Lacking the buy-in by the powerful Longshore Union, Occupy Tacoma protesters have dialed down what was initially advertised as an effort to shut down Tacoma port activity Monday and substituted informational picketing on one of the port’s main approaches.
The latest bulletin Thursday to friends and supporters of the Occupy movement call for a noontime protest beginning on the Port of Tacoma Road overpass over state Route 509.
A communique to protesters asked them to bring signs. Some of the suggested slogans: “Occupy Tacoma Supports Port Workers,” “Occupy Tacoma Supports Truckers,” “Save the Middle Class,” and “Jobs, not Cuts.”
Occupy’s loosely governed organization had been planning for more than a month to block operations at all major West Coast ports, including Tacoma on Monday, but the movement got strong pushback from the Longshore Union, a powerful union whose members provide labor on the waterfront.
Occupy’s backers had claimed they would halt operations at the port in sympathy with the Longshore Union’s effort to win a contract to load and unload grain ships at a new facility at the Port of Longview and to support unionization efforts by truckers serving container terminal in Los Angeles.
But Longshore officials said they would decide when to protest, not some third-party movement.
Scott Mason, president of Longshore Local 23 in Tacoma, said the union is in sympathy with much of what the Occupy movement is trying to say, but he fears their adopting the union’s own struggles as their own.
The union is operating under federal court restrictions about what it can do to protest the situation at the Longview grain elevator, he said. Mason said he is concerned that Occupy’s protests might violate those restrictions and make the union and its officers subject to penalties.
“The Occupy people have never called the local here and asked us how they could direct their energy,” he said.
On the Columbia River, a Longshore leader expressed similar sentiments.
“If I wanted to shut down the port, I could do it without the Occupy,” said Jeff Smith, president of the Longshore Union’s Columbia River District Council. “This is a question for the Occupy movement. Why would I want to send my people home? Why would I take a job away from somebody?
“I don’t get what they’re thinking. It’s my job to put people to work. I’ve got jobs for ’em,” he told Willamette Week. “So I’m going to put ’em to work. And I’m going to take some of Wall Street’s money.”
The Occupy movement, which has spread worldwide, began in New York as a protest to the excesses of the financial community in the face of a worldwide economic crisis.
International Longshore and Warehouse Union President Robert McElrath said the union would not honor a blockade that was created outside the union’s own internal decision-making process.
“Only ILWU member or their elected representative can authorize job actions on behalf of the union,” he wrote members.
“And any decisions made by groups outside of the union’s democratic process do not hold water regardless of intent,” he said.
Meanwhile in Olympia, Occupy protesters say they have no plans so far to blockade that port. “No plans have yet been announced for an Olympia-centered port action,” the movement announced on its website.
Besides the fact that they lack the ILWU’s backing, Occupy would have difficulty blocking traffic to most West Coast ports because they have multiple access points.
The Occupy movement was briefly successful in shutting down the Port of Oakland earlier this fall, but that port has more constricted access.
The Port of Oakland has bought full-page newspaper advertisements in Bay Area newspapers asking protesters to let port business continue unimpeded.
The Occupy movement claims support from individual union members they’ve quoted on their website. But at least one of those Longshoremen says his words were misinterpreted.
Dan Coffman, president of ILWU Local 21, which represents the Longview longshoremen, said the movement does not speak for him and his workers. Blockade organizers in news releases and a video posted online have featured Coffman’s appearance at an Occupy Oakland rally. Coffman said his trip to California was mainly to thank longshoremen there for sending money to support their picket lines in the grain terminal dispute.
“As far as the shutdown of the ports, we have no involvement with that whatsoever — none,” Coffman told The Associated Press.
Longshore workers are bound by a contract with the Pacific Maritime Association, a coastwide alliance of containership lines and terminal operators. That contract has no provisions for picketing unrelated to contract issues.
Earlier this year, however, Longshore workers up and down the coast held a brief wildcat strike in support of the longshore workers in Longview.
The union says it didn’t sanction that walkout.
John Gillie: 253-597-8663 john.gillie @thenewstribune.com
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