7435 Michigan Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48210 www.labornotes.org   #292 July 2003

Baltimore ILA Local Threatened with
Trusteeship for Resisting Concessions

by Carl Biers

International Longshoremen's Association Local 333 in Baltimore is being threatened with trusteeship by the ILA because its officers have resisted demands for concessions, says an executive board member of the local. John Blom, a 26-year member, says the union is in a strong position to resist the concessions demanded by UPM-Kymmeme, one of the world's largest paper companies.

The local has been negotiating with UPM since December and has agreed to some demands, but not enough for the ILA leadership, which has earned a reputation for feeble resistance to employer attacks on East Coast longshore worker standards.

UPM's main demands are for a reduction, from 15 to nine, in the minimum crew size and an increase in the number of start times. They are offering workers a dollar an hour increase each year of the contract.

UPM has threatened to use non-union workers or relocate to another port if Local 333 does not agree to reduce its labor costs before the contract expires in September 2004.

At a trusteeship hearing in New York on May 7, ILA executive board member Gerald Owens told Local 333's leadership that if they did not recommend UPM's final offer to the membership the following week, the local would be placed in trusteeship.

Local officials refused to recommend the offer, which was then voted down by a two-to-one margin, according to Blom.

The international has not yet responded, but the threat of trusteeship still looms over the local. If a trusteeship is imposed, the local bylaws can be suspended and a contract signed without approval of the membership.

NO AGREEMENT
Unlike the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the West Coast dockworkers' union, Local 333 is vulnerable to threats of moving or going non-union because the ILA has failed to establish a coast-wide master agreement for break-bulk cargo-goods that are not shipped in containers. Break-bulk makes up a sizable part of the cargo in Baltimore and other East Coast ports.

Without coast-wide standards, companies can threaten to abandon one port for another. Conditions can be driven lower and lower as locals become accustomed to viewing each other as competitors. Blom fears the erosion of standards, while limited to break-bulk, will set a bad precedent for containerized cargo, the mainstay of the ILA, which is loaded and unloaded under a coast-wide master agreement. ILA spokesperson James McNamara did not return calls.

The situation was not always so dire. Until President John Bowers took control of the ILA in the mid-1990s, the union operated on a policy of "one port on strike, all ports on strike," which prevented whipsawing. Ports still competed over productivity and safety standards, says Blom, but wages and crew size requirements were taken out of the equation.

Standards are further eroded by the ILA's inability to stanch the growth of non-union work in many East and Gulf Coast ports. Non-union operations, which pay as little as $8 per hour, account for 15% of the work in the Port of Baltimore.

ILA'S ADVANTAGES
Nevertheless, Blom believes that the local is in a strong bargaining position. He points to several factors that would keep UPM in Baltimore using ILA labor.

UPM currently uses docks that are publicly owned by the Maryland Port Authority (MPA), which forked over major subsidies in 1999 to attract the $10 billion paper products giant. The subsidies included an agreement to build a $10 million, 250,000-square foot warehouse, which is nearly complete. Blom says Maryland law requires that the ILA perform all work on publicly owned docks.

Furthermore, UPM's docks are a few hundred feet from rail access and only a bit further from Interstate 95, the main Northeast coastal artery. It would take years, says Blom, for UPM to build enough storage space elsewhere, and they are bound to Baltimore by their agreement with MPA and the ILA contract until September 2004.

The company is eager to lock in concessions over a year before the contract expires because, Blom says, at contract time it will have little leverage if workers at their main U.S. port of entry are on strike.

Any strike or attempt to go non-union could also be met with a campaign to tap the solidarity of dockworkers in Europe and elsewhere. Such a campaign in support of ILA Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina forced Nordana, a major Danish shipping company that had gone nonunion in the late 1990s, to return to the union fold.

What angers Blom most is that his local is in a strong position to hold the line and is willing to fight, but it may be forced into concessions, a trusteeship, or both by an international leadership that has no strategy for resistance and has made little or no effort to organize the growing non-union sector.

[Carl Biers is the executive director of the Association for Union Democracy.]