Union Says Bush Has Dropped Threats, But Dockworkers’ Fight Heats Up
by Charles Walker
This article and the ones that follow are
from the website Labor Tuesday for October 1, 2002. They have been
edited for Labor Standard.
As this is written, over 10,000 West Coast
dockworkers are locked out of their jobs for the second time since Friday
night, Sept. 27. Once again, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), a
consortium of shipping and terminal companies charged that members of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) orchestrated a coastwide work slowdown at
29 seaports. The union adamantly denied there was a work slowdown. The union
said that the bosses’ chief negotiator was showing “the same disrespect for the
union he has since the beginning of these talks. He is unilaterally taking the
action of closing all ports and bears full responsibility for its effects on
the American economy.”
For months, the labor movement has nervously
contemplated the possibility of a government takeover of the West Coast docks,
and the military repression of the dockworkers union, which has been engaged in
contentious negotiations since May with the shipping bosses.
However, according to the dockers union, the
Bush administration has dropped such plans to intervene in the negotiations. On
Sept. 26, the ILWU told its members, “This week, the Bush Department of Labor
denied outright in writing that they have any intention of intervening in the
ILWU/PMA labor negotiations. The Bush Administration states in the document
that it has no plans to break up the union, send troops, or place longshore
workers under the Railway Labor Act. This pledge comes after months of threats
and innuendo from the Bush Administration which have been exposed by the ILWU
in the media.”
But that doesn’t mean that the government has
dropped plans to impose an 80-day “cooling-off” period, as authorized by the
infamous Taft-Hartley Act.
Though the union says that it didn’t ask the
ranks to engage in a work slowdown, it did publicly state: “The ILWU
Negotiating Committee passed a resolution today, Sept. 26, calling on members
to redouble efforts to improve safety on the docks. The resolution, distributed
to all locals, calls on longshore workers to follow all safety procedures,
including speed limits, to refrain from working extended shifts, working
through lunch hours, or doubling back. It also calls on ILWU members to ensure
that all military sustainment (sic) cargo is handled without any difficulties
or delay.”
Coincidentally or not, a major San Francisco
ILWU local unanimously passed a motion to enforce safety regulations, just days
before the Coastwide Negotiating Committee adopted its similar motion. Without
a doubt, productivity, the source of the bosses’ profits, would be negatively
impacted by the dockers strictly following safety regulations, and refusing
overtime.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian, told the
San Francisco Chronicle (Sept. 29), that the bosses’ [first] lockout was
“just a trial balloon. Both sides are engaged in a high stakes game, with the
ILWU trying to win public support and the PMA wanting the Bush administration
to step in.”
After the first lockout—which lasted 36
hours—ended Sunday, the dockers returned to work, but with an added wrinkle.
“The union told workers who normally report to the same shipping terminal each
day to instead begin Sunday at the dispatch hall for random assignment.
Experienced crane operators, for example, chose other jobs and left their less
experienced co-workers to operate the cranes.” The bosses complained that,
“It’s like a plumber showing up to roof your house” (S.F. Chronicle,
Sept. 29).
On Sunday, the dockworkers were back on the job
less than a full shift, and the bosses shut down the piers and terminals a
second time. The bosses declared that the lockout would last until the union
agreed to a new contract or agreed to extend the expired contract, which might
crimp the workers’ measures to ensure their safety. City police removed
workers—-who protested the new lockout—-from their job sites.
The press and the PMA estimate that the shutdown
will cost the economy a billion dollars a day. True or not, some analysts said
the impact of the first lockout would not be large. “Jack Kyser, an economist
with the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, said a short
lockout—while damaging—would not pull the plug on the economy,” reported
Reuters (Sept. 27). “Independent truckers would miss income for the weekend of
expected shipments, while railroads and steamship owners would pay the costs of
idle trains and ships waiting for cargo.”
The union and the bosses are reported to have
scheduled a negotiating meeting today, Sept. 30, the first face-to-face meeting
in 48 hours. A PMA representative told the media that the PMA was optimistic.
But the latest word from the union is that there was no progress on the key
issue of jobs.
The Bush administration will come under renewed
pressure from retail merchants to impose the Taft-Hartley Act should the talks
collapse, or drag out much longer. Much earlier, an ILWU spokesperson said that
forcing the dockworkers back to work for 80 days would not resolve the dispute.
He recalled that the union had been forced to work under the Taft-Hartley Act
in 1971, and struck for more than 130 days as soon as the so-called cooling-off
period was over.
The core dispute is over jobs. The PMA wants to
use the cover of new technology to deny the union the right to represent
workers hired for computerized work. The union earlier agreed to give up 600
traditional jobs, and insists that the shippers reciprocate by recognizing its
jurisdiction over the new work. Today the ILWU released a statement by its
president James Spinosa.
The statement reads in part:
“They [the shipping bosses] are not prepared to
deal with turning over the jobs that remain in the industry and any new jobs
that are created that will take this industry forward to this Union; the jobs
that are functionally equivalent to our work and they are under obligation to
this Union to do. The Union has stepped up, the Union has told the Employers
over and over again, ‘We will meet you in the middle, we will allow for free
flow of information, we will allow for technology to move forward,’ so that we
would strengthen our position in the global market, on the West Coast, in these
ports, providing that you meet us halfway on the jobs that are necessary to be
done, that are left to be done in this industry. The Employers cannot deliver
that, they refuse to deliver that, their latest proposal has been, ‘We really
didn’t mean that we want to turn over the jobs to your Union, what we really
meant is that we want to buy your workforce out.’ Totally unacceptable to the
ILWU; we will not move along those lines, not now, not ever in the future. What
we are looking for in this set of bargaining are jobs, jobs that remain in the
industry, jobs that are ours under the contract and the Employers have got to
step up to the table, if they want to see those West Coast ports resume their activities
like they have in the past.”
Conversation with Sweeney about National Health Care
by Jerry Gordon
Jerry Gordon was a staff representative
of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union for twenty-three years.
Articles by him on the U.S. Labor Party’s opposition to government control of
unions and on the state of the unions as of Labor Day 2002 have been posted on
both Labor Tuesday and Labor Standard web sites in previous weeks.
Together with about 75 other people, I had lunch
this past Tuesday (September 24) with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. The lunch
followed a public meeting addressed by Sweeney at the University of Toledo, at
which he denounced corporate corruption. There was no question-and-answer
period following Sweeney’s talk or at the lunch, but there was an opportunity
to talk with him informally. I decided to engage him on the health care issue
because I wanted to know whether there had been any change in his position
regarding single-payer universal health care.
Before recounting our conversation, it may be
helpful for those not familiar with the development to summarize the way the
AFL-CIO’s position has evolved on the health care issue over the past several
decades, and what Sweeney’s role has been. My source for what follows is Marie
Gottschalk’s excellent book: “The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and
the Politics of Health Care in the United States” (Cornell University Press,
2000).
From National Health Care to Employer
Mandate
In the post–World War II period, U.S. labor was
a staunch advocate of a national health care program ensuring access to medical
care for all. When the idea of a legislative scheme tying health care to
employment was first floated, labor strenuously opposed it. Labor officials
contended such a system would not do enough to reduce costs and expand access
to quality health care, and that it would ratify a multi-tiered system of
health care delivery. They also noted that the existing system of employment
was ridden with inequities and that tying benefits to jobs gave employers a
disincentive to hire full-time workers. Recessionary periods with mass layoffs
only heightened their concerns about job-based benefits.
In 1978, over the heated objection of many
unions and several presidents of internationals, labor officially reversed
course and embraced the very system it had previously denounced. What accounted
for this remarkable turnabout?
The main factor was the belief that labor was
too weak to win genuine universal health care and that a switch to employer
mandate would pick up support from the business community since commercial
for-profit insurance companies would remain at the very center of the system.
The idea was to make labor part of a broader and winning coalition. Over the
next decade and a half, labor’s commitment to an employer mandated solution did
not wane. As Gottschalk puts it, “Employer mandate helped reconfigure the
coalition and the health-care issue, aligning labor more closely with employers
and insurers.” This at a time when companies were increasingly turning to
replacement workers to break strikes; holding down wages with threats to
relocate production overseas or to low wage, low benefit right-to-work states;
shifting more of the costs of health care to their employees; and vigorously
opposing organized labor on issues like plant closing legislation and family
leave. Yet many labor leaders continued to maintain that the big business
forces doing all of the above should be considered the allies and partners of
working people in the fight for health care for all!
Regarding Sweeney’s role, Gottschalk writes,
“Sweeney, as head of the AFL-CIO health-care committee, pushed ... for a joint
labor-management solution [to the health care problem] rather than a
single-payer arrangement. Even though Sweeney could be critical of business at
times, he believed that a satisfactory solution on health care would come about
because of business participation—not in spite of business participation.
Because the business community would never endorse a single-payer plan, this
approach was doomed from the start, in his view.”
AFL-CIO Split Down the Middle
The AFL-CIO’s health care committee was split
down the middle between single-payer advocates and employer mandate supporters.
Things came to a head in early 1991. As described by Gottschalk, “At a critical
and contentious meeting of the federation’s health care committee on January
31, 1991, Robert M. McGlotten of the AFL-CIO argued that the single-payer
approach was not politically viable because legislators did not want to take on
the insurers. He warned that if organized labor insisted on endorsing such a
proposal, it would find itself politically marginalized as the debate over
health-care reform unfolded. Several union presidents disagreed with
McGlotten’s assessment. UAW president Owen Bieber countered that it was still
too early to assess the political feasibility of a single-payer plan because
organized labor had done so little to educate legislators, the public, and its members
about the solution.”
The meeting deadlocked eight-to-eight over
whether to endorse the single-payer option. Lane Kirkland and Sweeney remained
clearly committed to the employer-mandate formula and looked for support from
leaders of the Democratic Party. At the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council meeting in
February 1991, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Speaker of the House
Tom Foley addressed the group and derided the single-payer plan. Foley pressed
the Council not to support “any legislation that involved anything but
tinkering with the job-based system.” The day before the Executive Council
meeting, Kirkland told a gathering of the American Medical Association,
federation’s longtime nemesis, “Gone are the old, hardened attitudes and purely
political exercises.” He proudly announced that organized labor was “in common
cause with many of our traditional adversaries in the business
community—including the National Association of Manufacturers and some of the
nation’s biggest corporations.”
The Clinton plan—far from being a program for
universal health care as it was packaged—was, in reality, a scheme for managed
costs (not “managed care”). Clinton said that his Health Security Act was built
upon “what works today in the private sector to expand employer-based
coverage.” His proposal centered on a requirement that employers pay a portion
of the health insurance premiums for their workers. Despite the misgivings of a
number of unions, most ended up supporting the Clinton approach, including some
internationals which held single-payer positions.
Today the AFL-CIO, together with many of its
international affiliates, is part of the National Coalition on Health Care.
Other members of this coalition include representatives of big corporations.
While the coalition’s program calls for “Health Insurance for All,” it endorses
a system that “builds upon the American tradition of providing private health
insurance through the workplace.”
Tuesday’s Exchange with Sweeney in Toledo
I was familiar with this background when I
talked with Sweeney on Tuesday. I began by telling him about a campaign in Ohio
to get the legislature to act without delay to pass publicly funded universal
health care. This campaign has been endorsed by the Ohio AFL-CIO, UAW, dozens
of local unions, the Ohio Council of Churches (representing three million
people), three members of Congress, Cuyahoga County Commissioners (Cleveland),
several city councils, the Ohio Nurses Association, nearly 70 physicians, a
number of RNs, and community and health care advocacy groups. I handed Sweeney
a Call to a conference being held next January promoting the campaign and told
him we were for a publicly funded health care system to replace the
employment-based one that has clearly failed.
Sweeney said he was for any kind of health care
system, whether publicly financed or privately funded, which would guarantee
access to quality heath care for all Americans. But, he said, you’re not going
to get it until you change the composition of Congress and other legislative
bodies, since the Republicans are holding up health care reform. He added that
we cannot even get a prescription drug bill out of Congress.
I said we had an ultraconservative, Republican-dominated state legislature in Ohio but that we took the position that we could
win health care reform regardless, provided we educated and mobilized a large
enough number of people. I pointed out that there were a lot of angry people in
Ohio, including steelworker retirees who were losing heath benefits, and that
if hundreds of thousands of workers and their allies marched on the state
capital in Columbus and announced they were staying there until the General
Assembly passed a single-payer bill, I thought we could make some things
happen. I also said that it would be great if the AFL-CIO were to lead a
national campaign to win a single-payer system, that this would win the
federation tremendous support and appreciation from the population as a whole.
Pointing to the Call to the January conference,
Sweeney said, “Look, I think you are doing the right thing and I wish you every
success. You know, the AFL-CIO tried to get single-payer legislation passed but
we were unsuccessful. You won’t be able to get it right away either.”
I said I thought we had to demand it right away,
that we understood we weren’t getting it immediately, but that we were building
the movement for fundamental change. Then I asked him whether he now favored a
single-payer plan. He said yes. I asked him if I quoted him as being a
single-payer advocate, would that be accurate? He said yes. That was the end of
the conversation.
Unfortunately, the AFL-CIO is not about to lead
a campaign to win a single-payer health care system in the U.S. Their priority
remains electing Democrats to office and they regard that as a precondition for
achieving fundamental reform. So it remains for others, such as the Labor
Party, Physicians for a National Health Program, and the single-payer
coalitions around the country to lead the struggle for change.
But having said this, it seems to me that we are
now fighting on more favorable terrain. There is much greater sympathy and
support for the single-payer position in the labor movement than existed even
months ago.
We see this in Ohio, where our movement has acquired
real momentum. Sweeney’s comments, while not presaging any seismic changes
regarding what the national AFL-CIO plans to do on the health care issue in the
immediate period ahead, do attest to the growing receptivity to the
single-payer solution, even among some who resisted it so strongly for decades.
After all, everything else has failed. It’s time for labor to recapture its
past and again embrace an idea whose time has come.
How Important an Issue?
Some on the left, while acknowledging that
health care is an important issue, do not see it as a cutting edge one
warranting priority attention and the expenditure of energy and resources.
At a time of impending imperialist war against
Iraq, mobilizing opposition to prevent the bloodbath is clearly the overriding
priority. The issue of war or peace is always of overriding concern to the
working class.
So, too, is building solidarity with the West
Coast dock workers in their fight against the Pacific Maritime Association and
the government, and opposing Bush’s union busting campaign in establishing the
Department of Homeland Security.
It is entirely unnecessary to pit the health
care issue against any other in order to argue how critical it is and why the
left should be fully involved in the fight to win a single-payer system. This
is a major class battle—a confrontation between the working class and the
insurance companies, HMOs, and their corporate backers. There are tens of
millions of workers and retirees in this country who, when asked what issue is
paramount to them, say health care. It is clearly a matter of burning concern
to masses of people.
Both the Florida and Ohio AFL-CIO have now taken
positions calling for a publicly funded universal health system. [The statewide
AFL-CIO bodies in the states of Maine and Washington have also taken this
position.—note by Labor Standard editors.] Major internationals like
AFSCME, the UAW, and UNITE hold strongly to single-payer positions. More can be
won over. There is a gigantic movement to be built out there in support of what
is one the great social justice issues of the new century.
For decades, virtually all of labor’s struggles
have been defensive. Here is an opportunity for labor to go on the offense,
leading other sectors of the population in a struggle against the giant
pharmaceuticals and the bloated health care industry. As increasing numbers of
people get into motion on this issue, they will come to understand more clearly
the need for independent working class political action, given the miserable
failure of the Democrats and Republicans to legislate relief. This deepening
disillusionment with the two corporate parties can help lay the basis for
building the mass workers party which is so vitally needed.
LABOR BRIEFS—U.S. LABOR AND THE LOOMING WAR AGAINST IRAQ
New Mexico Carpenters and
Joiners
“To Honorable Senator Bingaman, Honorable
Senator Domenici, and Honorable
Representatives Wilson and Udall: We, members of
Local 1319 of the United
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of
America, present at our regular monthly
meeting, September 15, 2002, urge you, our elected representatives, to oppose
the administration’s plans for military [invasion] of Iraq…”
—Adopted , Sept. 15, 2002, New Mexico.
Washington State Labor Council
Convention
“RESOLVED that the Washington State Labor
Council urge the AFL-CIO and its affiliates to oppose the U.S. government’s
open-ended ‘war on terrorism’ and participate in rallies, marches, and other
activities to pressure President Bush and Congress to stop the war and redirect
money from corporate handouts and the military budget to assist laid-off
workers, restore and expand public services, and promote global justice by
providing humanitarian and economic aid—administered by unions—to our brothers
and sisters in other countries.”
—Adopted,
August 19–22, 2002, Spokane, WA.
San Francisco Labor
Council
“Resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council,
AFL-CIO, reaffirm and join the growing movement in opposition to any U.S. war
against Iraq, and call on unions and the AFL-CIO at all levels and
Congressional representatives to publicly oppose this war…”
—Adopted,
August 26, 2002, San Francisco
California Teachers State
Council
“Therefore, be it resolved that the
California Federation of Teachers goes on record as strenuously opposing the
Bush administration’s march toward war with Iraq. And be it further resolved
that the California Federation of Teachers urge its members and affiliates to
get involved with organizations working toward stopping the Bush
administration’s march toward war with Iraq.”
—Adopted, Sept. 21, 2002
East Bay Pride At
Work
“RESOLVED that the East Bay Pride At Work Chapter
will campaign against preemptive war strikes on Iraq or any other country
without the support of international law and community, and without approval by
Congress, and will support military actions only under the immediate and
justified threat to the United States or its allies and be it further RESOLVED
that East Bay Pride At Work Chapter will participate in rallies and marches and
other activities as necessary to redirect money from the expanded military
budget back to restore public services, health and welfare to U.S. citizens,
assist laid-off workers, and seek to promote global justice by supporting and
encouraging humanitarian and economic aid to our brothers and sisters in other
countries and be it RESOLVED that East Bay Pride At Work will send this
resolution to all other allied labor unions for concurrence and to our
representatives in Congress, and to the President of the United States, and
will not support candidates for public office that condone preemptive war on
any country.”
—Ratified Sept. 8, 2002, by a Quorum of Officers
East
Bay Pride At Work, Affiliated with the AFL-CIO, Eileen Berkun,
President
United Electrical Workers of America
(UE)
“The Bush Administration is cynically
using inflated claims of Iraq’s threat to vastly increase the military budget,
to help his friends in the oil business control oil production in the Middle
East, and to boost his own popularity and prop up the electoral fortunes of the
pro-corporate Republican Party. None of these will help to prevent terrorism,
but all of them will hurt workers in the U.S. and abroad. THEREFORE, BE IT
RESOLVED THAT THIS 67TH UE CONVENTION: 1. Opposes a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but
supports instead a genuinely multilateral diplomatic approach to the Iraq
situation, sanctioned and directed by the United Nations; 2. Encourages UE at
all levels to educate our members on the history and issues underlying the
disputes in the Middle East.”
—Bruce J. Klipple, General Secretary-Treasurer
[The resolution was adopted by the UE convention]
AFL-CIO’S SWEENEY AND
CO?
“AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and the 51
members of the Executive Council have refused to comment on the growing debate
over whether the United States should go to war against Iraq, as though it was
not a matter of concern for America’s working families.”
—Harry Kelber’s LaborTalk for September
18, 2002