Port of Longview, ILWU and EGT Agree on Settlement

The rank and file members of ILWU local 21 have agreed to a new contract with EGT at the Port of Longview, Wa, after months of brutality by local police (see here) and intransigence by EGT. (For more on the history of the struggle, see here).

According to the new contract, EGT will hire only workers dispatched from the Local 21 hall. However, workers must then vote on whether they wish to be represented by the ILWU, the Daily News Online wrote this week.

While this compromise doesn’t nix ILWU members outright, like EGT’s prior practice of hiring only non-ILWU members, it does leave open the possibility of hiring non-union workers willing to apply for work at the union hall. It prevents an automatic closed shop from existing at EGT, which would have otherwise been the case. And it also opens the door to an employer-led anti-union campaign on the jobsite and threats and intimidation to keep non-ILWU members from joining the union and to prevent a closed shop from emerging.

Ostensibly, this provision was designed to avoid violating federal labor law, which prohibits companies from designating a union before it even hires a work force. However, EGT had made earlier promises to hire Local 21 members and then reneged on the promise, precipitating the conflict in the first place. And if the company really wanted to hire ILWU members, then it would just hire them and they could call it a union after the fact. In reality, it is simply an attempt to weaken or stamp out the union influence, something ILWU members most likely felt confident they could prevent by requiring all new hires to come from their union hall.

The agreement also requires both sides to drop all unfair labor practice claims and other litigation. The ILWU would still be liable for damages from last summer's protests, which a federal judge has placed at more than $300,000. The union is appealing the amount.

One particularly curious and burdensome aspect of the contract requires the ILWU to ask all outside groups, including the Occupy movement, to refrain from picketing at EGT. However, this is not the ILWU’s responsibility. They never asked for OWS to picket or shut down ports and they have no control or jurisdiction over them anyway.

Verizon Workers Turn Away Customers and Chase Scabs

Verizon workers have been picketing at Verizon stores in the Northeast, successfully turning away customers and eating into corporate profits. However, Verizon is seeking injunctions to end this practice, according to Labor Notes. Union employees are also engaging in mobile pickets to block scab technicians from reaching their clients.

45,000 members of the Communications Workers (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are striking the Eastern Seaboard, from Massachusetts to Virginia. Workers are resisting Verizon’s attempts to eliminate pensions, limit raises and impose large health care costs on current workers and retirees. Overall, the concessions would take away $1 billion from workers.

Verizon argues that the concessions are necessary for it to keep up with nonunion competitors. Yet the company made nearly $20 billion during the last four years.

Solidarity in Action

On Wednesday I reposted an update from Education Notes Online that teachers in New York have joined Verizon workers on the picket line. Labor Notes reports that operating Engineers, crane operators, and other construction and building-service workers in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have refused to cross picket lines, while teamsters at UPS have refused to deliver to Verizon offices, denying the company wireless and fiber-optic equipment. They have also double-parked their trucks so as to box in scabs and managers. At least 20 scabs have driven their vehicles into picketers, sending at least two to the hospital.

Ruling Class Solidarity With Verizon

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered police to follow Verizon vehicles around to “protect” them from striking workers, according to Labor Notes. This luxury is subsidized by taxpayers at a time when Bloomberg has been slashing social services and education. It is also a gratuitous gift to a company that not only paid no federal taxes in 2009-10, but actually claimed a $1.3 billion refund.

Teachers and other workers could learn a lot by reading the complete Labor Notes piece which discusses several novel tactics being used by Verizon workers, as well as the various tactics management is using to try and stop them.