Socialist Viewpoint

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) contract talks have been proclaimed a “smashing victory” for the 10,500 West Coast dockworkers. Moreover, ILWU President James Spinosa claims the tentative agreement is a win-win deal for both the workers and the stevedoring and shipping companies. President Bush used almost the same language as Spinosa to describe the pact. “This agreement is good for workers,” Bush said, “good for employers, and it’s good for America’s economy.” (Los Angeles Times, Nov. 24).

Since many of the details of the proposed settlement have yet to be made public, sympathetic outsiders may feel constrained to wait and see if the union’s ranks feel the same way as Spinosa. How the ranks evaluate the pact will be known when their votes are announced sometime in January. One detail we do know is that the negotiators agreed to an unprecedented six-year deal, in order, we’re told, primarily to spread the costs of the pension plan, said to increase pensions by as much as fifty percent for a worker after 35 years.

Further, there’s an admission by all sides that the deal includes what the longshore bosses were looking for, the right to introduce new technology without hiring more dockworkers. The technology is said to be no more than optical scanners and bar codes. If that were all, the new terms would be less unfavorable than the truly historic Mechanization Agreement of 1961, negotiated by the legendary Harry Bridges. That contract allowed for containerization and while it provided more money and benefits it also cost the union jobs, some say thousands of jobs.

Wall Street Journal likes pact

But there’s more to it than that, say several sources. One, the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 26), in a gloating editorial, says that, “Moreover the PMA [Pacific Maritime Assn.] can continue instituting new cost-saving technology as it comes along, so that it can compete with rival docks in Europe and Asia.” Labor reporter Nancy Cleeland of the Los Angeles Times, who has followed the talks from the beginning, agrees, and wrote on Nov. 25 that, “The contract also sets out a collaborative process for implementing labor-saving technology.”

In other words, new labor-displacing processes can be introduced, processes that apparently the ranks won’t vote on. Cleeland quotes Joseph Miniace, PMA’s president and chief negotiator as saying, “It requires the parties to sit down and talk about technology, what the process is, how it’s implemented, rather than using the adversarial process of implementing it and then fighting over it. We are now forcing ourselves to sit down and act like business people taking care of a business that has a lot of public impact.” Miniace’s words are echoed by the union, which says that, “The ILWU looks forward to working with PMA to make West Coast ports even more efficient and profitable through new technology enhancements in this contract.”

No matter how the ranks vote, the bosses’ war, the war to reduce labor costs, must and will continue. The pressures on the stevedoring and shipping firms to compete are not going away. In fact, “globalization,” itself is a response by capital to protect itself from the effects of dog-eat-dog competition, reborn along with the rebuilding of the European and Japanese economies. Giving up jobs, the source of workers’ power in this economy, for higher pay, benefits and pensions is a certain path to eventual ruin for all unions, the ILWU included. We can sympathize with those dockworkers who will oppose the tentative pact, arguing that Bridges’ 1961 deal with the employers should not be repeated; arguing that to trade away jobs is to trade away the strength of the union.

Labor writer David Bacon wrote in July, “Today’s dockworkers look with trepidation at the beginning of a new era. Decades from now, the waterfront will be largely automated. Workers in front of computer screens, often hundreds of miles away from the docks, will control the movement of cargo on and off ships. Ports like Singapore and Rotterdam already have this new technology, and the world’s shipping companies want to introduce the same system on the Pacific coast.” Though the details aren’t fully known, it seems clear that the PMA believes that if the proposed settlement is ratified they will have taken a big step in that direction, leaving many workers behind.

At the beginning of the contract talks there was talk that the ILWU mustn’t repeat Bridges’ mistake of 1961. We hoped that those who made that argument would continue to press their case. It was our feeling that should the ILWU cast their fight as a fight to provide jobs for other workers, they would receive the same sort of sensational support the United Parcel workers received in 1997, when they fought for the part-time worker.

At this time, even more than in 1997, the fight for decent jobs is a daily fight for millions of Americans, whose numbers promise to increase. A fight for jobs is a fight to enlist the aid and support of those millions. A fight to use technology to reduce the workweek is a fight to bring to the longshore situation the one thing that has been missing, the social weight of other workers, unionized or not.