Happy Labor Day to us all!

Picketer's being beaten by police

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a day and age when organized labor seems largely irrelevant to many, this is an appropriate time to stop and reflect on the gains made by unions in the past 100 years.

Although no one seems to remember now, some of the most basic protections we presently enjoy – like Social Security and Unemployment Insurance – came to workers courtesy of the push from organized labor. This package also includes the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage, overtime, the child labor laws and much more, including some very basic things like the right to join a union and the right to strike. Most of this was enacted as parts of President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.

But none of these rights and protections were just handed to the workers, even if they were part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. People died to obtain these protections.

The years leading up to the New Deal – particularly the 20’s and 30’s – were a bloody, bitter time for workers. Strikes – where people died for their union beliefs – were commonplace.

Back in those days, the typical scenario was that the workers would go on strike or get locked out, and then the employers would hire scabs, and detectives (like the Pinkerton’s or the notorious Baldwin-Felts Agencies) to “protect” the scabs. Then the war was on.

The strikers were most often cast as “Commies” or communist-dominated in propaganda put out by the employers – the “Red Menace” was a very common theme. The Chamber of Commerce and other civic organizations usually backed the employers. Often, local citizen groups, augmented (or supplanted) by the hired detectives and backed by the local governments formed “posses” and took on the strikers in open warfare – all in the name of “civic virtue” (cleaning out the Red’s). Occasionally the National Guard even got into the act.

Good examples of this sort of open labor warfare include The Ludlow Massacre (1914), The Battle of Matewan (part of the West Virginia Coal Wars – 1920), the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), The Herrin Massacre (1922), The Columbine Mine Massacre (1927), The Auto-Lite Strike of 1934, The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike (1934) and the 1934 West Coat Maritime Strike (which evolved into the West Coast General Strike of 1934).

Hundreds and hundreds of workers died in those years, fighting for even the most basic of protections.

Continue reading “Happy Labor Day to us all!”

This is how democracy dies

A liberal’s long journey away from Barack Obama and the Democratic party

  By Michael Pellegrini

About seven and a half years ago following the 2008 elections, I wrote a blog post titled America: Disgraced then reborn.     I absolutely gushed about how happy I was at the election of Barack Obama. I was dead certain he would right all the wrongs caused by eight years of George Bush, and particularly, that he would make good on his pledge to end all our wars.

To me, implicit in that promise was ending the phony war on terror. A “war” that was nothing but a happy contrivance of the Bush administration.

Looking back to September 2001, George Bush was nine months into what was shaping up to be an uninspired, lackluster, one-term presidency. Then 9/11 happened.

Speaking unscripted in a press conference on September 16, 2001, President Bush said, “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient…”

Bush’s advisers craftily seized the opportunity and came up with an absolutely brilliant idea: everyone knows a country will rally behind their leaders in wartime. So rather than simply finding the 9/11 perpetrators and bringing them to justice, instead, they made Bush’s war official and decided to declare a generalized “war on terror.”   This also facilitated other plans they had.

Continue reading “This is how democracy dies”

America’s war against Islam

From a Muslim perspective, this whole “war on terror” has to look a whole lot like a “war on Muslims.”

We’ve invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Innocent civilian deaths in the Iraq war – and that’s just innocent civilian deaths by themselves – run overall between an estimated 110,000 to over 600,000 lives. Can there be many people over there who haven’t lost a friend or relative to the Iraq war?

Life under Saddam Hussein was actually pretty pleasant for a majority of Iraqis. He was a secular Muslim. The Shia Muslim minority was terribly oppressed. But the Sunni majority had the good life.

We come in and topple Saddam, fire all the Ba’ath party members from the army and civil service positions, kill as many as 600,000 innocent people, install an unpopular puppet government, torture people, lock up people for years and years in Guantanamo without filing any charges or giving them any due process, steal their oil, plunder their economy. Is that the way you make friends and influence people?

To the Iraqis we must come across as a bunch of Nazis.

Continue reading “America’s war against Islam”

Are you ready for the oligarchy?

The thing that disturbs me the most about this methanol/LNG mess is not the methanol or LNG per se.   Rather it’s that these issues bring home the hard, cold fact that while we were sleeping, there’s been a coup.   Our city’s been taken over by hostile forces. Tacoma and the United States are both well on their way to becoming oligarchies.

When people talk about the country becoming an oligarchy on the national level, it’s hard to grasp.   We still have our homes and jobs, the same programs are on TV. We’re going on a vacation to Yellowstone next year. Cousin Steve just got married and the wedding was fantastic!   On and on. In almost every ordinary way, things are the same now as they were 5-10 years ago.

As applied to the United States, the term oligarchy is an abstract; it’s intangible. Because of the overt normalcy, it’s really hard to come to terms with. “Yeah, America is an oligarchy, you say? Hey did you catch last night’s Mariners game?”

Continue reading “Are you ready for the oligarchy?”

What can Port of Tacoma do to become more competitive with the Canadian ports?

To recap, Vancouver has a slight edge in certain factors like the cost of transiting terminals, they have more large super-post-Panamax cranes, they have slightly better rail delivery rates through state-subsidized Canadian National Rail, slightly better productivity, and they get a break of about $100 per container on Harbor Maintenance Tax.  And they have massive plans for expansion.

One of the most obvious things we can do to improve our competitive position is to improve our productivity, and having modern, state of the art equipment would make it a lot easier.  The slight edge Vancouver enjoys in productivity could easily be attributed to the fact that they’ve spent a lot of money upgrading their cranes and yard equipment.

Continue reading “What can Port of Tacoma do to become more competitive with the Canadian ports?”

Port Metro Vancouver or Port of Tacoma? Who’s got the edge?

 

 

 

 

According to a report prepared for Port Metro Vancouver (PMV), their Container Traffic Forecast (which again, I encourage everyone to read), they predict that West Coast container volumes will increase between 3.4% and 5.7% per year through 2030.  Based on that, they’re forecasting their share of the traffic will provide increases for PMV from 3.51 million TEUs in 2014 to 7.02 million TEUs in 2030.

According to the report, they believe they will capture the lion’s share of this work because:

“…Vancouver is considered to have a better competitive position than its immediate competitors – Prince Rupert, Seattle, and Tacoma – based on a review of the following criteria:

  • Physical capability of the terminals;
  • Planned development of capacity;
  • Productivity of the terminals;
  • Cost of transiting the terminals;
  • Delivered costs to Central Canada and the US Midwest;
  • Intermodal capacity;
  • Import/export balances;
  • Suitability as a regional hub; and
  • Existing customer base.

Continue reading “Port Metro Vancouver or Port of Tacoma? Who’s got the edge?”

Port of Tacoma – moving boldly into the future, or sliding into oblivion?

 

I read a really good book recently, on the evolution of container shipping:  The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson.   It’s a great book.  Anyone interested in understanding the Port of Tacoma and/or the shipping business should read it.

One of the things that struck me was how quickly the shipping world transitioned from “breakbulk” cargo to containers.  Breakbulk was where everything was all shipped individually, or more recently, on pallets. It’s the same basic system that’s been used for hundreds of years. A breakbulk ship might take a week or more to unload, as everything was taken off piece by piece. But put the same amount of cargo in containers and the ship could be unloaded in just hours.   The cost savings from containerization were enormous. In the mid-50’s, the world was breakbulk; by the start of the 70’s, container shipping was big business.

It wasn’t an easy transition at all; the push to containerize was very contentious with many, diverse elements of the industry including the unions fighting it.  The ports as a whole were very skeptical – transitioning to working containers was quite an expensive proposition because of the specialized equipment necessary.

A few forward-looking ports including Tacoma decided to take the plunge, investing heavily in container cranes and handling equipment.  Many other ports did not, believing breakbulk would prevail.

Continue reading “Port of Tacoma – moving boldly into the future, or sliding into oblivion?”

An open letter to the Tacoma City Council and Port Commissioners

 

Self determination is really important to Americans. That is after all, why we fought the Revolutionary War — so the American people could decide their own fate, not King George and the English aristocracy.

Well it’s obvious some people in Tacoma have forgotten that.

Most elected leaders in this democracy would err on the side of the democratic process. If a sufficient number of citizens were riled up about any particular issue to qualify an initiative for an election, the leaders would typically champion that as our democracy at work, and then abide by the results. That is what a democracy is all about. Rule for the people, of the people and by the people.

Except in Tacoma. In Tacoma, when the common people have the sheer effrontery to challenge the supreme wisdom of their elected leaders, the leaders go to court and file massive lawsuits to beat and club and force the people into submission.

The lawsuit brought jointly by the Port of Tacoma, the The Chamber of Commerce, the EDB and now the City of Tacoma against the Save Tacoma Water organizers unmasks the dictatorial, authoritarian style of our current elected leaders.

Continue reading “An open letter to the Tacoma City Council and Port Commissioners”

To be, or not to be…

This current presidential election will be perhaps the single most important event the United States has faced in a hundred or more years.  Never before has there been such a wide range and disparity between the different candidates.  Never before has there been so much at stake.

This is where we decide if we’re a representative democracy or an oligarchy.

What has our country come to?

The answer is that there have been some very fundamental, mostly gradual changes in   recent years that brought us to where we are now. The biggest single, most disastrous event was the advent of the Citizen’s United, Supreme Court decision. This is where the oligarchs – the 1%, truly took over control of our country. 

As President Jimmy Carter observed about Citizen’s United,

“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now [the United States is] just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

 It’s true. If someone dumps massive amounts of cash into a politician’s campaign, they do expect results. The politicians are not dummies, they know what’s expected. And they have a vested interest to keep the money coming in, so they work diligently to protect the interests of the people who bankrolled them.  Continue reading “To be, or not to be…”

The West Coast ports disaster and the blame game

Originally printed in the Journal of Commerce – February 13, 2015

Opinion, by Michael Pellegrini

So the ILWU is solely responsible for the humongous mess our West Coast ports are in? It must be so because I read it in the Journal of Commerce. My first concern is that perhaps this blame is misplaced. To get at the truth, let’s look at the background.

First off, a normal workweek for longshoremen consists of 147 hours spread over three shifts in seven days. An eight-hour day shift, an eight-hour night shift, and a five-hour graveyard or “hoot owl” shift. If you take away the two night shifts each day, then you’ve lost 91 hours in a week, or about 62% of the available worktime. If you take away another two days from that, you drop the available work time to just 27% of normal.

Now as reported by the Journal of Commerce, the PMA’s supposed goals for not hiring night and now weekend shifts, they say,   is to reduce terminal congestion, and to reduce labor costs – to quit paying premium pay for what they consider to be workers with “diminished productivity.”

So what is the PMA really trying to accomplish by reducing available work? And is it likely that reducing available worktime to 27% of normal it will help ease terminal congestion or help customers get their goods delivered faster?

Well if you look beyond the repetitive, glib rhetoric and specious reasoning of the PMA, the true intent is obvious. The PMA has deliberately done away with nearly three-quarters of the available worktime solely to cut longshoremen’s paychecks. Their reasoning is the longshoremen will be much more pliable and easy to intimidate if maybe they can’t pay their mortgages or feed their children.

It’s that brutally simple. Their unstated but obvious purpose is to force the longshoremen to submit and back down. Period.   If that base motive wasn’t clear when the PMA stopped hiring the night shifts, it’s now abundantly clear since they locked-out the longshoremen for the weekend.

What this is, is hardball negotiations in the extreme. These foreign-owned shipping lines are perpetrating economic warfare against the United States of America. The only thing the PMA hasn’t done yet is to bring out thugs to bust heads, but perhaps that’s coming soon.   Things do seem to be escalating.

The irony is that if conversely, it was the longshoremen who had walked off the job and gone on strike refusing to work nights, much less if they staged a weekend strike, it’d be a completely different story.   In that instance, the whole country would be up in arms demanding their heads. They’d be calling for President Obama to fire them, à la Ronald Reagan and PATCO. They’d be called terrorists, holding the nation’s economy hostage.

That’s so very wrong. It’s extremely naive to assume the PMA’s lame excuses and tapestry of lies about reducing terminal congestion are even remotely valid.

Because the PMA excuses are indeed lame. If you want to move more cargo, and move it faster, you add shifts and you add workers. Not cut shifts. Is it any wonder the ports are on the brink of a complete standstill with what the PMA has done?

The vast majority of the blame for the gridlock we’re presently experiencing clearly lies with the PMA and their reckless attempt to punish the workers, trying to make them submit. Let’s give blame where blame is due.

This leads to my second concern: I take issue with the bias of the Journal of Commerce’s coverage of the negotiations. JOC has been facilitating the PMA’s propaganda agenda.

How so?

A good example is the way JOC seems to accept without question the PMA’s assertions that they’ve done away with nearly three-quarters of the work shifts to save money or to help clear terminal congestion. That simply defies reason.

Then in successive articles, the PMA statements – which are repeated over and over and over, ad nauseam – are all presented in an authoritative manner, while the ILWU statements are often presented in a more dismissive light.

And then to top it off, for the better part of the last month, JOC has had PMA graphics prominently displayed on its home page (Data), the latest graph having the headline: Pacific Maritime Association’s stats show drop in skilled labor.

So what’s the overall impression the reader is to come away with? Given the disparate, favored treatment, it’s obvious the PMA is the white knight. It would be extremely hard to walk away with an impression other than that.

That is not balanced reporting.

I value the Journal of Commerce for its news coverage of the industry. I even like reading opinion pieces that I don’t necessarily agree with; it’s enriching. But there has to be a clear line between the opinion and news. Because if the line blurs, it cheapens and degrades the publication. I hope JOC decides to take the high road.