seattle indymedia center

Mark Jensen from UFPPC wrote about the connection between Maersk and the military industrial complex at the ports of Olympia and Tacoma:

 http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/6806/

Maersk began operations at the Port of Tacoma in 1985, and completed a major port extension in 2002, finishing the Port of Tacoma's largest terminal before the Iraq war. Maersk Line Ltd. contracts with the Department of Defense Military Sealift Command to operate and manage a number of military vessels, and has approximately double the volume of its business with the U.S. Government since Sept. 11, 2001, undertaking one third of the shipping of all U.S. military equipment to Iraq in preparation of the March 2003 invasion and earning more than $1 billion in sales through 2006, according to a CorpWatch ( http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13196&printsafe=1)

Tacoma...not just bridges and gangsters....

Smash ICE!

Solidarity forever-for the union makes us strong!!

If you refer to this video in the future, please do not call this a wildcat strike. Jobs With Justice and Maersk did not call their picket line a wildcat strike, and they would like it not to be depicted as such, since this could cost workers' their jobs at Maersk. That was my mistake -- the word "wildcat" carries too many connotations that JWJ didn't think applied to this.

I’m trying to understand the relationship between 1) Securitas, which according to your post, is the company union which the pickets outside the Maresk gates this morning were struggling against, and 2) Securitas the private security firm mentioned in the Seattle Indymedia post “Military ship coming to Olympia” (11/04/07; see  http://seattle.indymedia.org/en/2007/11/262550.shtml ).

I can find absolutely no connection between “Maersk” and “Securitas” on the web, so if this is a union at Maersk, it is a somewhat secret one. If they really are the same entity somehow, then I can understand why Maersk would keep it secret. It sounds from this post like the Maersk security workers have some pretty serious economic grievances. The very last thing that any capitalist (especially the huge ones at Maersk) would want would be for their workers’ economic struggles to be illuminated with anti-imperialist conciousness.

Please provide us some facts so we can make sense out of this.

Also, as of 1PM Friday, there was absolutely no news online about the Tacoma Maersk pickets. Did any ILWU cross the line?

--Ira Jones, Seattle

Sorry I can't say more at the moment. We're filming a lot of the stuff that's happening in Tacoma and Olympia right now.

Securitas is the union that Maersk workers are forced to join. There's no adequate info on it anywhere on the web, I found that mysterious too.

Jobs With Justice will have more information. Securitas has a website too, of course.

A picket line was called to push the administration of Maersk (headquarters in Tacoma) to allow workers to join the union of their choice instead of the company union that managers have imposed on them.

An arbitrator called by the longshoremens' union (ILWU) and management decided whether the picket line Jobs With Justice staged was safe to cross. The arbitrator deemed it unsafe and required management to compensate the longshore workers for not crossing the line.

Jobs With Justice organized the picket, Tacoma SDS and other community members who heard word-of-mouth about the picket went to the port to show solidarity.

Maersk is the largest shipping company in the world, JWJ said. Its North American headquarters are located in Tacoma. The workers are not granted basic needs that other union workers are, such as a living wage. Workers are forced to join the company union which acts as an obstacle to them. Maersk has tried to convince workers that the company union is a good union, and that other unions are dangerous. The workers are not convinced. They voted to change the company union, and Maersk is unwilling to do that at this time.

Tacoma P.D. singled out Tacoma SDS members and asked for identification and phone numbers. There were no physical confrontations, but our group felt it was unfair that officers would single out SDS without any reasonable suspicion. We told them we would not consent to any of their questions or searches. Officer Darlington said the port has been the site of conspiracies to conduct terrorism. "People ride jetskis next to tankers and then they speed off in the other direction," he said. We were not convinced that this warranted suspicion towards Tacoma SDS.

***Earlier we published an account of this protest that we wish to clarify. The Jobs with Justice (JwJ) port protest was a community solidarity picket not a wildcat strike. JwJ is a community coalition that includes many community organizations as well as unions. Solidarity picketers did not include Port of Tacoma workers and JwJ did not call for and is not calling for a strike of any workers. Securitas is the contractor that Maersk hired to employ the Maersk Terminal guards who are organizing to form a union. The company union has a different name than Securitas. The arbitrator is an independent "neutral" selected jointly by management and union leaders and is not from the Longshoremens' union (ILWU).

Mark Jensen from UFPPC wrote,

Maersk began operations at the Port of Tacoma in 1985, and completed a major port extension in 2002, finishing the Port of Tacoma's largest terminal before the Iraq war. Maersk Line Ltd. contracts with the Department of Defense Military Sealift Command to operate and manage a number of military vessels, and has approximately double the volume of its business with the U.S. Government since Sept. 11, 2001, undertaking one third of the shipping of all U.S. military equipment to Iraq in preparation of the March 2003 invasion and earning more than $1 billion in sales through 2006, according to a CorpWatch ( http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13196&printsafe=1) account.

Clarification: the workers involved are employed by a security guard company called Securitas. The union they voted out in August (but Securitas is forcing back on them) is called the Security, Police, and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA).

Rich,
Thanks for the clarification.

--Ira

I work for Securitas in Conn. We are waiting to organize with SEIU next year. Security Officers have been organizing all over the country and its about time.