The small city of Longview in southwestern Washington state is currently ground zero for one of the most militant U.S. labor struggles in decades.
Since May, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 has been escalating the fight in a two-year-plus battle to force the multinational conglomerate EGT Development to honor its contract and use ILWU labor at a new $200 million grain terminal in Longview. This is the first new terminal built on the West Coast in the last 25 years.
In the course of the battle in Longview, ILWU members and their supporters have blocked trains from bringing grain to the terminal and organized mass pickets to disrupt its operations. But the company is taking a hard line. Local 21 is up against multiple global corporations, police and private security, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and another union--Operating Engineers Local 701, which is providing scab labor.
Now, after a series of test runs, EGT is planning to bring in its first ship in mid-December. Separately, the Occupy movement--whose call for a general strike and day of action in Oakland, Calif., on November 2 in protest of vicious police violence shut down that city's massive port--is calling for protests at ports up and down the West Coast on December 12 in defense of the movement and longshore unionists. The ILWU has not endorsed this call.
The Longview struggle is a crucial test for labor and the wider working-class movement. In late November, interviewed Local 21 President Dan Coffman and Local 21 Vice President Jake Whiteside. In this excerpt, they about the background and significance of this modern-day labor war--for workers in Washington state and around the country.
Since May, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 has been escalating the fight in a two-year-plus battle to force the multinational conglomerate EGT Development to honor its contract and use ILWU labor at a new $200 million grain terminal in Longview. This is the first new terminal built on the West Coast in the last 25 years.
In the course of the battle in Longview, ILWU members and their supporters have blocked trains from bringing grain to the terminal and organized mass pickets to disrupt its operations. But the company is taking a hard line. Local 21 is up against multiple global corporations, police and private security, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and another union--Operating Engineers Local 701, which is providing scab labor.
Now, after a series of test runs, EGT is planning to bring in its first ship in mid-December. Separately, the Occupy movement--whose call for a general strike and day of action in Oakland, Calif., on November 2 in protest of vicious police violence shut down that city's massive port--is calling for protests at ports up and down the West Coast on December 12 in defense of the movement and longshore unionists. The ILWU has not endorsed this call.
The Longview struggle is a crucial test for labor and the wider working-class movement. In late November, interviewed Local 21 President Dan Coffman and Local 21 Vice President Jake Whiteside. In this excerpt, they about the background and significance of this modern-day labor war--for workers in Washington state and around the country.
ILWU members in Longview have confronted grain shipments headed for the new EGT terminal
COULD YOU tell us how this struggle began?
Dan: It would have been early 2009. When we heard about this elevator being constructed in our community, there were a lot of high expectations. If you look at the paper here from November 2009, it talks about how this elevator is going to create 50 new longshore jobs. The new $200 million project was going to put construction people in this community back to work, and this is when our unemployment rate was pushing right around 15 percent.As soon as ground construction started with the building of this thing, people realized that local labor was not getting any of this action. What we found out is that Bunge was bringing in every non-union type of company to do this project. The high expectations were soon evaporating right in front of our eyes.
At the same time, the ILWU always felt confident, because we have a working agreement with the port that has been in existence for 70-plus years. We felt confident that we were going to sit down and get an agreement with Bunge.
YOU MENTIONED Bunge--that's the main one of the three corporations that make up EGT, right? The others are Itochu, based in Japan, and STX Pan Ocean, based in South Korea.
Dan: In negotiations, Bunge talked about how it had planned this for five years prior. The terminal is EGT, but if you look at it, the 51 percent controlling partner is Bunge North America, based in New York state. We negotiated for close to 14 months, and we were negotiating throughout the whole thing with Bunge. You never saw an Itochu official at the table. You never saw an STX Pan Ocean person at the table.Bunge is part of what we call the grain cartel, which is the equivalent of the oil cartel. There's a handful of players in the grain cartel, and Bunge is one of them--along with Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Louis Dreyfus, Gavalon. Actually, if you look at it, they're probably more powerful than the oil cartel, because people have to eat, and they know that.
Itochu is a logistics firm out of Japan that has a lot of trucking and shipping interests. Then the shipping lines company they needed to haul their product was Pan Ocean. What they did was triangulate their corporations to meet all their needs, and it became a partnership.
WHY DID they pick Longview?
Dan: We're a small port. I think they probably thought that being such a small port, they could do what they've done throughout the whole world--they could come in and micromanage not only us, but the community as a whole.Jake: I think one of the main things about Longview is the geographical location. It's the first place you come to on the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean. We're set up with a rail system. I-5 is right there. None of that is a coincidence. It was definitely orchestrated, almost brilliantly.
WHAT WERE the key issues during negotiations?
Dan: The two sticking points were straight-time pay and who was in the master console room. They wanted two 12-hour shifts for a 24-hour period. And during that 12 hours a day, they didn't want any of that to be overtime. It was going to be straight time only.The other big sticking point was that, in a grain elevator, they have what they call the master console. He controls the flow of grain throughout that facility. Bunge didn't want any union member in that control room. We told them we don't care if you have 50 supervisors in there, there needs to be one longshoreman. We don't take orders from a supervisor. We needed that buffer between management and labor.
In the beginning, they offered us a total of three jobs in the whole facility. We finally got them to up that to four when we asked for a lead man or a general foreman. On top of that, there'd be a need for two millwrights and one electrician, for a total of seven jobs.
We started our negotiations on January 20, 2010 in Portland, Ore. We broke off negotiations, I believe, at the end of February of 2011. During our negotiations, they weren't willing to budge on one thing. I didn't call them negotiations--I called them dictations--dictations by three giant conglomerates that wanted it all their way.
WHAT IS the significance of this new terminal?
Dan: This new elevator is going to pour 40 percent faster than the last one that was built on the West Coast and have about a 30 to 40 percent decrease in the labor needed to operate this facility.If you can imagine a Panamax ship being loaded in about a 24-hour period, that's basically unheard of. You're talking 50,000 to 60,000 metric tons of whatever product being loaded in over a 24-hour or less period. That's huge volumes at super-fast speeds. These people are recreating the playing field for the grain industry.
This new elevator is going to meet their needs logistically to supply them with an easier route to get their product to Southeast Asia and Japan. They had to set up an elevator on the West Coast to achieve that.
