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The Real Lockout Story

Dockworkers die during company speed-ups

From Washington Jobs with Justice

Whipped up by "strike hysteria," shipping on the West Coast broke records this summer as major corporations stockpiled imported products. As a result, the major shipping companies imposed a brutal work speed-up that put many dockworkers in danger but generated huge company profits. Five Longshore union members died in separate incidents as a result of this speed-up. While bargaining a new contract, union leaders called for a "work safely" campaign to insure that proper training and protection of health and life came before profits. The big shipping companies then retaliated against the dockworkers by locking out all Longshore workers in every port on the West Coast.

The shipping companies have tried every means to use the federal government to keep Longshore workers from negotiating a fair union contract. First, they called for Bush to bring in the US military to replace dockworkers on the job. Then, shipping companies and other businesses called on Bush to invoke the rarely used Taft-Hartley Act to save face for an ineffective lock-out and force Longshore workers back to dangerous speed-up rates at work. The companies are especially desperate to force speed-up work as the holiday season approaches.

In the last six months there have been five fatalities of ILWU workers, each more horrific than the last. (1) On September 3 Local 26 watchman Rudy Acosta was run over and killed by a top handler at the Pacific Container Terminal operated by SSA in Long Beach. (2) On July 23 Richie Lopez, Jr., Local 46 in Port Hueneme, was run over by a heavy forklift. (3) On June 1, Local 14 member Dick Peters was checking the hatches of a ship being loaded in the Port of Eureka. Apparently the ship-board gantry crane swung and crushed Peters against the ship itself. (4) On March 15, Mario Gonzalez, Local 26, was operating a huge mill that shreds cars into scrap metal at Hugo Neu-Prolers' facility at the Port of Los Angeles. The machine jammed and Gonzalez went in to fix it. But the hydraulic-powered, several-ton door closed on his chest, killing him. (5) On March 14 foreman John Prohoroff, Local 94, was routinely preparing a ship to be worked at SSA's Long Beach terminal. The line on one of the ship's cranes broke, dropping a 3,000-pound metal ring 30 feet and hitting him. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

"PMA's constant push for more productivity is making a bad problem even worse," said ILWU International President Jim Spinosa. "The docks are already dangerously congested, but during these negotiations several terminal operators tried to raise their posted speed limits from 10 or 15 miles an hour to 25. But even with safe limits posted, none of the equipment we are given to drive have speedometers. Accidents occur all too often and that is why one of the demands we have on the table in these negotiations is to have speedometers put in all the power industrial trucks on the docks."

For more info, go to: www.ilwu.org . Also visit Washington State Jobs with Justice, PO Box 9662, Seattle, WA 98109-0662; 206-441-4969; wsjwj@igc.org;