Conghaileach
18th May 2003, 11:43
Using National Security To Bash Workers
By David Bacon
(Note: a shorter version appeared in The Nation, May 12 issue)
After a year of fighting with the Federal government over the rights of
displaced airport baggage screeners, Kawal Ulanday finally got a
response from authorities. The FBI knocked on his door.
Agent William Root arrived with a list of questions reminiscent of an
earlier era, but gave them a new twist. Were you born in Mindanao, he
asked.Are you a Muslim? Do you know anyone in the Philippines linked to
Al- Qaeda? Are you anti-American? Ulanday, born in San Pablo,
California,is a community activist and staff organizer at Filipinos for
Affirmative Action in Oakland. Since the passage of the Transportation
Security Act, he and FAA have been helping screeners who lost their
jobs in the federalization of the workforce.
It was no surprise to them that the Bush administration seemed to be
equating terrorism with advocacy for the rights of immigrants, workers
and unions. And on January 9, that equation became more explicit than
ever, when Admiral James Loy, head of the Transportation Security
Administration, prohibited collective bargaining outright for the new
screener workforce.
"Fighting terrorism demands a flexible workforce that can rapidly
respond to threats," Loy said. "That can mean changes in work
assignments and other conditions of employment that are not compatible
with the duty to bargain with labor unions." To deal with workplace
issues, Loy created a management- dominated group within the agency's
human relations department.
Had this been the private sector, or even those remaining parts of the
Federal government where normal labor rights still apply, both actions
would have been illegal. But since September 11, the terrain for labor
relations under Bush has changed dramatically. The treatment of the
screeners has been a touchstone for this new world. Close to 30,000
workers,working in every major metropolitan area, were fired last year.
Had they been workers in another industry, the outcry might have been
fierce. But these were largely minorities and immigrants, almost all
without unions, and their fate hardly created a media blip.
Screeners took the first blow, not from Bush, but from Congress. In the
wake of the attack onthe World Trade Center and the Pentagon, screeners
were blamed for allowing terrorists armed with box cutters and plastic
knives to board airliners. The items used by the hijackers were all
permissible at the time, but baggage screeners made a convenient and
easy scapegoat in the atmosphere of fear that followed.Both Republicans
and Democrats voted for the Transportation Security Act, which called
for replacing the existing workforce with a new, federalized one.
Especially in large metropolitan airports like Boston's Logan, from
which the hijackers departed, a large percentage of screeners were
people of color. In many airports most were immigrants -- from the
Philippines and other countries of Asia and Latin America. They worked
for wages close to the minimum, in high- stress jobs for private
contractors hired by the airlines. Over the last decade, bad conditions
inspired union organizing drives in many airports. In San Francisco, a
new screeners union finally raised wages above $10 for the first time.
Federalizing the jobs could therefore have benefited the existing
workforce, bringing higher wages and greater security. But Federal
employees must be citizens.That requirement cost thousands of immigrant
screeners their jobs.
One was Erlinda Valencia, who worked at San Francisco airport. "I've
done this job for 14 years," she said,"but they're going to hire people
with no experience at all. You can fly the airplane if you're not a
citizen, or carry a rifle in the airport if you belong to the National
Guard. But you can't check the bags of the passengers."
Valencia's union, Service Employees Local 790, lobbied to make San
Francisco one of five airports nationally where private contractors
continue to run screening operations.That saved the union contract, but
it didn't save the workers. Non-citizens like Valencia weren't even
allowed to apply for the jobs. SEIU, FAA and the ACLU challenged the
non- citizen ban in court and won a limited decision,but while the case
was on appeal the workers were canned. Proposed legislation to overturn
the ban died in Congress, despite numerous demonstrations by immigrant
workers and supporters.
Citizen screeners didn't fare much better. The Transportation Security
Agency set up a screening process for their new workforce, designed by
corporate executives Bush brought in on loan.The old screener workforce
was put at the end of the line when it came to taking the test to get
rehired. Test questions asked candidates to guess what percentage of
supervisors abuse employees, or what percentage of their coworkers
cheat--queries designed to elicit attitudes towards authority, rather
than test job skills. "It was more of an integrity test,"according to
one current JFK screener. English-proficiency tests weeded out
naturalized immigrants who spoke with accents.
At both Oakland and San Francisco,workers were so angry they planned to
stop work in protest. Ulanday,who assists the Oakland workers, says TSA
threatened to replace striking workers immediately, and deny them
training and unemployment benefits. He went in front of television
cameras to describe the threats, which might have earned him his FBI
visit.
Most former screeners didn't get the $500 bonus promised if they stayed
to the end -- "we were all promised one, but no one I know has received
anything," says Lydia Koslowska, a former Oakland screener who put in
16-hour days to keep lines running before she was terminated. After
hundreds at Oakland lost their jobs in late November, FAA and the
AlamedaCounty Central Labor Council had to organize a food distribution
to ensure they wouldn't go hungry over the holidays. But the corporate
designers of the new screening system were well-rewarded. Boeing even
got TSA managers to dip into a fund intended to purchase explosive
detection equipment, and instead turn over $500 million to pay for part
of its contract, according to a letter from the American Association of
Airport Executives to Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta. The
actual work was subcontracted to Advanced Interactive Systems.
Boeing's expensive training, given through a subcontract with Advanced
Interactive Systems, didn't ensure a fair or smooth process, however.
While regulations call for 40 hours in the classroom and 60 hours of
training on the job,many new hires were thrown onto the lines with much
less. At New York's LaGuardia airport, and in St. Louis and Portland,
some were even given the answers to questions on certification tests in
advance by their supervisors, according to a report in Newsday. On the
other hand, Koslowska had to take her test without notice or
prepartation, at the end of a 16-hour shift.
The composition of the new screener workforce changed as a result. "At
the top 100 airports, which employed 80% of the screeners, it was a
majority-minority workforce," according to SEIU researcher Robert
Masciola. TSA reports the new workforce is 61% white, and only 31% of
new hires are women. The agency also says only 4500 of the original
28-30,000 screeners were rehired, and some observers think the
percentage was much less than that.
TSA hired many former military and law enforcement personnel into
management positions, creating a culture of "do what you're told, and
don't ask questions." Being a Federal employee, it turned out, was no
guarantee of good working conditions. In Pittsburgh, where screeners
worked 48-hour weeks through the holidays, their one day off changed at
the whim of supervisors. Mandatory overtime was a constant at JFK and
LaGuardia, where some put in 7-day weeks during the same period.
Screeners were told to quit if they didn't like it.Workers at the X-ray
machines still often have no radiation badges to measure cumulative
exposure, and some have already contracted back problems from lifting
heavy bags. "I have friends who've been sexually harassed," the JFK
screener adds,"but with no union, who can they go to? If they complain,
managers just transfer the man to another terminal."
Adopting the corporate model for workforce compensation,TSA set up "pay
bands" instead of the normal scale, paying screeners between $23-34,000
a year. Supervisors determine unilaterally the actual salary, and
everyone starts at the bottom. The agency told newly- hired workers
their probation would last for a year.
Despite feeling insecure about their jobs, it didn't take long before
the new screeners began to organize. By mid-February, AFGE had filed
petitions to bargain for 3300 workers at LaGuardia, Baltimore,
Pittsburgh, Chicago Midway, Greensboro, Harlingen/McAllen/Brownsville,
and Columbus. Workers formed organizing committees and were preparing
petitions at JFK,Tampa,Orlando,Charlotte,Atlantic City and Des
Moines.
That was when Loy prohibited collective bargaining, and when the
influence of corporate executives surfaced again. Before the Federal
Labor Relations Authority,TSA argued that if Loy's order is not upheld,
screeners should still not be entitled to organize unions airport by
airport. Instead, they all should form one national bargaining unit, a
huge obstacle to organizing efforts. This is exactly the position taken
by Federal Express when its workers began to organize. Congress then
passed a special law giving the company a nationwide bargaining unit,
which killed the drive. Among the corporate execs at TSA is Clifford
Hardt, FedEx's director for special projects, who boasted to the
Sacramento Bee that "we couldn't have done what we did if they hadn't
torn down established procedures."
Loy's order could have been easily predicted. In a dramatic preview of
what lay in store, the administration ruled in January,2002, that close
to 1000 workers in the Department of Justice were ineligible for union
membership, deeming it incompatible with their job responsibilities.
These included employees of the US attorney, the DoJ Criminal Division,
the US National Central Bureau of Interpol, the National Drug
Intelligence Center, and the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.
The letter denying their right to collective bargaining came on the day
the treasury employees union filed a representation petition on their
behalf.
Then, in the debate over the Homeland Security Act last fall, Bush's
director of the Office of Management and the Budget, Mitchell Daniels,
declared that the model for labor relations at the new department might
"eventually help us untie managerial talent across the executive
branch." The Federal workplace, in other words, would come to look much
like Enron's.
The Act, passed after the November election, while Democrats still
controlled the Senate, allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to
write new employment rules, exempting any group in the department from
existing civil service regulations governing pay grades, promotion and
hiring systems, banning discrimination,or protecting whistleblowers. It
also allows the secretary to suspend Title 5 of the Civil Service Act,
which guarantees collective bargaining rights for Federal workers, for
units like TSA. The Department is huge, encompassing 170,000 workers,
thousands of whom currently belong to 17 different unions in 50
bargaining units.
In early February, the administration ruled that another 1000 workers,
at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, would lose their
already-existing right to bargain.NIMA director James Clapper cited the
1996 act which created the agency in eliminating the union, saying that
collective bargaining would compromise the ability of its workers to
perform intelligence, investigative and security duties. But NIMA is
also contracting out the work of those very employees. Shedding its
obligation to bargain with them makes the move much easier. "It's not
that the employees' jobs have changed, or that NIMA's mission has
changed," said AFGE's Diane Witiak. "It's simply part of the Bush
administration's overall plan to bust federal sector unions and reward
his political contributors."
Using Federal employment as a pattern for fighting unions is only one
form of Bush's policy of intervention against labor, which predates the
September 11 attacks. On March 9, 2001, the president told 10,000
mechanics, plane cleaners and janitors at Northwest Airlines that they
couldn't strike for 60 days,despite the fact that the union contract of
the Aircraft Mechanics FraternalAssociation had expired over four years
before. His action eliminated any incentive for the airline to
negotiate, and it broke off negotiations two days later, rejecting the
union's proposals.
Bush repeated the action in December, 2001, at United Airlines, where
15,000 mechanics,working under wage concessions negotiated in 1994, had
voted almost unanimously to strike. After September 11,the airline went
into a tailspin, and eventually filed for bankruptcy in January, 2003.
As executives at the supposedly worker-owned company played hardball to
extract massive wage concessions from employees, Bush officials put a
big weapon in their hands, threatening to withhold a $1.8 billion
bailout if unions didn't agree.
The administration openly argues that the functioning of the air
transport industry is vital to US society, and that job actions are
threats to the economy and the nation itself. In the summer and fall
last year, that use of national security to prevent job action among
transport workers took an enormous leap forward.As the contract between
the west coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the
Pacific Maritime Association expired on July 31, the administration
intervened directly.
Before negotiations even began, shippers and some of their biggest
customers, including The Gap, Target, Mattel, and Home Depot, held
secret meetings with a White House task force headed by advisor Carlos
Bonilla. Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge and representatives of the
Department of Labor then phoned ILWU President Jim Spinosa, warning him
thatthe administration would view any interruption of work on the docks
as a threat to national security. They threatened to invoke the Taft-
Hartley Act, to use the military to replace striking workers, to place
the waterfront under the Railway Labor Act (making a strike virtually
illegal), and to remove the union's ability to negotiate a single labor
agreement covering all ports on the coast.
The ILWU nimbly avoided being provoked into a strike, but finally, at
the peak shipping season, employers locked out their own workers.
Although the PMA accused the union of organizing an alleged work
slowdown, speedup on the docks was so intense that accidents cost the
lives of five longshoremen last year.When the union told its members to
work at a safe speed, the PMA locked them out, and then demanded that
Bush invoke Taft-Hartley. The administration's legal brief before Judge
Alsup voiced a startling new philosophy,elaborated by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfield. He held that all commercial cargo could be considered
important to the military, not just goods specifically intended for
military use abroad.
"TheDoD increasingly relies upon commercial items and practices to meet
its requirements," he stated. "Raw materials, medical supplies,
replacement parts and components, as well as everyday subsistence needs
of our armed forces, are just some of the essential military cargo
provided by commercial contractors that typically are not labeled as
military cargo."
In other words, any stoppage on the docks is a threat to national
security.Instead of defining a threat in terms of vital life- dependent
services, this use of national security defines it as economic. Any
strike halting the continued operation of an industry or a large
profitable enterprise could be defined as such a threat, and made
illegal.
At the beginning of October, the union went back to work, having been
locked out for 12 days. They returned, not voluntarily, as they had
offered, but under Federal injunction. Bargaining continued for another
month under the Taft-Hartley Act's 80-day "cooling off" period.
On the surface, it seems incomprehensible that the association would
need a Federal order to open the gates of the closed terminals. After
all, they'd shut them themselves, and could have opened them at any
time. But the resumption of work was not the issue. The PMA wanted a
guarantee that dockers would be forced to continue unloading ships
through the peak shipping season, when goods traveling from the
sweatshops of the eastern Pacific rim are en route to stores for the
Christmas rush. And it wanted to make the union so vulnerable that it
would be unable to put pressure on employers during negotiations.
In the end, the ILWU agreed to a six-year contract with significant
salary and benefit increases, but some job losses due to implementation
of new technology, as well as new pay differentials, which the union
historically has also opposed. Both the contract's supporters and
opponents agreed that the union's leverage in negotiations was severely
eroded by Bush's intervention.
While this use of national security is having a growing effect on
unions, many still don't challenge the rationale directly. Their more
limited argument questions whether changes sought by the administration
are necessary and fair, and whether they violate union rights. Once the
logic of the threat is accepted, however, almost any response becomes
justifiable. In the words of TSA's Chris Rhatigan, "collective
bargaining would be incompatible with the nation's safety." Nico
Melendez, another TSA representative, is even more blunt: "Security is
paramount and collective bargaining could cripple the system."
Unions organized two huge Solidarity Day demonstrations when Reagan
busted PATCO. Yet so far they have yet to organize a similar mass
response in the streets to defend the screeners, and question this use
of national security. The rank-and-file of the labor movement have yet
to be mobilized in their own defense, against a clear threat to their
own rights. This timidity hardly puts the administration on notice that
labor intends an all-out battle to resist, and it hardly seems possible
that Bush and his corporate allies will be detered by anything less.
Michael Albert
ZNet / Z Magazine
[email protected]
By David Bacon
(Note: a shorter version appeared in The Nation, May 12 issue)
After a year of fighting with the Federal government over the rights of
displaced airport baggage screeners, Kawal Ulanday finally got a
response from authorities. The FBI knocked on his door.
Agent William Root arrived with a list of questions reminiscent of an
earlier era, but gave them a new twist. Were you born in Mindanao, he
asked.Are you a Muslim? Do you know anyone in the Philippines linked to
Al- Qaeda? Are you anti-American? Ulanday, born in San Pablo,
California,is a community activist and staff organizer at Filipinos for
Affirmative Action in Oakland. Since the passage of the Transportation
Security Act, he and FAA have been helping screeners who lost their
jobs in the federalization of the workforce.
It was no surprise to them that the Bush administration seemed to be
equating terrorism with advocacy for the rights of immigrants, workers
and unions. And on January 9, that equation became more explicit than
ever, when Admiral James Loy, head of the Transportation Security
Administration, prohibited collective bargaining outright for the new
screener workforce.
"Fighting terrorism demands a flexible workforce that can rapidly
respond to threats," Loy said. "That can mean changes in work
assignments and other conditions of employment that are not compatible
with the duty to bargain with labor unions." To deal with workplace
issues, Loy created a management- dominated group within the agency's
human relations department.
Had this been the private sector, or even those remaining parts of the
Federal government where normal labor rights still apply, both actions
would have been illegal. But since September 11, the terrain for labor
relations under Bush has changed dramatically. The treatment of the
screeners has been a touchstone for this new world. Close to 30,000
workers,working in every major metropolitan area, were fired last year.
Had they been workers in another industry, the outcry might have been
fierce. But these were largely minorities and immigrants, almost all
without unions, and their fate hardly created a media blip.
Screeners took the first blow, not from Bush, but from Congress. In the
wake of the attack onthe World Trade Center and the Pentagon, screeners
were blamed for allowing terrorists armed with box cutters and plastic
knives to board airliners. The items used by the hijackers were all
permissible at the time, but baggage screeners made a convenient and
easy scapegoat in the atmosphere of fear that followed.Both Republicans
and Democrats voted for the Transportation Security Act, which called
for replacing the existing workforce with a new, federalized one.
Especially in large metropolitan airports like Boston's Logan, from
which the hijackers departed, a large percentage of screeners were
people of color. In many airports most were immigrants -- from the
Philippines and other countries of Asia and Latin America. They worked
for wages close to the minimum, in high- stress jobs for private
contractors hired by the airlines. Over the last decade, bad conditions
inspired union organizing drives in many airports. In San Francisco, a
new screeners union finally raised wages above $10 for the first time.
Federalizing the jobs could therefore have benefited the existing
workforce, bringing higher wages and greater security. But Federal
employees must be citizens.That requirement cost thousands of immigrant
screeners their jobs.
One was Erlinda Valencia, who worked at San Francisco airport. "I've
done this job for 14 years," she said,"but they're going to hire people
with no experience at all. You can fly the airplane if you're not a
citizen, or carry a rifle in the airport if you belong to the National
Guard. But you can't check the bags of the passengers."
Valencia's union, Service Employees Local 790, lobbied to make San
Francisco one of five airports nationally where private contractors
continue to run screening operations.That saved the union contract, but
it didn't save the workers. Non-citizens like Valencia weren't even
allowed to apply for the jobs. SEIU, FAA and the ACLU challenged the
non- citizen ban in court and won a limited decision,but while the case
was on appeal the workers were canned. Proposed legislation to overturn
the ban died in Congress, despite numerous demonstrations by immigrant
workers and supporters.
Citizen screeners didn't fare much better. The Transportation Security
Agency set up a screening process for their new workforce, designed by
corporate executives Bush brought in on loan.The old screener workforce
was put at the end of the line when it came to taking the test to get
rehired. Test questions asked candidates to guess what percentage of
supervisors abuse employees, or what percentage of their coworkers
cheat--queries designed to elicit attitudes towards authority, rather
than test job skills. "It was more of an integrity test,"according to
one current JFK screener. English-proficiency tests weeded out
naturalized immigrants who spoke with accents.
At both Oakland and San Francisco,workers were so angry they planned to
stop work in protest. Ulanday,who assists the Oakland workers, says TSA
threatened to replace striking workers immediately, and deny them
training and unemployment benefits. He went in front of television
cameras to describe the threats, which might have earned him his FBI
visit.
Most former screeners didn't get the $500 bonus promised if they stayed
to the end -- "we were all promised one, but no one I know has received
anything," says Lydia Koslowska, a former Oakland screener who put in
16-hour days to keep lines running before she was terminated. After
hundreds at Oakland lost their jobs in late November, FAA and the
AlamedaCounty Central Labor Council had to organize a food distribution
to ensure they wouldn't go hungry over the holidays. But the corporate
designers of the new screening system were well-rewarded. Boeing even
got TSA managers to dip into a fund intended to purchase explosive
detection equipment, and instead turn over $500 million to pay for part
of its contract, according to a letter from the American Association of
Airport Executives to Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta. The
actual work was subcontracted to Advanced Interactive Systems.
Boeing's expensive training, given through a subcontract with Advanced
Interactive Systems, didn't ensure a fair or smooth process, however.
While regulations call for 40 hours in the classroom and 60 hours of
training on the job,many new hires were thrown onto the lines with much
less. At New York's LaGuardia airport, and in St. Louis and Portland,
some were even given the answers to questions on certification tests in
advance by their supervisors, according to a report in Newsday. On the
other hand, Koslowska had to take her test without notice or
prepartation, at the end of a 16-hour shift.
The composition of the new screener workforce changed as a result. "At
the top 100 airports, which employed 80% of the screeners, it was a
majority-minority workforce," according to SEIU researcher Robert
Masciola. TSA reports the new workforce is 61% white, and only 31% of
new hires are women. The agency also says only 4500 of the original
28-30,000 screeners were rehired, and some observers think the
percentage was much less than that.
TSA hired many former military and law enforcement personnel into
management positions, creating a culture of "do what you're told, and
don't ask questions." Being a Federal employee, it turned out, was no
guarantee of good working conditions. In Pittsburgh, where screeners
worked 48-hour weeks through the holidays, their one day off changed at
the whim of supervisors. Mandatory overtime was a constant at JFK and
LaGuardia, where some put in 7-day weeks during the same period.
Screeners were told to quit if they didn't like it.Workers at the X-ray
machines still often have no radiation badges to measure cumulative
exposure, and some have already contracted back problems from lifting
heavy bags. "I have friends who've been sexually harassed," the JFK
screener adds,"but with no union, who can they go to? If they complain,
managers just transfer the man to another terminal."
Adopting the corporate model for workforce compensation,TSA set up "pay
bands" instead of the normal scale, paying screeners between $23-34,000
a year. Supervisors determine unilaterally the actual salary, and
everyone starts at the bottom. The agency told newly- hired workers
their probation would last for a year.
Despite feeling insecure about their jobs, it didn't take long before
the new screeners began to organize. By mid-February, AFGE had filed
petitions to bargain for 3300 workers at LaGuardia, Baltimore,
Pittsburgh, Chicago Midway, Greensboro, Harlingen/McAllen/Brownsville,
and Columbus. Workers formed organizing committees and were preparing
petitions at JFK,Tampa,Orlando,Charlotte,Atlantic City and Des
Moines.
That was when Loy prohibited collective bargaining, and when the
influence of corporate executives surfaced again. Before the Federal
Labor Relations Authority,TSA argued that if Loy's order is not upheld,
screeners should still not be entitled to organize unions airport by
airport. Instead, they all should form one national bargaining unit, a
huge obstacle to organizing efforts. This is exactly the position taken
by Federal Express when its workers began to organize. Congress then
passed a special law giving the company a nationwide bargaining unit,
which killed the drive. Among the corporate execs at TSA is Clifford
Hardt, FedEx's director for special projects, who boasted to the
Sacramento Bee that "we couldn't have done what we did if they hadn't
torn down established procedures."
Loy's order could have been easily predicted. In a dramatic preview of
what lay in store, the administration ruled in January,2002, that close
to 1000 workers in the Department of Justice were ineligible for union
membership, deeming it incompatible with their job responsibilities.
These included employees of the US attorney, the DoJ Criminal Division,
the US National Central Bureau of Interpol, the National Drug
Intelligence Center, and the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.
The letter denying their right to collective bargaining came on the day
the treasury employees union filed a representation petition on their
behalf.
Then, in the debate over the Homeland Security Act last fall, Bush's
director of the Office of Management and the Budget, Mitchell Daniels,
declared that the model for labor relations at the new department might
"eventually help us untie managerial talent across the executive
branch." The Federal workplace, in other words, would come to look much
like Enron's.
The Act, passed after the November election, while Democrats still
controlled the Senate, allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to
write new employment rules, exempting any group in the department from
existing civil service regulations governing pay grades, promotion and
hiring systems, banning discrimination,or protecting whistleblowers. It
also allows the secretary to suspend Title 5 of the Civil Service Act,
which guarantees collective bargaining rights for Federal workers, for
units like TSA. The Department is huge, encompassing 170,000 workers,
thousands of whom currently belong to 17 different unions in 50
bargaining units.
In early February, the administration ruled that another 1000 workers,
at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, would lose their
already-existing right to bargain.NIMA director James Clapper cited the
1996 act which created the agency in eliminating the union, saying that
collective bargaining would compromise the ability of its workers to
perform intelligence, investigative and security duties. But NIMA is
also contracting out the work of those very employees. Shedding its
obligation to bargain with them makes the move much easier. "It's not
that the employees' jobs have changed, or that NIMA's mission has
changed," said AFGE's Diane Witiak. "It's simply part of the Bush
administration's overall plan to bust federal sector unions and reward
his political contributors."
Using Federal employment as a pattern for fighting unions is only one
form of Bush's policy of intervention against labor, which predates the
September 11 attacks. On March 9, 2001, the president told 10,000
mechanics, plane cleaners and janitors at Northwest Airlines that they
couldn't strike for 60 days,despite the fact that the union contract of
the Aircraft Mechanics FraternalAssociation had expired over four years
before. His action eliminated any incentive for the airline to
negotiate, and it broke off negotiations two days later, rejecting the
union's proposals.
Bush repeated the action in December, 2001, at United Airlines, where
15,000 mechanics,working under wage concessions negotiated in 1994, had
voted almost unanimously to strike. After September 11,the airline went
into a tailspin, and eventually filed for bankruptcy in January, 2003.
As executives at the supposedly worker-owned company played hardball to
extract massive wage concessions from employees, Bush officials put a
big weapon in their hands, threatening to withhold a $1.8 billion
bailout if unions didn't agree.
The administration openly argues that the functioning of the air
transport industry is vital to US society, and that job actions are
threats to the economy and the nation itself. In the summer and fall
last year, that use of national security to prevent job action among
transport workers took an enormous leap forward.As the contract between
the west coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the
Pacific Maritime Association expired on July 31, the administration
intervened directly.
Before negotiations even began, shippers and some of their biggest
customers, including The Gap, Target, Mattel, and Home Depot, held
secret meetings with a White House task force headed by advisor Carlos
Bonilla. Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge and representatives of the
Department of Labor then phoned ILWU President Jim Spinosa, warning him
thatthe administration would view any interruption of work on the docks
as a threat to national security. They threatened to invoke the Taft-
Hartley Act, to use the military to replace striking workers, to place
the waterfront under the Railway Labor Act (making a strike virtually
illegal), and to remove the union's ability to negotiate a single labor
agreement covering all ports on the coast.
The ILWU nimbly avoided being provoked into a strike, but finally, at
the peak shipping season, employers locked out their own workers.
Although the PMA accused the union of organizing an alleged work
slowdown, speedup on the docks was so intense that accidents cost the
lives of five longshoremen last year.When the union told its members to
work at a safe speed, the PMA locked them out, and then demanded that
Bush invoke Taft-Hartley. The administration's legal brief before Judge
Alsup voiced a startling new philosophy,elaborated by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfield. He held that all commercial cargo could be considered
important to the military, not just goods specifically intended for
military use abroad.
"TheDoD increasingly relies upon commercial items and practices to meet
its requirements," he stated. "Raw materials, medical supplies,
replacement parts and components, as well as everyday subsistence needs
of our armed forces, are just some of the essential military cargo
provided by commercial contractors that typically are not labeled as
military cargo."
In other words, any stoppage on the docks is a threat to national
security.Instead of defining a threat in terms of vital life- dependent
services, this use of national security defines it as economic. Any
strike halting the continued operation of an industry or a large
profitable enterprise could be defined as such a threat, and made
illegal.
At the beginning of October, the union went back to work, having been
locked out for 12 days. They returned, not voluntarily, as they had
offered, but under Federal injunction. Bargaining continued for another
month under the Taft-Hartley Act's 80-day "cooling off" period.
On the surface, it seems incomprehensible that the association would
need a Federal order to open the gates of the closed terminals. After
all, they'd shut them themselves, and could have opened them at any
time. But the resumption of work was not the issue. The PMA wanted a
guarantee that dockers would be forced to continue unloading ships
through the peak shipping season, when goods traveling from the
sweatshops of the eastern Pacific rim are en route to stores for the
Christmas rush. And it wanted to make the union so vulnerable that it
would be unable to put pressure on employers during negotiations.
In the end, the ILWU agreed to a six-year contract with significant
salary and benefit increases, but some job losses due to implementation
of new technology, as well as new pay differentials, which the union
historically has also opposed. Both the contract's supporters and
opponents agreed that the union's leverage in negotiations was severely
eroded by Bush's intervention.
While this use of national security is having a growing effect on
unions, many still don't challenge the rationale directly. Their more
limited argument questions whether changes sought by the administration
are necessary and fair, and whether they violate union rights. Once the
logic of the threat is accepted, however, almost any response becomes
justifiable. In the words of TSA's Chris Rhatigan, "collective
bargaining would be incompatible with the nation's safety." Nico
Melendez, another TSA representative, is even more blunt: "Security is
paramount and collective bargaining could cripple the system."
Unions organized two huge Solidarity Day demonstrations when Reagan
busted PATCO. Yet so far they have yet to organize a similar mass
response in the streets to defend the screeners, and question this use
of national security. The rank-and-file of the labor movement have yet
to be mobilized in their own defense, against a clear threat to their
own rights. This timidity hardly puts the administration on notice that
labor intends an all-out battle to resist, and it hardly seems possible
that Bush and his corporate allies will be detered by anything less.
Michael Albert
ZNet / Z Magazine
[email protected]