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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2002
Lead ArticleWest coast dock struggle at front line of war on labor
by Ron Brokmeyer No recent experience demonstrates the power of labor in
today's globalized capitalism more than the hundreds of cargo-laden ships
waiting to unload outside west coast ports on Oct. 8, the eleventh day of a
lockout of the dockworkers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
The employers' group, Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), started the lockout
after dockworkers decided to strictly enforce contractually agreed upon safety
regulations in the face of a deadly speed-up. The lockout caused serious
dislocation in the U.S. and world economy. "Just in time" delivery meant rotting
perishables, lost retail sales, and shut down manufacturing plants like giant
NUMMI motors in Fremont, Cal. and as far away as Mitsubishi in Normal, Ill. With
losses escalating, PMA got what they wanted all along--the power of the U.S.
government to help them subdue workers on the job. In fact, just before
negotiations collapsed, the solicitor general of the Department of Labor, Eugene
Scalia, got the ILWU to agree to a 30-day contract extension, but PMA refused,
holding out for government intervention. President Bush promptly obliged as he
went to court to get a Taft-Hartley injunction, opening the ports under
supervision of the U.S courts. U.S District Judge William Alsup ordered
dockworkers to return and perform at a "normal and reasonable rate of
speed." The Taft-Hartley Act, called by the labor movement the
"slave labor act," had not been used since 1978 and never in a
lockout. Furthermore Bush's secretary of war, Donald Rumsfeld, put his own
imperious stamp on the injunction, saying the shutdown interfered with the
effort "to prosecute the global war on terrorism." Two weeks later PMA
claimed returned dockworkers were working at a 20% to 25% reduced pace and were
preparing to ask Judge Alsup to use his extraordinary powers under Taft-Hartley
to fine the ILWU and even jail its leaders. ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT The contract for the 10,500 dockworkers at 29 west coast
ports expired July 1 and had been renewed during negotiations up until Sept. 1.
A life-threatening speed-up on the docks was the turning point. On Sept. 13, a
rank-and-file newsletter, MARITIME WORKER MONITOR, cited the "Mechanization
and Modernization Fund Agreement of 1960" and asked, "Why is it we
continue to work at near record paces in violation of safety rules... So far
during the course of the 1999-2002 period there have been nine fatalities."
The escalation of the speed-up is reflected in the fact that five of those nine
deaths were in the previous seven months alone. The lockout ensued soon after
the MARITIME WORKER MONITOR called for "rank-and-file job action" to
enforce safety regulations. PMA's singular fixation has been to increase
productivity at all costs. In order to obscure the real point of contention in
this dispute and try to turn other workers against the dockworkers, PMA has
flooded the media with exaggerated claims about the dockworkers' high pay.
However attempting to buy the workers off with more money is exactly PMA's
strategy. All the issues over compensation and benefits have been
settled and the sticking point is PMA's insistence on introducing new technology
aimed at replacing up to 600 clerical dockworkers with computers connected to
devices that will track containers with scanners. The ILWU has even agreed to
the introduction of the new technology as long as the remaining work of managing
cargo information is done by its members. Yet the PMA refused to accept this
proposal. The whole purpose of the new technology for them is to extend their
control over the work flow on the docks. Another reason the business community is out to get--and
maybe even destroy--the ILWU is the willingness of ILWU workers to go beyond
bread and butter issues affecting themselves and use their power, for example,
to actively support those fighting authoritarian regimes that rule through
terror. These were regimes like apartheid South Africa and Chile under Pinochet,
regimes with which global capitalism found great affinity. The current president
of South Korea, Kim Dae Jung, may owe his life to the ILWU, which supported him
as a dissident in the 1980s when he was under threat of execution. ILWU workers staged a job action to support the movement
against global capitalism as it emerged in the massive anti-WTO demonstrations
in Seattle in November 1999. They were in the forefront of labor's support for
civil rights in this country and most recently led the successful fight to free
the Charleston Five--east coast picketers of a mostly African-American local of
the International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) who were put under house
arrest. The ILWU workers' active solidarity with other workers
and social movements has brought out many supporters, locally and
internationally, on their behalf at rallies at the docks in Oakland, Cal. Ken
Riley, president of Charleston ILA Local 1422, came to Oakland to speak at a
solidarity rally for west coast dock workers. On Oct. 10 a group of activists
from "environmental and social justice organizations" locked PMA out
of their corporate offices downtown "as a gesture of solidarity with the
ILWU." Activists from several local unions joined the Port Worker
Solidarity Committee in planning, along with ILWU Local 10, a National Labor
Conference Against Taft-Hartley and Union Busting on Dec. 7. They included hotel
workers from HERE Local 2, who won (Oct. 18) a contract after a 140-day strike
at the Marriott Hotel at Fisherman's Wharf. What makes the dock workers present fight over
life-threatening speed-up and workers' further loss of control over their labor
process all the more intense is that, in the world after the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks, the employers sense a chance to really go after the union. None comprehend this better than ILWU Local 10, a
majority African-American local in the San Francisco Bay Area, which voted to
oppose a new U.S. war on Iraq. Local 10's secretary-treasurer, Clarence Thomas,
declared at a rally Oct. 5 that "as unionists we have an obligation not
only to negotiate good wages and work conditions for our members, but we also
have a responsibility to propel the issue of economic social justice for all
working and oppressed people... The war on terrorism is a war on workers'
rights." Just when Bush pushed Congress to give him a blank check
for his war on Iraq, he went to the courts for a Taft-Hartley injunction, making
war on labor at home. The ILWU got direct calls from Tom Ridge, director of
Homeland Security, pressuring the workers to settle. For the administration the
workers on the docks are an integral part of the U.S. war machine and their
Taft-Hartley enforcement powers can mean the full militarization of labor by
bringing troops onto the docks. Labor officials and rank-and-filers feel Bush
has reached a new stage in his anti-labor offensive. Up to 170,000 government employees are threatened with
losing their union and civil service rights if Bush gets his way with the new
Homeland Defense Department. Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO,
warned that the use of Taft-Hartley in a lockout was unprecedented and that now
"all employers know the administration will rush in with Taft-Hartley to
give them what they want." The WALL STREET JOURNAL (Oct. 8) cited Charles
Rhemus, a labor relations expert, who predicted Bush would "not hesitate to
act" against auto workers in their upcoming negotiations with the excuse
they are involved in producing war commodities. CAPITALISM'S INHERENT ANTI-HUMANISM The present struggle on the docks is much deeper than
going up against an oppressive political authority in that the enemy, which
includes the power of the state, is wholly organic to capitalism's innermost
soul. Capital's very being is driven by the increasing dominance in production
of dead labor, machines in the form of capital, over living labor, the worker.
Karl Marx called the former constant capital (c) and the latter variable capital
(v). Living labor is variable "capital" because it produces more value
than it itself costs in the form of wages. Increasing productivity through
speed-up and technological innovation is a way to extract more surplus value (s)
from living labor and is the capitalist obsession.* The whole history of the introduction of technology in
the workplace, increasing c over v, has been to more fully control workers by
making humans more of a mere appendage to a mechanical process. The predominance
of constant capital is graphically illustrated at today's ports where only a few
dockworkers operate monstrous mechanical cranes and do the work that hundreds
did before them. In the 1950s, before mechanization and modernization introduced
containerization, there were 100,000 longshoremen on the west coast docks. Now PMA's insistence on doubling west coast port volume
in the next five years, especially through information technology, is a
particularly insidious anti-humanism. Marx caught the essence of today's
conflict a century and a half ago when he said capitalism increasingly endows
material forces with intellectual powers while reducing human beings to more of
a mere material force. The very nature of information technology is to literally
animate dead labor (machines), replacing workers and making those left more
completely an extension of a mechanical process. Today it is not enough to appeal to workers' power
through strikes. The dockworkers' struggle is implicitly raising the need to
re-think the whole relationship between humans and technology. The dockworkers'
struggle raises the need for newer and deeper forms of social solidarity to
overcome the anti-human inversion in production, where machines dominate human
beings as capital with a logic and direction of their own. DEEP PROBLEMS IN THE U.S. ECONOMY This fundamental antagonism in production is connected
to intractable problems in the economy as a whole. One of the consequences of
the growing preponderance of constant capital over variable capital is
capitalism's self-defeating tendency for the general rate of profit to decline.
The huge and growing list of criminal behavior by greedy corporate managers
reveals a less emphasized fact--the totally phantom profits reported in the
speculative bubble of the '90s. The burden of capital's falling rate of profit affects
workers in several ways. Many workers saw their retirement nest eggs
dramatically shrink in the stock market collapse. More consequential is
capital's immediate answer to their falling rate of profit, which is to get rid
of as much living labor as possible. Thus, we are seeing little hiring and wave
after wave of layoffs, like the latest by SBC which will cut 11,000 jobs in 13
states. Though the U.S. economy has had some growth for over a year, it is being
called a "jobless recovery." The last jobless recovery, in the early
'90s, was followed by what we now recognize as a huge speculative bubble. The
biggest fear is that this time we will see a long protracted stagnation as Japan
is still experiencing after its bubble burst over a decade ago. The general drive to diminish living labor is reflected
in one of the last pillars holding up the U.S. economy, consumer confidence,
which is as low as it has been in a decade. On top of that we are now back to
huge deficit spending due to tax cuts for the rich and the growing cost of the
U.S. war machine which is now permanently in conflict policing the world for the
needs of capital, especially its insatiable appetite for oil. Another record
deficit, signified by all those cargo-laden ships anchored outside west coast
docks and for which the bill will some day come due, is the trade deficit, which
reached an unprecedented $38.5 billion in August. $10.9 billion of that deficit
was with China alone. China, as a high growth economy, is practically unique
among nations in today's world economy. With a nearly inexhaustible supply of
labor under an authoritarian state, it is a low-wage haven for global
capitalism, looking to reduce the cost of living labor. Other low-wage centers
like Southeast Asia and Mexico, with already stressed conditions, are in further
decline. While Silicon Valley has seen no new jobs for over 18
months, China also now has a growing high-tech workforce. One of the aspects of
information technology jobs is that they can mostly be done from remote
locations. Indeed, at a recent rally on the docks one ILWU speaker surmised that
if the PMA were not stopped, they could shift their remaining jobs handling
cargo information to a place like China. The U.S., as the home world of global capital's empire,
may indeed be one of its weakest economic links. Whether in China or the U.S.,
capitalists with their new globally integrated production search everywhere for
state intervention to help impose their despotic plan. The flip side is that the
U.S. west coast dockworkers have received unprecedented statements of support
and commitments to act if called upon from workers, especially dockworkers,
throughout the world. The dockworkers' fight here shows more than ever the need
for a humanist alternative to the vicissitudes of global capital. * For an in-depth discussion of these categories in Marx's CAPITAL, see the two part series "The revolt of the workers and the plan of the intellectuals" by Raya Dunayevskaya in the August-September and October 2002 NEWS & LETTERS. |
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