The battle ahead after ILA's port shutdown

[Hannah Bell]

PICKETS SHUT down seaport operations outside New York and Philadelphia for a second day September 29 over a union-busting effort by food giant Del Monte, but work resumed that evening pending the results of negotiations set for October 7. It was the biggest dockworker job action on the East Coast in more than 30 years...

The employers--who include some of the biggest shipping companies and terminal operators in the world--responded aggressively. They obtained a temporary restraining order from federal district Judge Dickinson Debevoise in Newark ordering the workers to return to the job and threatening to seek penalties of $1 million a day on ILA locals that failed to comply. Terminal operators called the action an "illegal strike."

Harold Daggett, executive vice president of the ILA, denied that the action broke the law. "Members from Philadelphia were upset about 200 people losing their jobs because Holt is trying to bust the ILA," he told the Journal of Commerce. "They came up here and put up a picket line, and the men here chose not to go across. No union man wants to cross a picket line..."

But Holt and Del Monte weren't after concessions. They want a chance to get rid of ILA labor altogether...Ken Riley, president of ILA Local 1422 in Charleston, S.C., summed up the mood in his union: "There is a feeling out there that we can't afford to lose this one."

http://socialistworker.org/2010/10/01/battle-ahead-after-port-shutdown