Charleston Longshoremen lead battle for reform

By Carl Biers

Sept. 3— In January 2000, when 500 South Carolina state troopers and police marched into Charleston to intimidate 150 members of International Longshoremen (ILA) Local 1422 who were peacefully picketing a shipping company, Ken Riley, president of this almost entirely African-American local, got the message. The grossly disproportionate show of force, the altercation it provoked, and the draconian felony charges against five ILA members delivered the warning: Stay in your place. Under Riley’s leadership, the local had become too much of a threat to the state’s anti-union forces, too active in organizing, too much a player in progressive politics. In sum, too aggressive in the workplace and too much an actor on broad issues of social justice.

It is Riley’s organizing ability that has turned the cause of the Charleston Five into a national issue for union activists. Under his leadership, local members take inspiration from the civil rights battle in the heart of the Confederacy. They have rallied national and international support for the victims, raised $300,000 for legal defense, exposed an anti-union crackdown reminiscent of an earlier era. On June 6, 2001, more than 5,000 union supporters, including John Sweeney, demonstrated at the statehouse to protest the felony charges. Under Riley’s leadership, Local 1422 serves as an actual model in the labor movement for what Sweeney only hopes for: dynamic, militant, inspiring minorities, organizing, forming community coalitions.

But there is more to this story than a battle to defend a union. Ken Riley and his brother, Leonard, and dozens of other ILA members are engaged on another front, virtually unknown even to the activists who are supporting the Charleston Five. The Rileys are leaders of the Workers Coalition, an internal union caucus that seeks greater democracy and militancy in the ILA. The ILA leadership has responded with a heavy hand to this challenge. So, while the leaders of Local 1422 must defend their members from repression by state officials, they are also forced to defend their rights within their international union.

Some background: The ILA has a checkered past. In the 1950s, after widespread revelations of heavy mob infiltration of the union and major companies, a waterfront commission took over control of the industry. In 1986, one Senate Committee listed the ILA as one the four most racketeer infested unions. Over the years, there were indictments and convictions of union officials on corruption charges.

Even now, the ILA shows signs of a bloated bureaucracy. With fewer than 60,000 members, several officers each make over $300,000 a year. General Organizer Frank Lenardo topped the salary list with $372,101. With salary and expenses, Secretary Treasurer Robert Gleason raked in $404,116.

The Workers Coalition’s criticism of the ILA international administration has a familiar ring. The group, founded in 1988, charges that the ILA international lacks accountability to its membership, that it negotiates concessionary contracts, that its failure to organize has led to an “erosion of jurisdiction” and a proliferation of shipping companies using nonunion labor. The coalition calls for the direct election of international officers by the membership to replace the present system of election by delegates at conventions. Direct elections, they contend, will force the leadership to be more responsive and bring back better contracts.

However, it was the events in Charleston that exacerbated the conflict between the international and the officers of Local 1422, who are also leaders of the Workers Coalition.

The Charleston longshoremen were picketing Nordana, a Danish shipping company which had dumped the ILA so that it could employ nonunion workers at a fraction of the union rate. Leonard Riley charges that the international made no effort to organize informational picketing at other East Coast ports where ILA members continued to work Nordana ships that had been loaded by scabs in Charleston. Nordana was forced to rehire ILA longshoremen only when dockworkers in Spain refused to work its ships. It was the Local 1422 leaders who reached out for the international support.

According to Jack Heyman, a local officer of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union — the ILA’s West Coast counterpart — who has been organizing support for the Charleston Five, ILA International president John Bowers waited until March 2001, over a year after the event, to make a public statement in support of the Five. Riley says the support from the AFL-CIO, the ILWU, and dockworkers in other countries finally shamed the ILA to take its belated action. The ILA has not contributed to the legal defense fund set up by Local 1422.

Bowers answered criticism in a letter that appeared in the ILA newsletter. He replied that the ILA made efforts to settle the dispute with Nordana. The international, he said, has established its own defense fund for the Five and refused to contribute to the Local 1422 fund, because, he says, the union’s attorneys advised that it would be improper for the international to do so. (ILA spokesperson James McNamara would not comment on the Workers Coalition other than Bowers’s letter.)

Meanwhile, the ILA administration has opened war against the Workers Coalition. The ILA international executive committee and one regional body have unanimously passed a resolution condemning the coalition. Bowers also implied in his letter that the Workers Coalition was exploiting the plight of the Charleston Five to raise money for itself, an accusation they deny. The administration, however, has more than the power of words at its disposal. After Leonard Riley was elected a trustee of Local 1422, he was declared ineligible as a supervisor; but, he protested, ILA members in a similar positions have been allowed to run and hold office. Other coalition supporters Wilmington, Del., face charges for using the union’s “ILA” acronym in their literature without the international’s permission. Michael Goldberg, their attorney, says this restriction, written in the ILA constitution, is almost certainly illegal. One coalition supporter has been removed from local office, suspended for three years. The charges are an assortment of trivia and alleged minor offenses. In combination, they reveal a concerted effort to crush an opposition movement.

Stripped of its complexity, the longshoremen’s experience reminds us of the link between workplace rights, social justice, and union democracy.

Source: Union Democracy Review

Wal-Mart out to ravage workers’ rights

By John Nichols

Aug. 30— As if anyone needed another reason to stop shopping at Wal-Mart, here it is: The sweatshop-marketing, small-town-Main-Street-destroying corporation is no longer content to prevent unions from organizing its stores. As Labor Day approaches, the Arkansas-based retail giant is financing efforts to undermine the ability of unions to effectively organize and represent employees of other businesses.

Wal-Mart is pouring money into a drive to enact a so-called “right-to-work” law in Oklahoma. If successful, right-to-work proponents hope to use Oklahoma as a model for a renewed campaign to reduce wages and benefits for workers across the country.

Developed in the 1940s by segregationist Southern senators and their right-wing Northern allies to prevent the Congress of Industrial Organizations from uniting African-American, Latino and white workers in the South and Southwest, right-to-work laws are among the most vile legacies of an era when conservatives worked at the state and national level to erect legal barriers to racial progress.

Right-to-work laws, cloaked in the rhetoric of “self-determination” by their corporate proponents, are designed to prevent unions from gaining the strength to demand fair wages and benefits for workers of all races. By undermining the ability of labor organizations to collect union dues and represent all workers on a job site, these laws make it difficult for unions to negotiate solid contracts and flex their muscles on behalf of working families in the political debate.

And right-to-work laws work. In the 21 states that have such legislation on their books, the median household income is $4,882 less than in the states where workers are free to organize effective unions. The majority of states with the highest poverty levels in the United States are right-to-work states. The majority of states with the highest rate of uninsured families are right-to-work states. The majority of states with the lowest per-pupil expenditures for education are right-to-work states. In fact, no piece of legislation is more likely to define a state as “backward” than a right-to-work law.

No wonder, then, that only two states have put them on the books since the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed in the 1960s.

Still, a self-serving coalition of big-business interests and right-wing extremists continue to advance the scheme, and the coalition’s latest target is Oklahoma. A Sept. 25 referendum in that state asks voters whether they want to put a right-to-work law on the books. In a fair fight, the law wouldn’t stand a chance - Oklahoma rejected a right-to-work referendum in 1964 when, famously, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to campaign against the proposal.

But this will not be a fair fight.

Right-wing Gov. Frank Keating, powerful US Sen. Don Nickles and the state’s most powerful newspaper publisher, Daily Oklahoman boss Edward Gaylord, are throwing everything they’ve got into passing the measure. And they’ve got a lot, thanks to Wal-Mart.

The firm has already moved $100,000 into the accounts of the campaign to pass the right-to-work law, making it the third largest contributor to the effort. And there are expectations that, after Labor Day, more money will flow from Wal-Mart’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters into the Oklahoma campaign.

In a sense, it is a good investment for Wal-Mart, which often has a hard time finding workers willing to accept the low wages paid at its stores. If the Oklahoma campaign is a success, right-to-work advocates hope to use it as a model for passing similar initiatives in Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, New Hampshire and New Mexico.

But Oklahoma trade unionists are hoping Wal-Mart will get the word that consumers don’t approve of corporations that use their resources to drive down wages.

“Union members across the country should take note of Wal-Mart’s support of measures like ‘right-to-work’ before they spend any of their union wages at Wal-Mart stores,” says Edwin Hill, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Hill is right. But the anger at Wal-Mart need not be limited to union members. All Americans who believe in economic and social justice -- especially those who take seriously the promise of the civil rights revolution for which King and so many others struggled -- ought to be furious at any firm that promotes the right-to-work lie.

Source: Madison Capital Times

Who’s better off this Labor Day? Numbers tell

By Derrick Z. Jackson

Aug. 31— To know whose labor is actually being honored on Labor Day, consider these facts, drawn from recent data by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the Economic Policy Institute, the American Sociological Review, and the new book “Raise the Floor,” published by the Ms. Foundation for Women:

If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as American productivity since 1968, it would be $13.80 an hour.

If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as domestic profits since 1968, it would be $13.02.

If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as profits in the retail industry, it would be $20.46. Nearly half of the workers in the retail industry make less than $8 an hour. While 16.9 percent of America’s work force is in the retail industry, 35 percent of America’s workers who make less than $8 an hour are in the retail industry.

If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as executive pay since 1990, it would be $25.50 an hour, not $5.15.

If the average pay for production workers had risen at the same level as CEO pay since 1990, the annual salary would be $120,491, not $24,668.

Twenty-nine percent of American families make less than what the Economic Policy Institute estimates is needed to meet basic needs -- a national median of $33,551.

You cannot tell that children are our most precious resource by how we pay child-care workers. The median wage of child-care workers is $6.91 an hour. The median wage of parking lot attendants is $6.89. Preschool teachers average $9.43. Animal trainers average $12.39.

Women make up 28 percent of the work force in durable manufacturing but are 46 percent of workers in that industry who make less than $8 an hour.

Women make up 41 percent of the work force in communications but are 58 percent of workers in that industry who make less than $8 an hour.

In 1978, 70 percent of workers in the private sector were covered by employer-provided health insurance. By 1998, the figure had dropped to 62.9 percent.

In 1979, 40.7 percent of the lowest-income workers in the private sector were covered by employer-provided health insurance. By 1998, the figure had dropped to 29.6 percent.

In 1979, 60.9 percent of Latinos in the private sector were covered by employer-provided health insurance. By 1998, the figure had dropped to 44.6 percent.

The average compensation for the top health care executives at the top 10 managed health care companies, not including unexercised stock options, is $11.7 million per year.

African-American men in the highly paid professions of securities and financial sales earned only 72 cents for every dollar earned by white colleagues. African-American lawyers earned 79 cents for every dollar earned by white male lawyers. African American doctors and dentists earned 80 cents for every dollar earned by white male doctors and dentists.

The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans control about 38 percent of America’s wealth.

The bottom 80 percent control 17 percent of America’s wealth. The top 1 percent of stock owners have 48 percent of stock holdings. The bottom 80 percent have 4 percent of stock holdings.

A CEO of a firm that announced plans in 2001 to layoff 1,000 or more workers averaged $23.7 million individual total compensation. That compares with the national CEO compensation average of $13.1 million.

Source: Boston Globe