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Supply chain solidarity

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Page context: Home > Transport International Magazine > Issue 21 October 2005 > Supply chain solidarity

Speakers at a recent conference for maritime and mining unions vividly demonstrated how workers can and must support each other, across national boundaries and supply chain links, says Steve Stallone

In a globalised economy, the workers who mine, process and transport the resources that feed the world’s industries can exercise enormous power. Holding the first links of the global supply chain in their hands and sharing the same multinational employers, they can shape the way those industries work and distribute the wealth they create. Recent experience has shown just how much the workers along the resource supply chain can help each other in times of need.

More than 200 officers and rank and filers representing more than 30 mining and transportation unions from 10 countries gathered in Long Beach, California in May in an effort to better understand their connections and maximise the strength they offer. Through four days of presentations, debate and networking the delegates made good on the gathering’s slogan of “Globalising Solidarity” and ended the session by unanimously pledging to stand together against global capital and to take the offensive against their multinational employers.

Long Beach declaration

Summary of goals more>>

The MUA and the ILWU co-sponsored this year’s meeting, the second maritime and mining conference to take place, three years after the first, in New Castle, Australia. It was attended by delegates from Chile, Vietnam, Australia, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Japan, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand.

ILWU international president James Spinosa set the tone and orientation in his opening remarks.

“We should not just get together when we have a problem, when we are locked out or on strike as companies try to outsource our jobs,” he said. “We should always be confident we are not alone. We must educate ourselves so we understand where we have to be when the calls come from each other.”

Paddy Crumlin, national secretary of the MUA, followed Spinosa and put the issues of globalisation and solidarity in the context of the assembled unions’ experiences.

“We’re the people that deliver the goods and that’s why we’re under the hammer,” Crumlin said. “There’s no room in free trade for the worker. There’s no room in free trade for unions. And there’s especially no room in free trade for strong transport unions.”

Crumlin went on to recount the story of how in 1998 private police ran 2,000 Australian wharfies off the docks with attack dogs at midnight. Locked out of their jobs, the wharfies watched from outside the gates as “scabs” did their work. The entire Australian labour movement and ordinary citizens joined them on the picket line. ILWU longshore workers in Los Angeles refused to work the first and last “scab-loaded” ship calling on the US West Coast, and that solidarity won the workers back their jobs and saved their union.

Fighting excessive corporate power

AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka – a third-generation miner who rose through the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America to become number two in the US labour movement – told the delegates they need to “connect the dots” between the widening gap between workers’ wages, the obscenely high pay of corporate executives and the people determining policy and law.

“The cold reality for workers and our unions in the US is that corporations and their executives are picking our pockets with one hand and controlling our government with the other,” he said.

He suggested ways to deny these “corporate conspirators” their victory—better organising, better political action, better legal and regulatory strategies, more coalitions for workers, civil and human rights and, most importantly, better solidarity.

Fighting for a fair share

John Maitland, the national secretary of the CFMEU, noted that the connections between mining and maritime are not intuitively obvious. But in a globalised industrial economy the workers who mine, process and deliver the resources create the wealth of society and deserve a bigger share of it, and are in a position to make that happen, he said.

Gino Govender, of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), which includes 144 mining affiliate unions from 85 countries, presented an overview of the global mining industry, exhorting the delegates to “know your enemy.” He said the industry is experiencing a boom right now, and the biggest mining companies are flush with cash and are merging into larger conglomerates. These circumstances make this is a good time for workers to take action to end the huge gap in wealth between the people who own the mines and those who live in the mining countries.

ITF dockers secretary Frank Leys noted that four major terminal operators—AP Moeller, Hutchison, P&O and PSA International—now handle more than half of all global trade at their facilities around the world. Given the power and reach of the Global Network Operators ITF affiliates will need to develop a strategy to engage with them to ensure that minimum acceptable standards are in place worldwide. The ITF Ports of Convenience Campaign will be addressing this important issue.

Maritime solidarity

ITF-affiliated dockers and seafarers unions have a long tradition of mutual solidarity. Dockers use their industrial muscle to help seafarers on flag of convenience vessels enforce ITF-agreements, which provide them with minimum acceptable pay and conditions. However some ships’ captains are now using the new international security regulations to keep dock workers off the ships and make seafarers do cargo handling – in contravention of ITF agreements.

Leys also mentioned a new solidarity collaboration between the ITF and the ICEM—a global alliance of oil and gas production and transportation workers. Much like the mining and maritime alliance, this initiative aims to follow oil from the point of production through to the final point of distribution, figuring that often the workers best placed to assist a group of oil transport workers may not be other transport workers, but those involved in oil production.

Bob Hayden, national secretary of Australia’s Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU), spoke of how his members are a key link between mining and maritime, carrying the resources from “pit to port.” During the big 1997 miners dispute in Australia with the notoriously anti-union company Rio Tinto, the rail workers of the RTBU ran no trains from the mines to the docks, thus providing crucial support for the miners’ eventual victory. Similarly, during the Australian waterfront dispute in 1998, RTBU members made sure not one freight train made it to the ports. Hayden said his union is now working with other transportation unions in Australia to map out the strengths and weaknesses of their mutual employers and to work on joint organising, member education, lobbying and corporate campaigning.

Port security soundings

After 9-11 the United Nations’ International Maritime Organisation (IMO) developed the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS), allegedly to protect maritime trade from terrorist attacks. Its implementation has varied from country to country as national unions have, with different degrees of success, worked with or against their governments to protect workers’ rights.

Dean Summers, the ITF coordinator in Australia, explained during a maritime workshop at the conference, how the MUA beat back the most onerous aspects of the security code. The Australian transportation worker identification card will include none of the “smart” electronic information features employers and government officials wanted. Instead it will just be a simple plastic photo ID card.

And the criminal background checks will only search for convictions on crimes related to terrorism.

By contrast Canadian maritime unions including the ILWU are fighting draconian measures still being considered for Canada’s waterfront. These proposals include extensive and intrusive background checks that require only a rather subjective finding of “reasonable suspicion” to deny even longtime longshore workers access to the ports and their jobs.

Mike Mitre, the ILWU’s director of port security, told the workshop that in the US real port security is being ignored in favor of measures like the Transport Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) card to control the workforce and hamstring unions.

The criminal background checks are still the worst part of the new security measures for ILWU longshore workers, but the union has been working in Congress to lessen the impact. With employers now worrying that these policies may negatively affect their trained and productive workforce, and with the Bush administration wanting to fast-track the TWIC card, the union may get the narrower background checks and the appeal process it has been lobbying for all along.

Union and human rights abuses

Atrocity in Burma

The immediacy of the workers’ struggle intruded on conference proceedings when the ITF’s Frank Leys got a call from London informing him of the assassination of Seafarers’ Union of Burma organiser Ko Moe Naung. The Burmese army had arrested him a few days earlier, tortured him and finally killed him, in retaliation for his work organising Burmese fishermen and migrant workers.

The ITF called for the international trade union movement and the international business community to isolate Burma and its military regime both politically and commercially. The delegates voted to dedicate the seminar to Naung’s memory.

Draconian anti-union tactics in Chile

The president of the 6,000-member Chilean dock workers’ union, Jorge Silva Beron, recounted how his members went on strike on 5 October 2004 demanding a raise from US$29 a day to US$32. They were met by police and military who attacked the workers and targeted him specifically, beating him on the head and leaving him to bleed almost to death.

After 20 days on strike the Chilean dockers won their demands. But now the employers are suing the union for the money lost in those 20 days, and the government is prosecuting Beron for leading an organisation that stopped production at the port. He is facing a five-year prison sentence and his case will not be decided by a judge, but by a navy admiral.

Understanding the desperation of the situation, the delegates raised US$6,000 from among themselves to donate to Beron’s legal defence fund.

Australia’s ever more hostile regime

All the Australian unionists present sounded the alarm on the new crisis awaiting them upon their return home. Prime minister John Howard’s ultra-conservative “Liberal” Party won majorities in both houses of the parliament in recent elections.

The new government has declared its intention to “reform” the country’s labour laws, in what the CFMEU’s John Maitland called “the greatest attack on workers’ rights since our country was born.”

Employers will be legally able to offer workers “individual contracts” rather than bargaining collectively with them. Combined with the elimination of the country’s unfair dismissal laws, the choice workers will face is clear and stark: accept the bosses’ terms or be sacked. Howard also plans to lower the minimum wage and eliminate the right to refuse overtime or irregular hours.

The delegates passed a resolution opposing Howard’s plans and supporting the Australian unions, pledging each union present to do all it can to help beat back this attack.

Power of the ports

In a presentation on organising along the marine cargo-handling chain, Peter Olney, the ILWU’s director of organising, pointed to one of the union’s latest organising drives—the Blue Diamond almond processing plant in Northern California—as an example of using the power of the ports for workers.

Almonds are the largest agricultural export in the state and Blue Diamond is the largest processor, with 70 per cent of its product exported around the world. The company began an aggressive anti-union campaign as soon as its 600-plus workers started organising for better pay, conditions and health care.

All the unions at the gathering signed a letter to the CEO of Blue Diamond, encouraging him to respect his workers’ right to organise and to deal with their demands. They informed him. “If your negative conduct continues then we will do anything within our rights and legal power to assist the ILWU in bringing justice to the Blue Diamond workers.”

At the end of the meetings the delegates crafted, refined and voted unanimously for a resolution committing the participating unions to develop a communications network of union leaders and rank-and-file activists. “The Long Beach Declaration” commits them to striving to provide a global rapid response to political or industrial conflicts affecting any network union, and to identifying an appropriate corporate target to be the focus of a recognition campaign.

Steve Stallone is communications director of the ILWU in the US and editor of the ILWU newspaper The Dispatcher.

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Issue 21 October 2005

Other pages for Supply chain solidarity:
Long Beach declaration

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