President’s message

As I write this column, working families and union members across North America – including many ILWU members – are coming under attack.

Wisconsin is ground zero

Most eyes are now focused on Wisconsin where the anti-union Governor, Scott Walker, has made his state a battleground in the new war on workers. The Governor is trying to justify his demand to destroy unions by pointing to the state budget deficit. But the real cause of budget deficits is the recession brought on by the greed and deregulation of Wall Street.

Another reason for budget deficits is that anti-union politicians have been cutting taxes for 30 years. Those tax cuts mainly benefit corporations and the super-rich, which ends up making the rich a lot richer while bankrupting our government in the process. The expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t help.

Working class families have been losing ground for 30 years – suffering a decline in real wages that makes the tax base of our communities much weaker. Combine that with the handful at the top who are taking a lot more – while paying less taxes – and you begin to see why we’ve racked-up these huge budget deficits.

Finally, remember that two years of recession have hammered tax revenues and pension fund investments. Once again, the blame lies with the big banks and their political friends in Washington who allowed Wall Street to run wild at taxpayer expense. We are now paying the price with record numbers of bankruptcies, foreclosures, repossessions, and double-digit unemployment.

Budget deficits are being used as an excuse to attack unions. But the worst is yet to come, because now the same politicians who allowed and bailed out Wall Street are using the crisis they created to come after unions. With only 7% of the working class in a private-sector union today, wealthy donors and their antiunion politicians and figure it’s time to go after the relatively larger and stronger public unions.

The battle in Wisconsin and other states may come down to a simple question: who will win the loyalty of working class and middle income voters? Will we be able to win over workers – many who once belonged to unions – but have since seen their pay, benefits, and job security go down? Or will right-wing politicians succeed in pinning the blame for deficits on union members and convince working class voters that unions are the problem?

The loyalty of the working class is now up for grabs with the outcome hard to predict.

Governor Walker has reason to be confident after just winning an election with support from working class voters – and he’s got a majority of like-minded, anti-union legislators in the State House, which means he’s holding some pretty strong cards.

But union members are fighting back. One hundred thousand supporters came to Madison on February 26th, and support rallies were held in more than a dozen cities on the same day. The stakes in this fight couldn’t be higher, as it may determine whether the labor movement continues to shrink or survives long enough to organize and grow in the future. There’s some reason to be hopeful, because it appears that

Governor Walker has failed to convince a majority of working families to support his agenda of destroying public sector unions. A poll of registered voters in Wisconsin conducted February 16-20 showed that a healthy 62% saw public workers in a favorable light, with only 11% expressing negative views. Three out of four voters polled say they oppose taking away collective bargaining rights from public employees – and almost half of Republican voters agreed. That’s the good news.

The not so good news is that voters tend to be less sympathetic towards “unions” than the plight of individual “workers.” Voters also say they’re inclined to support pension cuts for public workers. The real test will be what happens over time – as both sides in this class war make their moves to win public support. The standoff will probably turn on whether voters are more likely to blame workers or the Governor as the protests continue.

And while we’re focused – as we should be – on Wisconsin, it has to be said that union members are facing trouble in all 50 states as well as in Congress. There are 21 other states besides Wisconsin where anti-union Governors and state legislatures hold power. Plans are already rolling in Ohio, Indiana and New Jersey to follow Governor Walker’s attack in Wisconsin. Right now, they’re watching and waiting to see what happens. The outcome in Wisconsin will either make them more bold or more cautious.

Things in Congress aren’t any better, with an anti-union majority controlling the U.S. House of Representatives that’s attacking anything that could possibly help workers and unions such as OSHA protections and NLRB funding.

The Obama Administration has been a mixed bag for workers. We got a health care bill that was mostly disappointing. It will stop insurance companies from cancelling coverage if you’ve been sick, but seems to be a better deal overall for the insurance industry than it is for the average citizen. And for ILWU longshore workers, there’s the added rub of a special tax on “better than average” health care plans like ours. And if that’s not enough, Obama appointed a commission that recommended cuts to Medicare and Social Security – including a plan to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69!

Remembering PATCO and learning from the past

We can’t afford to have another situation like the PATCO strike (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) that we had in 1981 when President Reagan replaced striking air controllers with non-union scabs. That incident made it more acceptable for companies to replace strikers with scabs, encouraging employers to hire scabs – while increasing the fear among workers that they could be easily replaced in a strike. If Wisconsin isn’t going to mark another decline in the state of America’s labor unions, we’ll need to change some of ways that unions do things. With that in mind, what are some of the lessons we can learn so far from the Wisconsin experience?

1. We have to fight back. Nobody in the ILWU or any other union can afford to sit around and watch this attack unfold. If all of us don’t try to help in some way, we’ll have only ourselves to blame when we’re in the crosshairs and nobody is left to help us. With the help of Coast Committeeman Ray Ortiz, Jr., and organizing assistance from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, ILWU members from Locals 13, 63 and 94 joined other union members who filled an airliner and flew out to Wisconsin in late February. Members in other locals have been attending solidarity rallies in Sacramento, Olympia, San Francisco, Honolulu, and other cities. We need to keep up the solidarity and pressure.

2. We have to win public support. We need to be smart about the way that we fight back, and that means winning support from the 90% of working class families who no longer have a union. We can’t win by making this a fight about our unions, our pensions, our pay, and our health benefits. This needs to be a much broader fight that’s about defending the working class, good jobs, and middle-income America – not just unions.

3. We have to talk more about taxing the rich and making them pay their fair share. Anti-union politicians have been preaching the gospel of tax-cutting for 30 years. They’ve been able to trick plenty of working class families into thinking a few dollars saved on their taxes is the only way to make up for falling wages and lower living standards – while most of the tax benefits benefit the wealthiest Americans and big corporations. Oregon voters recently approved a tax increase for upper income residents – maybe we could encourage others to do the same.

4. Rallies and protests are good, but they aren’t enough. Holding a rally is usually the first thing we think of. It’s good to feel pumped-up for a few hours or even a few days, but they’re soon over and then people ask: “now what do we do?” If the answer is, “hold more rallies,” then maybe we need to think harder, because our goal has to be about winning public support, and if rallies don’t help us accomplish that goal, maybe we need to be doing other things such as a general strike across the United States with support from all unions and labor.

5. Abraham Lincoln said our government should be “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but most of us today feel screwed by the people we elect. While the two political parties are different in some ways, we can’t count on politicians to automatically stand up for workers or unions just because of their party label.

Many of us elected Democrats, thinking they would look out for the working class at the federal, state, and local level, but too many have stabbed us in the back and joined the anti-union crowd. This means we have to be pickier when it comes to deciding who gets our support. We also need to be more aggressive about holding politicians accountable, instead of just trusting them to protect us. And finally, let’s remember that most politicians don’t lead, they go where the breeze is blowing.

And these days, the anti-union winds are blowing pretty strong. So if we want more politicians to stand with us, then we’ll need to rally a lot more troops to our side, speak up more loudly, and take nothing for granted.

6. We’ve got to get ahead of the curve and stop playing defense. The problem in Wisconsin and other states shouldn’t have surprised us. The gap in pay and benefits between union jobs and non-union-work has been growing for decades all over America – making all unions vulnerable to right-wing politicians that can exploit the fears of most workers who are falling behind. If unions don’t get more proactive by responding to the needs and frustrations of most workers who aren’t in a union – then our enemies will be more than happy to fill that vacuum with hate and manipulate workers against us. That’s why organizing to help workers join our union is so critical, and why we need to be fighting for the entire working class – not just those of us who are lucky enough to be part of a union. This is one of the Ten Guiding Principles of the ILWU.

7. ILWU members are facing challenges closer to home that also need our solidarity and support:

• Canadian Longshore Division members have been trying to bargain their contract for more than a year. Maritime employers in British Columbia are demanding pension take-aways and cut-backs in working conditions.

• Here in the States, workers with Local 63 OCU, the Office Clerical Unit in Los Angeles, have been negotiating with PMA employers for over 10 months.

• Rite Aid workers in Lancaster, CA have been trying to negotiate their first contract for more than two years.

• Workers at several Georgia Pacific warehouses in Portland who are represented by the Inlandboatmen’sUnion (IBU) have been negotiating for more than a year with an employer who’s opposed to decent pensions and health care.

• Hundreds of Washington State Ferry Workers, also represented by the IBU, have been told by Governor Gregoire to either make contract concessions or risk legislation similar to what Governor Walker is proposing for workers in Wisconsin.

• ILWU members at Locals 6 and 17 are facing challenges from employers who want to walk away from their pension fund obligations. Companies across America are trying to dump their “defined benefit” pensions and replace them with inferior “defined contribution” savings plans like “401-K’s” that don’t provide decent benefits.

With so many North American workers under attack, we can’t afford to risk losing any of these fights.

An injury to one is an injury to all.