Lessons on labor resistance in U.S. Gulf

Ingalls strikers on the picket line in March.

On March 8, more than 7,000 workers at the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., went on strike demanding a decent contract. The Ingalls workers are represented by 15 unions; 11 are affiliated with the AFL-CIO Pascagoula Metal Trades Council that represents 6,700 production workers including asbestos workers, boilermakers, machinists, operating engineers, painters and allied trades, plumbers and pipe fitters, sheet metal workers, and the unaffiliated carpenters, guards, laborers and teamsters.

Fourteen of the unions voted down the first two contract proposals presented by Northrop Grumman, the corporate owner of Ingalls. Grumman is one of the U.S. government’s major military defense (offense) contractors.

After a nearly month-long strike and amid mounting pressure from the Katrina disaster’s continuing impact on the workers and their families, union members voted on April 4 to accept a contract that had only 18 cents more than was offered in the first two Grumman proposals.

The vote count reveals a deep dissatisfaction among a majority of the workers with the contract, and with the government’s complicity with Grumman’s exploitation and disaster profiteering off its workers. The vote count was 1,370 in favor and 910 against, totaling only 2,300 of the nearly 5,000 members who had voted down the previous contract proposals and for the strike.

The nearly 3,000 union members who did not vote represent a silent majority who did not support the contract, but who felt that the Ingalls workers could not hold out on strike any longer. This figure also indicates a high degree of demoralization among the workers because of the lack of national support or promotion of the strike by the national trade union movement.

This lack of national trade union support for a strike against a major corporation by workers in the Gulf Coast disaster areas sends a very disheartening message to all workers in the region. It says that the trade unions have not made the fight for a Just Reconstruction for working people on the Gulf Coast a major part of their national agenda. This limits the power of the working class in this region when their struggles can’t get national support. This has serious negative ramifications for workers throughout the region, and for the development of a powerful movement for a just reconstruction throughout.

Resistance to corporate greed and disaster profiteering

The Ingalls workers’ strike was the first direct challenge to a major corporation on the Gulf Coast related to the Katrina disaster of August 2005. The workers were/are demanding that Grumman share its corporate profits and the billions of dollars it received from the federal government for disaster recovery with the workers to help address the new economic realities they face in the Gulf Coast.

The strikers’ demands for better wages and benefits are necessary to try and make up for the sharp post-Katrina increases in the price of everything from milk to gas to rent, which are bringing their families to a financial breaking point. The workers made major sacrifices to restore operations at the shipyard within two weeks after Katrina, enabling Grumman to meet huge multi-billion-dollar contract obligations. They feel that their efforts should be rewarded with a decent contract that includes not only a decent raise but also vision and dental insurance coverage, which they currently don’t have.

Grumman estimated the Katrina damages to its Gulf Coast operations at around $1 billion. However, the Navy gave Grumman $2.7 billion as an increase on existing contracts to cover recovery costs, and FEMA gave $386 million. Ingalls workers only got two weeks’ pay out of this, and many had to replace their own tools and equipment of their trades, even though they were lost or damaged by the flood and should have been covered by monies received by Northrop Grumman.

The workers voting down Grumman’s first two contract proposals and the nearly month-long strike reflect the deep anger among the Ingalls workers against Grumman’s efforts to force them to bear the main burden of the Katrina disaster. Sixty percent of the approximately 11,000 non-management Ingalls work force are African Americans, and feel especially hard-hit because of the long history of racism. Black workers were a major force in voting down the contract proposals.

The Katrina disaster has helped to create conditions that forced Ingalls workers to see the necessity of unity in struggle against this giant corporation and the government alignment with corporate interests against the needs and interests of working people on the Gulf Coast. The workers “are fed up with what they see as abandonment and neglect of this region,” said Ron Ault, president of the AFL-CIO Metal Trades. “Our members are the world’s best shipbuilders, living in one of the nation’s most devastated areas. Something has got to give.”

However, this unity is still fragile, and many Black workers had concerns that it might not withstand the pressures of big capital and the government in conducting a long strike without widespread support from the national trade union movement. There were a small percentage of the workers who did not honor the strike vote, and continued to work.

Government pressure on workers to end the strike

By midday on March 9, the second day of the strike, the Republican Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott issued a statement calling for a quick resolution of the strike and saying that it was in the interest of “America’s national security to make sure our military has the best tools to protect our nation.” (Mississippi Sun Herald) Federal mediators pressured the unions to settle and end the strike. Some of the workers felt that President George W. Bush would invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to try and force them back to work and to negotiate under government pressure similar to the West Coast Longshore Workers in July 2002.

Despite the current control of the U.S. Congress by the Democratic Party and its claims to stand on the side of the workers, no Democratic representative or party leader spoke out in support of the Ingalls workers’ strike or against Northrop Grumman’s corporate greed and disaster profiteering. This failure by the Democrats to challenge the injustices of this major U.S. defense contractor reflects their similar stance on refusing to cut funding for the U.S. military budget while claiming to carry out an anti-war vote that gave them “control” of the Congress. Even more disheartening was the lack of support from the national trade union federations.

On March 13, close to 3,000 Ingalls workers conducted a six-mile march from the Ingalls shipyard to the city of Pascagoula and back. The march was called by rank-and-file worker activists as an effort to draw national attention to the strike, and to show the connection between their struggle for a good contract and the struggles facing the majority of the working people and communities throughout the Gulf Coast for a Just Reconstruction.

Some of the organizers and leaders of this march are discussing the formation of a Gulf Coast Workers Alliance as a rank-and-file organizing framework to involve other unions, to begin organizing the unorganized and dislocated workers throughout the Gulf Coast, and to push out local struggles to the wider trade union movement.

Where were the AFL-CIO and Change to Win?

There was no call made by the national leadership of the AFL-CIO or Change to Win for national support for this strike. Several active leaders of national and local unions previously involved in major strikes requiring national support stated that their unions were not notified by their national unions or the federations about the Ingalls strike.

This lack of support by the U.S. national trade union movement for the Ingalls strike is not unlike its absence in August 2005 at the time of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and its failure to mobilize the power of the trade unions to demand that the U.S. government carry out an immediate rescue of the thousands of working people who were dying in New Orleans and throughout the region.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s June 2006 announcement of a seven-year $1 billion housing and economic development initiative called the “AFL-CIO Gulf Coast Revitalization Program,” (METALETTER, published by the Metal Trades Department, AFL-CIO, Nov. 3, 2006), while hopefully a positive step toward building affordable housing and creating jobs for those most impacted by Katrina, cannot shield Sweeney from criticism about the AFL-CIO’s failure to build support for the Ingalls strike. The Change to Win federation must also take its share of the criticism, as the new federation claims to be the force committed to building a new labor fight-back.

“The Katrina catastrophe screams out for a serious alternative program for democratic reconstruction, with social justice.” (Solidarity Editors) The Ingalls workers’ strike, as a major example of the struggles to come facing workers throughout the Gulf Coast, begs for the development of a Gulf Coast Workers Alliance as a major rank-and-file democratic workers’ organizing and fight-back component of the developing Reconstruction Movement.

Reconstruction of the region needs state and local government constitutional provisions that ensure basic rights for workers, women and historically oppressed communities in the region. After the defeat of apartheid in South Africa, the trade unions there conducted a massive “Workers Charter” campaign to fight for inclusion of basic worker democratic rights in the new South African Constitution. Workers throughout the Gulf Coast region must develop a similar campaign to organize and mobilize the power of workers to demand the inclusion of a Workers’ Bill of Rights within the state and local government constitutions and charters.

The leadership of African-American workers can help to bring about a powerful unity of the demands for the Right of Return of displaced majority-Black Survivors, and for a Workers’ Bill of Rights for all workers in the region impacted by Katrina and Rita.

Trade union leaders and activists throughout the country must raise criticisms throughout the labor movement about the lack of support for the Ingalls struggle, and hold discussions about the need to build support for the workers and masses of people on the Gulf Coast for a Just Reconstruction. Trade union support is needed to help build a Gulf Coast Workers Alliance and a labor solidarity network that builds national and international support for workers’ struggles on the Gulf Coast.

Those in the trade union movement considering themselves as part of labor’s left and progressive section have a special responsibility to help develop this support and raise the criticisms.

The Ingalls struggle and its lessons can serve as an important catalyst for building a united and more conscious labor movement to strengthen the Reconstruction Movement throughout the region.

Saladin Muhammad is the chair of Black Workers for Justice based in Raleigh, N.C. and a member of the Black Workers League based in Rocky Mount, N.C.