack and labor researcher Glenn Perusek on a more
wide-ranging book. It explores how unions can fight back “in
industries as disparate as manufacturing, construction, or
education,” but with a particular focus on “strategic action by
the working class” in logistics.”

“SUSTAINABIITY” OR “SELF-SATISFIED SECTIONALISM”?

The strength of _Labor Under Siege_ lies in what the author calls an
oral history-based “view of how decisions were taken and policy
carried out to ensure the ILWU’s sustainability during a challenging
time for all of labor.” Olney and Perusek hail their fellow
contributors as “some of the best organic intellectuals of the
working class.” But none of these labor academics, journalists, or
union organizers ever held elected union office above the local level.
And, for better or worse, in the U.S. labor movement, major decisions
about organizing, bargaining, and strike strategy are generally not
made by “intellectuals” with the best analysis or biggest ideas,
as helpful as they may be.

Instead, in the ILWU and other unions far less internally democratic,
union policy is shaped by elected officers like “Big Bob” who come
up from the ranks. They remain within the same organization for their
entire career and build the membership following necessary to win
elections at the local, regional, and then national level. Assessing
McEllrath’s nearly 40-year career in multiple roles, Schwartz and
Magden give him high marks for making sure “the union persevered,”
in the face of “grave threats from corporate employers, government
officials, law enforcement agents, legal challenges and even other
unions.”

They acknowledge that the ILWU “did not always achieve unqualified
success in every strike or lock-out,” and gains made in its on-going
struggle with the PMA over waterfront automation were “useful but
limited.”  Nevertheless, they believe that McEllrath helped the
union “retain much of its earlier cohesion and vibrancy, especially
in its core dockside jurisdiction.”

The past ILWU activists, who contributed to _Labor Power and
Strategy_ are more critical of their former employer, while much
admiring its ability to “bring a marine terminal to a halt and
threaten the delivery of millions of dollars of merchandise” with a
single picket line. Despite longshore labor’s “powerful present
and historical position on the docks,” Olney left the ILWU in 2013
disappointed that, as organizing director, he was not able to
“motivate or inspire the union to once again ‘march inland’ as
it had done in the 1930s and 1940s, consolidating its strategic flanks
by organizing warehousing and some manufacturing, all related to the
flow of goods in and out of the ports.”

SUPPLY CHAIN CHALLENGES

One model initiative, inspired by that history, was a five-year
unionization effort among 500 Rite Aid workers at the company’s
Southwest Distribution Center in Lancaster, CA (a campaign also
recounted in _Labor Under Siege_). The ILWU won a first contract
there but failed to take up “the supply chain challenge” elsewhere
due to what Olney calls its “self-satisfied sectionalism.”

In his contribution to _Labor Power and Strategy_, Carey Dall, who
spent 15 years as an ILWU Local 10 activist and later full-time
organizer, finds similar fault with “the last of the truly left-wing
unions” (but one now displaying a “reflexive progressivism without
any strategic foundation”). According to Dall, the PMA “has
perfected the art of ensnarling the ILWU in defensive fights over
jurisdiction and contract violations, removing resources that could be
used for organizing and research in any strategic vision of maritime
cargo supply chains.” He believes that the union leadership’s
resulting “singular focus on the waterfront terminal” has kept
Longshore Division members from shaking “off the limitations of
craft unionism in order to wield their great economic power to
transform conditions for workers further down the supply chain in
trucking, warehousing and retail.”

Like Dall, Womack and other contributors to the book offer their own
strategies for going on the offensive and deploying union resources
differently. A labor historian, Womack believes that the “greatest
move forward for US labor” to build “nationally strategic
industrial power” would be a mega-merger between the ILWU, the ILA,
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the International
Association of Machinists, and the United Transportation Union,
creating a single “Transport and General Workers Union,” of the
sort which exists in the U.K. and other countries.  The formation of
one big union in transportation, warehousing, and logistics seems
unlikely, given the amount of inter-union conflict chronicled, at
length, in _Labor Under Siege._

OBSTACLES TO CONSOLIDATION

Despite past rank-and-file networking and solidarity, the east and
west coast longshore unions are unlikely partners, due to their very
different union culture. The IAM has yet to consolidate, even with
other manufacturing unions like the Steel Workers and Auto Workers.
The UTU has been more marriage minded, having succeeded in uniting
four smaller and separate railroad craft unions before joining forces
with the Sheet Metal Workers in an amalgamation that has yet to
include other railroad workers or other national unions representing
more mass transit workers. As for the Teamsters, they have been an
historical nemesis of the ILWU, luring warehouse workers away from it
via the periodic “raiding” described by Schwartz and Magden.

The ILWU is not even currently affiliated with the national AFL-CIO,
having quit in 2013 for multiple reasons
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including its failure to discourage picket-line crossing by fellow
affiliates like the Operating Engineers.  As reported in _Labor
Under Siege_, a waterfront employer in Longview, Washington got
critical help from that building trades union in a jurisdictional
fight that the authors call “the most important battle of
McEllrath’s career as ILWU president because of its length and
bitterness.” Several years later, after an Oregon show-down with a
global company called International Container Terminal Services, Inc.
(ICTSI), the ILWU and its Portland local was hit with a huge damage
suit, which resulted in a jury award of $94 million, later reduced to
$19 million. Because the ICTSI litigation “threatened the union’s
solvency,” it remained “a serious challenge that continued beyond
Bob’s presidency” while the case is under appeal.

In the absence of top-down consolidation–between unions facing more
routine threats to their financial survival (like not having enough
dues payers to pay the bills any longer)–Womack suggests a Plan B.
That consists of “joint internal organizing” that links insurgent
workers in the same industry who have long been divided along craft
lines. The best working example of that approach lately is the
cross-union caucus known as Railroad Workers United
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12 different rail industry labor organizations.

RWU has gained greater traction lately amid a threatened national
strike, rank-and-file resistance to a federally imposed settlement
lacking sufficient paid sick days and now growing public concern about
rail safety due to the disastrous derailment of Norfolk Southern
“bomb trains” in East Palestine, Ohio (which created a temporary
“choke point” for sure). The strength of RWU lies not in its
embrace of any “Big Bobs” in the rail labor leadership or reliance
on “organic labor intellectuals” (although the group contains more
than a few). Instead, it has spent many years building strong ties
between workers who would otherwise have remained isolated, divided,
and “represented” solely by fragmented and often dysfunctional
union bureaucracies. That’s a still a long way from the “one big
union” in the rail industry that Eugene Victor Debs helped to create
at a meeting in Chicago 130 years ago this winter. But the spirit of
industrial union solidarity behind that strategic innovation—the
sadly short-lived American Railway Union– continues to animate the
work of the RWU today.

_STEVE EARLY has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He was
an organizer and international representative for the Communications
Workers of American between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of four
books, most recently Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and The
Remaking of An American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at
[email protected]_

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* Labor
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* Strategy
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* unions
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* books
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* ILWU
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* RWU
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