The International Longshoremen's Association is a labor union representing longshore workers along the East Coast of the United States and Canada, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, and inland waterways.

Long one of the most corrupt unions in the labor movement, it has been subject to a number of investigations since World War II and was expelled from the American Federation of Labor for a number of years in the 1950s. More recently, the federal government has obtained court orders imposing federal supervision of the operations of a number of local unions in the New York City area in order to eliminate organized crime control of those unions.

Origins

While longshoremen in the United States had organized and conducted strikes before there was a United States, the ILA traces its origins to a union of longshoremen on the Great Lakes, the Association of Lumber Handlers founded in 1877, then renamed the National Longshoremen’s Association of the United States in 1892. It joined the AFL in 1895 and renamed itself the International Longshoremen’s Association several years later when it admitted Canadian longshoremen to membership.

Organized and led by Dan Keefe, the organization had as many as 100,000 members on the Great Lakes, the East Coast, the West Coast and the Gulf Coast in 1905. Keefe was exceptionally conservative, even by the standards of his time, and rarely authorized strikes. He retired as President of the ILA in 1908, succeeded by T.V. O'Connor, who was succeeded in turn by Anthony Chlopek in 1921.

The ILA faced competition, particularly from the Industrial Workers of the World, which had a number of members on the West Coast, where many workers moved into longshoring from other centers of IWW strength, such as the lumber and mining industries, and in Philadelphia, where the IWW remained a force after the prosecution and conviction of many of its leaders in 1919 largely destroyed the organization. The ILA survived, even after an open shop campaign on the West Coast and a failed strike in New York City in 1919 left it much weakened.

The secession of the West Coast locals

The center of power within the ILA began to move eastward, to New York, where Joseph Ryan, who became President of the ILA in 1927, ruled. While the surplus of labor in major eastern ports kept the ILA weak, Ryan was able to maintain his preeminent position within the union by making deals with the employers, usually on their terms.

The West Coast locals, led by Harry Bridges, rebelled against Ryan's leadership during the 1934 West Coast longshore strike. A network of union activists largely circumvented Ryan during the strike, first organizing the membership to reject the contract that Ryan had negotiated, then leading a strike over his objections. Bridges and other veterans of the strike replaced Ryan loyalists in union elections up and down the West Coast following the strike.

Ryan never liked or trusted Bridges, even though he was forced to make him an International officer in recognition of his de facto power on the West Coast. Ryan fired Bridges in 1936, however, after Bridges launched an East Coast speaking tour in support of the left-wing sailors' union, the National Maritime Union , with which Ryan had unfriendly relations. Bridges subsequently took all but three of the ILA's West Coast locals out of the ILA to form the International Longshoremen's Union, which joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations shortly thereafter.

Organized crime and membership discontent

Ryan was corrupt as well as conservative: during his decades at the head of the ILA, the ILA's New York locals were largely taken over by organized crime, which used their position within the union to skim dues income from the locals, force longshoremen to pay kickbacks or take out loans at usurious rates in order to obtain work from mob-connected hiring bosses, extort bribes from shippers with the threat of slowdowns or walkouts, create no-show jobs and collect the wages of nonexistent employees and steal cargo on a wholesale basis. Ryan himself took thousands of dollars on an annual basis from the employers to ensure stable labor relations.

Longshoremen represented by the ILA in New York had no job security, obtaining work only through a "shapeup", in which bosses chose a workforce on a daily basis. Longshoremen often worked only a day or less per week as a consequence. Work was especially uncertain for those who unloaded trucks and had to appeal to gangsters who controlled this work for employment.

A movement to oust the gangsters and Ryan leadership gathered steam in the early days of the CIO, which tried to organize an East Coast equivalent of the ILWU. That movement disappeared, however, after Albert Anastasia, the later leader of Murder, Incorporated and brother of Anthony "Tough Tony" Anastasia, ordered the murder of the leader of the insurgency, Pete Panto, in 1937. Gangsters threatened or beat up anyone who posed a threat to their rule, whether they were members of the Communist Party or the anti-communist Association of Catholic Trade Unionists .

Conditions for longshoremen only deteriorated after World War II, as the introduction of new technology made the work harder and more dangerous for them. Longshore work was then the most dangerous occupation in the nation.

The survival of the shape-up system in New York City and Northern New Jersey, after it had disappeared elsewhere, led to a wildcat strike in 1945, which succeeded in limiting, but not eliminating, the shape-up system, despite the beating of the rank and file leaders of the strike by mobsters. The Xavier Institute of Industrial Relations, led by priests from Fordham University, continued to try to attract longshore workers, although it had to operate underground. The Communist Party, for its part, organized through a lawsuit brought to collect backpay owed longshoremen under the Fair Labor Standards Act for overtime work, establishing "back pay committees" as informal opposition forces within the union.

Overtime became an issue in the negotiations with the New York Shipping Association in 1948. When it appeared that the ILA might strike over the issue, President Truman obtained a temporary "national emergency" injunction provisions of the recently passed Taft-Hartley Act. Once that injunction expired the membership struck to reject the contract that the ILA leadership had recommended. Ryan, scrambling to meet a challenge to his leadership by Eugene Sampson, head of Local 791 in Manhattan, declared the International's formal support for the strike while doing little or nothing to organize picket lines and attacking the Rank and File Committee, a coalition of Back Pay Committees that tried to fill the void.

The strike spread to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia and threatened to spread to the Gulf Coast when some shippers attempted to divert shipments there. After the federal government intervened, threatening to take unspecified action against both the union and the employers if the strike continued, the union negotiated an improved contract that most of the locals approved. While some Brooklyn locals continued striking for a while, those efforts ended as well as strikers elsewhere returned to work.

The Back Pay Committees continued to agitate for several years after the strike, until a federal court decision upholding the employers destroyed them. The Xavier Institute continued offering evening classes demanding state and Federal intervention to clean up the industry. After another wildcat strike in 1951 and a series of public hearings, rank and file longshoremen finally did away with the shape-up system.

Those improvements did not, on the other hand, drive organized crime off the docks. The AFL expelled the ILA in 1953, creating the International Brotherhood of Longshoremen as a rival organization. The IBL succeeded in winning over a number of locals in the Great Lakes region, but did not pose any real challenge to the Mafia's control of locals in the heart of the East Coast. The expulsion did, on the other hand, drive Ryan, who had been declared President for Life in 1942, into retirement in 1953.

The AFL eventually readmitted the ILA, folding the IBL back into it, in 1959. Some contend that it did so in order to prevent the ILA from joining with the ILWU and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to form a rival federation.

Mechanization

The introduction of containerization in the late 1950s posed a threat to the union, since it eliminated much of the work of loading and unloading that longshoremen had historically performed. After several unsuccessful attempts to stop containerization altogether, the union agreed with the NYSA on a agreement on containerization that required that a certain percentage of work of stripping and unstripping of containers be done by ILA members.

Some employers outside the NYSA who faced the loss of business as a result of the agreement challenged it as an unlawful hot cargo agreement. The National Labor Relations Board originally upheld the challenge, only to be reversed by the United States Supreme Court in two cases in the 1980s that found that the clause was lawful in all respects, Following the Supreme Court's decision, however, the Federal Trade Commission found that the agreement was unlawful on a different theory, as an impermissible restraint on trade.

Governmental oversight

In 1953 the states of New York and New Jersey entered into an interstate compact, with Congressional approval, that established a Waterfront Commission responsible for regulating the ILA by preventing individuals with a criminal record from holding positions within it. The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, passed in 1959, imposed similar restrictions on all private sector unions.

That Commission was not, however, successful in eliminating the strong influence of organized crime in a number of ILA locals in the New York and New Jersey area. On the contrary, the Genovese and Gambino crime family cemented their control over ILA locals in the area by dividing jurisdiction over the union, giving the Genovese Family rights in Manhattan and New Jersey, while leaving ILA locals in Brooklyn and Staten Island to the Gambino Family.

The federal government therefore brought suit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act to obtain the power to appoint monitor or trustees to oversee the operations of six ILA local unions, Locals 18041, 824, 1809, 1909, 1588 and 1814, alleged to be controlled by organized crime. The ILA entered into a consent decree that eventually led to the appointment of government trustees in three locals.

Even these efforts proved to be largely unsuccessful, as organized crime figures continued to control some locals from behind the scenes. Under pressure from the United States Department of Justice, current ILA President John Bowers announced the appointment of Michael Armstrong in 2004 as the union's independent ethical practices counsel, responsible for investigating and taking action to correct any reported instances of corruption or other criminal conduct within the ILA.

Political activities

Unlike the ILWU, which has conducted largely symbolic strikes in which it refused to handle goods going to fascist states in the 1930s or from apartheid-era South Africa in the 1980s, the ILA conducted similar boycotts aimed at trade with the Soviet Union during periods of crisis, such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Supreme Court ruled in two companion cases in the 1980s that the union's boycott could not be enjoined under the Norris-LaGuardia Act, but that it was an unlawful secondary boycott that could be outlawed on that basis under the Taft-Hartley Act.

Civil Rights and the Charleston Five

The ILA had chartered separate black and white locals in the Gulf Coast area during the first half of the twentieth century. The union merged those locals, in a few cases over the objections of some African-American union officers who feared losing influence as a minority in the merged organizations, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 2000 Charlie Condon, the Attorney General for the State of South Carolina, intervened in criminal proceedings in which eight ILA members had been charged with misdemeanors arising out of a 2000 labor dispute involving a non-union shipping company's activities in Charleston, South Carolina to seek felony convictions against five of them. After a sustained international solidarity campaign came to these members' defense, Condon recused himself from the case; the defendants eventually pled guilty to various misdemeanors.

And see

• Paul Kelly (early twentieth century gangster active in 1919 strike)
• On the Waterfront (film set in New York and shot in Hoboken, New Jersey in the early 1950s)

External links

• History of the 1948 Strike by by Colin J. Davis

• History of the Great Lakes ILA

• Article reviewing history of efforts to outlaw union corruption

• Commentary on the Charleston Five case

Further reading

• Kimeldorf, Howard, Reds or Rackets, The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront, ISBN 0520078861