William “Bill” Carder, who served as the ILWU’s top legal counsel for nearly two decades, passed away on May 21 in Oakland after a long illness at the age of 78.
Carder was raised in a Southern California working-class family. His father was a short-order cook who eventually saved enough to open a chain of restaurants. Carder did well in school and graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Law in 1966. He quickly secured an important job at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Enforcement Division in Washington, DC.
Before long, a law school friend encouraged him to leave the new job behind and join the legal team for the newly-formed United Farm Workers of America (UFW) – created a year earlier when César Chávez merged his group with a seasoned network of militant Filipino farm workers. Carder and his then-wife Joanne, left Washington with their newborn daughter and headed to the small agricultural town of Delano in California’s Central Valley where the Farmworkers Union was based. During the next decade, Carder and his wife contributed long hours to help workers organize in the fields, win strikes and conduct consumer boycotts that made it possible for thousands of farmworkers to improve working conditions with union contracts. The effort gained national attention and was seen by many as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement.
An excellent lawyer
Released from jail: United Farmworkers Union President César Chávez was
released from a Monterey County jail on Christmas Eve in 1970, thanks to excellent
legal work by Bill Carder, on far right.
While at the UFW, Carder handled important cases, including one requiring him to persuade the California Supreme Court to release UFW President Cesar Chavez from jail on Christmas Eve in 1970. Chavez had been given an indefinite jail sentence by a grower-friendly judge on December 4 until the union leader agreed to end a nationwide boycott of lettuce grown in the Salinas Valley. As he was being taken away to jail, Chavez defied the judge by shouting to union members, “Boycott the hell out of them!”
Fighting Teamster corruption
During the previous summer, the UFW signed contracts with most of the state’s grape growers in California’s Central Valley. At the same time, vegetable growers in the Salinas Valley signed “sweetheart contracts” with Teamster officials in an effort to sabotage the more militant Farmworkers Union. The ILWU joined with other unions to oppose the Teamster/grower alliance against the UFW in Salinas, and did the same when Teamsters tried to thwart the UFW’s progress with Central Valley grape growers.
Early ILWU connections
Local 34 activist Don Watson and other ILWU members organized weekly caravans that delivered volunteers and donations to the besieged union in Salinas. Carder’s contribution to the high-stakes struggle in “the nation’s salad bowl” was to design a federal anti-trust legal challenge to the Teamster/grower alliance – an innovative strategy that ultimately pressured Teamster officials to yield jurisdiction to the UFW in 1977. That effort and other work led UFW General Counsel Jerry Cohen to hail Carder as “the best labor lawyer in the country.”
Leaving the Farmworkers union
In 1974, Carder left the UFW. Thirty-seven years later, he attended a community forum at the ILWU headquarters in San Francisco where author Frank Bardacke was presenting his important book, “Trampling Out the Vintage – César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farmworkers Union,” which offered a candid and constructively critical appraisal of Chávez. In his usual way, Carder listened patiently, then added a few clarifying facts and well-reasoned opinions in a respectful manner that furthered the discussion.
A new partnership
After leaving the UFW, Carder initially started his own labor law practice, but soon partnered with another well-respected, older labor attorney,= Norman “Norm” Leonard, who had been the ILWU’s lead counsel since the 1950’s. Over the next ten years, the two worked together with Carder eventually becoming the ILWU’s lead counsel in 1986. The law firm is still known today as “Leonard Carder, LLP” a name that reflects their longstanding partnership.
Advocating for the ILWU
During his three decades at the firm, Bill oversaw and personally litigated the ILWU’s most important legal matters. He and ILWU attorney Richard Zuckerman won a thirteen-year battle to secure ILWU longshore jurisdiction in the face of new technologies, establishing legal precedents that benefited all unions nationally. He also developed the legal foundation for new ILWU longshore worker registration programs that were needed in the mid- 1980’s when demand for dockworkers was growing. He also successfully defended the ILWU against new legal strategies developed by management lawyers to weaken unions, including abuse of RICO and antitrust laws.
Opposing war in Central America
In the late 1980’s, Carder became increasingly concerned with the government’s covert war in Central America, which allied the U.S. with repressive, anti-union regimes. He arranged a meeting between ILWU International President Jimmy Herman and Neighbor to Neighbor leader Fred Ross, Jr., to discuss efforts that could help end U.S. funding for the Contras in Nicaragua – and seek an end to the civil war in El Salvador.
That meeting led to an international boycott of Salvadoran coffee. ILWU members in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver, Canada, refused to cross Neighbor to Neighbor picket lines over Salvadoran coffee shipments. Those actions, along with many others, contributed to a negotiated end of the civil war in El Salvador. Carder defended the ILWU against employer lawsuits that were filed against the union for honoring picket lines and the coffee boycott.
Working as a community organizer
In the early 1990’s, Carder took a leave of absence from the law firm to do community organizing work, first with Neighbor to Neighbor, where he traveled to the state of Maine and organized citizens to pressure Republican Senator Olympia Snow to end the war in Central America. He then took an assignment with the Bay Area Organizing Committee, a project of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), founded by Saul Alinsky. Both projects aimed to empower communities afflicted by poverty and injustice. He returned to the law firm in 1995 where he devoted another decade of work to the ILWU.
Helping organize new workers
During his final years with the ILWU, Carder increasingly focused on providing legal support for the union’s new-member organizing campaigns, first under the direction of ILWU Regional Director Leroy King and later with retired Organizing Director Peter Olney. Carder played important roles with two campaigns that inspired a new, younger generation of workers to join the ILWU. One was the San Francisco Bike Messenger organizing drive that involved a partnership with ILWU Local 6, spearheaded by Secretary-Treasurer Fred Pecker. The second campaign involved helping hundreds of workers organize at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. That successful effort led to the creation of ILWU Local 5.
Man of many interests
Carder made a point of creating a life that went beyond his devotion to organizing and unions. His partner of 38 years, Sonia Lifshay, says Carder was a very good photographer who explored subjects ranging from Oakland storefronts to remote locations that they visited in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. His enjoyment of music ranged “from hip-hop to Beethoven,” she says, and his reading lists covered the classics to political journals. The last book he purchased, but didn’t finish, was “Fear – Trump in the White House,” by Bob Woodward.
“Bill wasn’t a typical alpha-male,” says Sonia, speaking to The Dispatcher from the modest Oakland bungalow that she and Bill shared for nearly four decades without being formally married. “We lived in sin for all those years,” she says.
Continuing despite poor health
Carder retired from the law firm he co-founded in 2004, but remained active with the ILWU, volunteering to help many more organizing campaigns during his remaining years. He also donated his skills to help low-income and immigrant workers in the East Bay.
Helping workers in Boron
In 2009, Carder helped over 400 ILWU members at Local 30 in Boron to prepare for a successful battle against Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest and most powerful mining corporations. The company was demanding concessions at the negotiating table and using hardball tactics on the job – all aimed at forcing workers into a hopeless economic strike. Carder helped develop a counter-strategy to increase members’ power on the job and provide the union with more leverage. He participated in training sessions where members learned how to refuse company demands for overtime, and respond creatively to other company provocations by organizing on the shop floor.
He explained how allowing the contract to expire – and continuing to work without a contract – would provide workers with powerful rights on the job – including the ability to conduct job actions without fear of reprisal or replacement. His efforts helped avert a potentially disastrous economic strike and put Rio Tinto on the defensive after the company locked-out workers on January 31, 2010 for 15 weeks. The lockout helped the union to win sympathy and support from communities in the high desert, throughout Southern California and around the world.
Former ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney said, “Bill provided us with invaluable advice over the many years that he helped ILWU workers win organizing campaigns. He was generous with his time and did it all while facing real health challenges, which made Bill so extraordinary.”
Help for Rite Aid workers
In 2011, Carder provided advice and support that helped almost 500 workers at Rite Aid’s Regional Distribution Center in Lancaster win their first contract. Using his expertise with consumer boycotts learned during his time with the United Farmworkers Union, Carder advised the ILWU how to organize a successful boycott of Rite Aid’s lucrative prescription drug business.
Supporting recycling workers During the same years, Carder donated time to help low-wage recycling workers in the Easy Bay win dramatic improvements. The multi-year effort was organized jointly with Local 6, but complicated because Teamster officials were colluding with employers to undermine the campaign – the same tactics Carder faced decades before at the Farmworkers Union. Carder sat patiently with recycling workers in dozens of bi-lingual meetings and trainings. His advice and reassurance – including the right of workers to take action during an expired contract – helped members gain confidence, win their strikes and secure dramatic contract gains.
Praise from ILWU President
ILWU International President Willie Adams said, “Bill Carder was one hundred percent devoted to helping working-class people learn about their rights to organize and build power. He was patient, took time to listen and took direction from workers, whether they labored in the fields, in a factory or on the waterfront. Those are special qualities that are rare among attorneys, and we remain eternally grateful for all his contributions.”
Carder is survived by his partner of 38 years, Sonia Lifshay; his daughter Sara Carder, her son (Bill’s grandson) Leo Paasch; Bill’s son, Benjamin Carder; his brother Donald Carder and five nieces and nephews.