22-01-2012, 05:31 PM
Published on Sunday, January 22, 2012 by Common Dreams
Military Intervention vs. Maritime Union Power
by Brian Tierney
For the first time in 40 years, the U.S. Armed Forces will be deployed to intervene in a labor dispute, facilitating a scab operation against union dockworkers at the Port of Longview in Washington.
In the long dispute between International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) Local 21 and EGT Development, the international conglomerate is now poised to make its first grain shipment from its new $200 million export terminal, violating its contract with the publicly-owned port and the union's jurisdiction on the waterfront.
But it may take an army to cross the picket line.
The ILWU has fought militantly against EGT's employment of non-ILWU labor at its new facility in Longview where both leaders and rank-and-file activists have engaged in civil disobedience, blockading grain shipments by rail and facing off with police. On January 3rd ILWU President Robert McEllrath sent a letter to dockworkers explaining that EGT would likely receive its first vessel to be loaded for grain export at the terminal this month.
"We have been told that this vessel will be escorted by armed United States Coast Guard, including the use of small vessels and helicopters, from the mouth of the Columbia River to the EGT facility," McEllrath wrote.
He added that the facility itself will be guarded by a massive presence of law enforcement, dispatched from multiple jurisdictions in the area.
Read the rest HERE
Military Intervention vs. Maritime Union Power
by Brian Tierney
For the first time in 40 years, the U.S. Armed Forces will be deployed to intervene in a labor dispute, facilitating a scab operation against union dockworkers at the Port of Longview in Washington.
In the long dispute between International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) Local 21 and EGT Development, the international conglomerate is now poised to make its first grain shipment from its new $200 million export terminal, violating its contract with the publicly-owned port and the union's jurisdiction on the waterfront.
But it may take an army to cross the picket line.
The ILWU has fought militantly against EGT's employment of non-ILWU labor at its new facility in Longview where both leaders and rank-and-file activists have engaged in civil disobedience, blockading grain shipments by rail and facing off with police. On January 3rd ILWU President Robert McEllrath sent a letter to dockworkers explaining that EGT would likely receive its first vessel to be loaded for grain export at the terminal this month.
"We have been told that this vessel will be escorted by armed United States Coast Guard, including the use of small vessels and helicopters, from the mouth of the Columbia River to the EGT facility," McEllrath wrote.
He added that the facility itself will be guarded by a massive presence of law enforcement, dispatched from multiple jurisdictions in the area.
Read the rest HERE
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller