Eleven Thousand Workers Vote to Leave the
Teamsters Union
by Charles Walker
This article, along with two that follow,
was posted on the web site Labor Tuesday for June 24, 2003. The articles
have been edited for Labor Standard. (Following the second article we
have added a reprint from the Oakland Tribune, which reached us only
after the other material had appeared on the Labor Tuesday web site.)
When Northwest Flight Attendants voted last week
to leave the Teamsters union and join an independent union, the Professional
Flight Attendants Association (PFAA), no one should have been surprised, least
of all Teamsters President James Hoffa, son of legendary Jimmy Hoffa. After
twenty-six years, a majority of the 11,000 flight attendants had had their fill
of the union, especially of the heavy-handed autocracy that’s back and fully in
charge.
The head of Teamsters for a Democratic Union
(TDU), Ken Paff, said in a prepared statement, “Hoffa essentially drove 11,000
Teamsters out of the union, 75 percent of them women, by refusing to deal with
their issues or their elected leaders.”
The Teamsters Union came close to losing the
flight attendants before. On the eve of their 1990 preparations to leave the
union, Ron Carey, then a candidate for the union’s top post, urged the flight
attendants to stay, saying that when he won the election he would see that
their problems would get his close attention. As president, one of Carey’s
first moves was to facilitate the organization of a national union local for
the flight attendants, who previously had been separated in scattered local
unions, and therefore always had minority status and influence. For a time the
flight attendants seemed hopeful. They overwhelming voted for Carey the two
times he ran for president. And they elected a slate of reform officers, some
of whom joined TDU, attended TDU’s annual conventions, and served as key TDU
leaders and organizers.
But when agents of the federal government drove
Carey from the union on bogus charges that a federal jury wouldn’t buy, the
relationship between the national union and the flight attendants once again
soured. First, Hoffa put his power behind a proposed concessionary contract,
which the flight attendants decisively rejected, despite a Madison Avenue-style
campaign that included multiple mailings to workers’ homes and videotape pleas
for their votes. Then, when flight attendants began last year to organize for a
decertification vote, Hoffa removed the local union’s officers and installed his
supporters, ending any chance for reconciliation.
The former local union leadership led the
decertification campaign, and seemingly had little trouble winning a majority
to their view that the Teamsters officialdom did not have the best interests of
the flight attendants at heart. TDU refers to the union the flight attendants
chose to represent them now as an “upstart,” a small independent union that
won’t have the clout to defend the workers from the airline bosses, who are now
on an industry-wide drive for massive concessions. Reportedly, Northwest is
demanding that flight attendants agree to wage and other concessions totaling
some $900 million over 6½ years.
From the start TDU clearly believed that the
flight attendants were making a grievous error, and attempted to win some
concessions from Hoffa that might head off the decertification vote. “TDU
leaders tried repeatedly,” they say, “to consult with and help the Teamster
leadership, calling for expanding the Teamster leadership team, promising a clear
end-date to end the trusteeship with a pledge that the unpopular
Hoffa-appointees would not seek office.”
But obviously, the flight attendants had no good
choices. They could vote to give up unionism altogether, they could endure what
TDU has repeatedly called Hoffa’s strong-arm tactics, or they could attempt to
use their leverage independently, unhindered by Hoffa’s callous interference.
With their past gains under attack from their
bosses, chances are slim that they will prevail where other airline unions are
failing. Yet the choice they made to get out from under the Teamster
bureaucracy is one that many workers will understand.
Machinists at United Airlines, too, are faced
with choices much like the Northwest workers. They may vote to leave the
Machinists union, which, like the Teamsters, is a major AFL-CIO affiliate. They
are separately being urged to break away and to stay by various leftists in the
Machinists ranks, who have failed to find a united answer to the union’s
concessions that drive the decertification effort. The efforts of both
machinists and flight attendants to try decertification as a remedy to their
problems are no coincidence; but their efforts don’t represent a major trend.
Despite the several decades of retreat and defeat suffered by U.S. workers,
there’s no labor upsurge on the horizon, no clear signs of an upheaval akin to
the sort that reshaped unions during the Great Depression and favorably altered
the relationship between workers and bosses.
In an independent union, the flight attendants
stand a chance of learning more about the pitfalls of business unionism, as
their democratic structure gives them a better feel for the battleground of the
class struggle being waged against them. To the extent that that potential is realized,
the flight attendants have chosen the right course.
The Antiwar Protest in Oakland: Police
Might vs. Civil Rights
by Jack Heyman
The author is a San Francisco longshore
union official and one of those arrested during the April 7 antiwar
demonstration in the port of Oakland. This article is followed by a June 24
report from a local newspaper on new plans by the Oakland authorities to
prosecute most of those arrested on April 7. That report is reprinted for the
information of Labor Standard readers.
When police opened fire on a peaceful antiwar
protest in the port of Oakland on April 7, many demonstrators and nine
longshore workers were injured. Police used “less than lethal” riot control
weapons. The manufacturer’s instructions clearly warn that shooting directly at
people, which police did, can be lethal. Thirty protesters and a longshore
union official were arrested in the unprovoked police attack. On May 12,
antiwar demonstrators successfully returned to the port to reassert their First
Amendment rights to protest. This time port employers delayed ship arrivals to
avoid any conflict and police did not attack demonstrators.
The Bay Area has a long history of dock
protests. At an Oakland Coliseum rally in 1990, Nelson Mandela credited a San
Francisco dock action in 1984 with sparking the U.S. anti-apartheid movement.
In 1997, before he was mayor, Jerry Brown marched in a picket line in support
of dockworkers in Liverpool, England. Today, he hypocritically defends the police
shooting of protesters in a picket line. Even police videos refute their
justification for shooting, the claim that the demonstrators threw rocks and
bottles and blocked trucks in the port.
Last year during longshore contract
negotiations, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), representing shippers,
closed all terminal gates, locking out longshore workers and shutting down all
U.S. West Coast ports from Canada to Mexico for ten days. Longshoremen
protested by organizing picket lines, rallies, and marches. Following the PMA
lockout, President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, forcing dockers back to
work under employers’ conditions. Mayor Brown did not object to the ports being
closed then by maritime employers, nor did he object to Bush imposing what the
labor movement historically has called the “Slave Labor” Act.
In the post-9/11 world every event is measured
in “national security” parameters. Last June, in an unprecedented act of
government intimidation of unions, Homeland Security Chief Ridge and Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld made phone calls to ILWU President Spinosa warning that
dock actions during longshore contract negotiations would threaten “national
security.”
Politicians of both parties are jumping on
Bush’s “war on terror” bandwagon, lest they be branded “unpatriotic.”
Meanwhile, draconian legislation like the Homeland Security Act, the USA
Patriot Act, and the Transportation Security Act, which eviscerate civil
liberties, fly through Congress without serious debate. These “patriots” argue
paradoxically that nowadays democratic rights have to be suspended in order to
protect them.
The state of California Anti-Terrorism
Information Center (CATIC) spied on protesters and union officials before the
April 7 police attack. In an Orwellian twist, Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for
CATIC, who has since been removed from that job, explained, “You can almost
argue that a protest (against a war...against…international terrorism) is a
terrorist act” (Oakland Tribune, May 18, 2003). Even more chilling, Van
Winkle said that “terrorism” included any action that has an “economic impact.”
Are union picket lines or civil rights demonstrations or boycotts to be banned
in this “war on terror”?
National security was the excuse for government
spying on former ILWU President Harry Bridges, the target of an unsuccessful
red-baiting campaign to deport him [in the late 1940s and early ‘50s]. Today,
spying on Oakland longshore officials, whose union has been outspoken against
the war and occupation of Iraq, is no less reprehensible.
Yet when it comes to the awarding of billions of
dollars in reconstruction contracts in Iraq to corporations like Bechtel and
Halliburton, probing into that’s taboo. Bush handed Stevedoring Services of
America (SSA) a $4.8 million contract to run the port of Umm Qasr. The port of
Oakland demonstrators were protesting SSA’s war profiteering. Clearly, this was
a war for imperial might not civil rights.
The “Blue Ribbon Committee” set up to
investigate the latest Oakland police atrocity will have as little effect in
curbing “excessive police force” as the Civilian Police Review Board did in
curtailing the OPD’s racist Riders. Perhaps, Jerry Brown in his possible run
for state attorney general could host a radio program similar to his former
KPFA show “We the People,” this time renamed “We the Police.”
Prosecution Planned Against Oakland
Antiwar Demonstrators
The following article from the June 24 Oakland
Tribune is reprinted for the information of the readers of Labor
Standard.
Tuesday, June 24, 2003—OAKLAND—Twenty -five
people arrested during the April 7 antiwar protest at the Port of
Oakland—including a longshore union leader [Jack Heyman]—were charged Monday
with a total of 63 misdemeanor counts ranging from interfering with a business
to failure to disperse.
Deputy Alameda County District Attorney Paris
Coleman filed the charges after reviewing hundreds of pages of documents, and
watching and listening to video and audio tapes. Other prosecutors also
reviewed the evidence.
June Breshears of San Francisco’s Global
Exchange said Monday that she had not heard about the decision to press
charges, but added she is “disappointed.” Breshears said she was the second
person arrested that day, before the violence began, and she never heard any
orders to disperse.
“After the way the police behaved that day,
being so violent toward people who were just expressing their free speech
rights, it’s disappointing that they are going to use public funds to
(prosecute),” she said. “This is just going to bring more attention to the
conduct of the police that day, and going to trial will just be another
opportunity to do that.”
A 17-year-old girl arrested at the protest had
been charged earlier with failure to disperse. Of the 33 people arrested during
the protest, seven were not charged.
Dozens of people, including nine longshoremen,
were injured April 7 when police fired lead-shot-filled bean bags, wooden
dowels and “stinger grenades” spewing rubber bullets at crowds blocking the
gates to two shippers with Iraq war–related government contracts.
Police have said they fired in response to
protesters who threw rocks and other objects at them, but none of those charged
are accused of that.
One of those charged Monday is among the 31
people who have filed claims against the city saying they were injured April 7.
Lindsay Parkinson, 23, said she was struck by a police motorcycle driving back
protesters and sustained “severe” injuries. Parkinson said she was unlawfully
arrested.
Police said they have television video and
eyewitness statements showing people throwing objects at them, but they were
unable to detain any of those people.
Coleman said "the facts of this case and
the circumstances surrounding the protest support the charges we filed. Really,
the bottom line is (the protesters) went there to interfere with the business
of the port and that is what they did.
“There are many people in many walks of life who
may have disagreed with the war,” Coleman said. “There are a lot of other ways
of civil disobedience that don’t violate the law.”
Coleman said he realizes some people might be
upset with the decision to file charges. But, he said, “You have to look at the
facts presented to you and see if they support filing a criminal case. And
obviously, we felt they did.”
When asked why it took so long to file the
charges, Coleman cited as one reason the large volume of documents and tapes
that had to be reviewed. “We wanted to be thorough, we wanted to be fair and
there was a lot to review,” he said.
Breshears was one of 24 charged with interfering
with a business by obstructing or intimidating people attempting to carry out
business, or their customers. Fifteen of the 25, including Breshears, also were
charged with disturbing the peace and failure to disperse.
Jack Heyman, 59, the elected weekend business
agent for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, was charged
with failure to comply with the order of a police officer and resisting or
obstructing a police officer. Police said he was arrested after he refused to
move his car as ordered.
Heyman’s attorney, Ted Cassman, said his client
is innocent, and blasted the district attorney for pursuing charges. “I think
it's a cynical pre-emptive strike by the local authorities to shield themselves
from a soon-to-be-pending class-action lawsuit on behalf of my client,” he
said.
Three of the 25 also were charged with resisting
or obstructing police and two, besides Heyman, were charged with failure to
comply with police orders.
Those charged Monday ranged in age from 19 to
64. Most are from Oakland and Berkeley, and others listed Alameda, Emeryville,
Danville, Chico, Santa Rosa, San Rafael, Santa Cruz and Grass Valley as their
homes, authorities said.
Prosecutors said the defendants would be
notified by mail and through their attorneys. They will each be given a court
date in the next few weeks, and prosecutors said they will be arraigned in
small groups rather than all at once. Each can request a jury trial.
Lt. Howard Jordan, one of the police commanders
at the scene April 7, said, “I think it's a good thing that they did (file
charges). It vindicates our deployment and shows that we did things the way
they should have been done. These folks were out there bent on causing
problems. The ones that didn’t, we arrested in a manner that was consistent
with the law.”
The Police Department is conducting a review of
events that day, and the city has convened a five-member independent panel to
conduct its own investigation of the police response to protesters. The Oakland
protest was the only antiwar demonstration in the country where police used
“less than lethal” ammunition.
U.S. Customs Service Blind to Forced
Child Labor, Says Labor Rights Group
by Charles Walker
Whenever you fish a packet of M&M’s out of
the lunch bucket or brown bag, you probably munch the pebbly sweets without
giving much thought to the chocolate center as your molars crunch down. But if
the chocolate in the center came from the Ivory Coast of Africa, chances are
that it was made from cocoa beans picked by child labor. Worse than that, some
of that child labor was forced child labor. Worse than that, some of that labor
was child slave labor, says a labor rights group.
On May 28, the New York Times reported
that the International Labor Rights Fund planned to file a lawsuit against the
U.S. Customs Service “for breaking American trade law and allowing African
cocoa picked by indentured child labor to be imported into this country.” The
Ivory Coast is a major producer and exporter of cocoa beans, brought here by
the likes of Nestle, Cargill, Hershey, and the ubiquitous Archer Daniels
Midland Company, among others.
The labor rights group told the Times,
“We are confident that if the Custom Service (sic) began an investigation the
industry would take notice and find out whether indentured child labor was used
to pick the cocoa beans.” Obviously, the rights group is convinced that forced
child labor is used to harvest the cocoa crops, and, as it says, it has “grown
impatient with the Customs Service for failing to investigate accusations that
cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast used slave or indentured child labor.”
The Times reported that others have also
charged that “plantation owners in the Ivory Coast buy children from
neighboring countries like Mali to work in cocoa fields.” A 1998 UNICEF report
prepared by its Ivory Coast office confirmed that child traffickers brought
children to the Ivory Coast to work, though it couldn’t estimate how many
children were transported. Perhaps the Customs Service has merely overlooked a
State Department report (2002), cited by the Times, which stated that
“some forced labor and trafficking in children and women also persisted.”
The liberal labor rights group, founded in 1986
and currently headed by a labor lawyer, believes that a Customs Service
investigation will force the agency to agree with the rights group that child
labor practices in the Ivory Coast should trigger a provision in U.S. law that
bans the importation of products made with forced child labor. Just the threat
of a ban, the group expects, will lead major cocoa importers to assist the
Ivory Coast farmers “to provide decent wages and basic rights to their
workers.” That and proper monitoring systems with legal enforcement should
“ensure an end to trafficked child labor in this industry,” the group
maintains.
The Customs Service agreed to meet with the
group in July, even though, as the Times reported, the federal agency
declared, “We reject the charges against us and are in the process of writing a
letter to the group explaining what we are doing…We already enforce the law.”