The fight for the tug at Neah Bay, on the northernmost tip of the Olympic Peninsula across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Vancouver Island, has been continuing for many years. Proponents argue it is needed to save distressed vessels before their fuel oil spills into the water and onto beaches. But the cost of the tug’s funding has been a political football, pitting shipping companies—that may be required to fund it—and Republican legislators against environmentalists, the Makah Tribe and labor.

The pro-tug forces prevailed temporarily last year when the federal government, through the Navy, came up with enough money to experimentally operate a Crowley boat during March and April 1999. Under pressure from environmentalist groups, the federal government patched together enough funds from the Navy, the Coast Guard and the EPA, along with some state money, to start the program again Dec. 15, 1999. This time Foss Maritime won the contract and the Barbara Foss was stationed at Neah Bay.

In both instances members of the Inlandboatmen’s Union, the marine division of the ILWU, worked the tugs. The union, company management and the 2,300-member Makah Tribe whose reservation is at Neah Bay, cooperated to develop a special program to give the Makah work opportunities and experience on tugs.

For this one tug Crowley and Foss agreed with the IBU to resurrect the old “ordinary sailor” position that had been removed in a manning cutback some 13 years ago. It would be used as an entry-level training position offered exclusively to members of the Makah Tribe who applied through the Tribal Council and were accepted for the program. The idea was that these ordinaries would eventually gain enough experience and pass the Coast Guard test to qualify as able-bodied seamen. Then with that license and the experience with a Washington-based company, they could work out of the IBU’s dispatch hall and become union members.

“Bruce Reed at Foss really helped get this program through,” said Stuart Downer, IBU Puget Sound patrolman. “The IBU worked to make it happen as part of our outreach to the communities we work in.”

The jobs offered a welcome opportunity for the Makah, because the area’s economy is slow and work is hard to come by.

“We have a lot of seasonal work in the fish industry, but not much else,” Makah spokesman Gordon Smith said. “We had natural resource-based jobs, logging, fishing and some processing, but that’s been in decline. We have a lot of fishermen, but there’s not much awareness of the kinds of careers available on the water other than fishing. So the program is good for that.”

But the tug means more than jobs, needed as they are. Its presence is so important to the Makah that the Tribal Council put out $400,000 of its own money to keep it operating in the spring. Ironically, the money can from a fund set up to pay for damage suffered when a fish processing ship, the Tenyo Maru, was struck by a Chinese freighter 20 miles west of Neah Bay in 1991, leaking oil that fouled beaches from the Makah Reservation southwards.

“Our main concern is for the ecology,” Smith said. “The jobs and dollars spent here on the tug is a side benefit. The protection of the resources is our priority. We must protect our home, and not just for the commercial fishing. Our per capita consumption of seafood is well above the national and state average and we do a lot of subsistence fishing and gathering of clams and mussels. A lot of people don’t realize that the largest oil spill in state history happened just south of Neah Bay in 1972.”

The IBU and the Makah have been working with environmental groups, organizing and lobbying to get the money to keep the rescue tug funded on a year-round basis. The need for the tug has been denied only by the shipping interests that would have to ante up for it and their paid political representatives.

“There are no tugs stationed in the west 75 miles of the strait, the most treacherous area,” said Doug Scott, Communications Director for People for Puget Sound, one of the environmentalist groups most active in the struggle. “In 1991 the legislature passed a law for there to be an emergency towing tug in the western strait by 1992. There still isn’t one.”

Scott and his group, along with Washington Environmental Council, have been working with state and federal officials and shipping industry representatives on the federal North Puget Sound Risk Management Panel, pushing for the rescue tug and other measures to protect the strait. Their incessant lobbying seemed to pay off when Frank Chopp, the Democratic co-speaker of the state legislature, put $4 million into the current state budget to operate the tug for a year. Republican legislators whittled that down to $1.65 million, allowing for the boat to operate only from October 2000 through April 2001. But after years of fighting Scott still sees this as a victory.

“In the six months the Barbara Foss was out at Neah Bay, she was called out six times by the Coast Guard to deal with vessels in distress,” Scott said. “The longer we have a tug out there and the more she is used, the stronger our case is.”

Support has been building among top politicians, including Congress-man Norman Dicks (D-WA), Demo-cratic Governor Gary Locke and Tom Fitzsimmons, director of Washington State Department of Ecology. Even the oil tanker companies are coming on board, abandoning the dry cargo shipping companies in opposition, so Scott remains optimistic that they will soon win a year-round tug at Neah Bay.

“My sense is the momentum is moving in our direction,” he said.

The state is putting the new tug contract out to bid and expects to decide on it by the end of August, said Joe Stohr of the Washington State Department of Ecology. But it remains unclear if the work will go to an IBU employer or if the Makah training program will be reinstated. Still the Makah Tribe and the IBU continue to press for a year-round tug.

“We’re working on this not just because it means jobs, but because we’re a union with an environmental consciousness,” Downer said. “We don’t want to see another catastrophe like what happened in Valdez here in the Puget Sound. We will be using all our resources to get it done. It’s a matter of importance to the union as a whole, not just the Marine Division, and President Brian McWilliams has put the full support of the Interna-tional behind this effort.”

—Steve Stallone

Hogbarn workers return to work, battle continues

Hog factory workers at Bear Hills Pork in Saskatchewan returned to work after a four-and-a-half month lockout May 15. The 13 members of the Grain Services Union, ILWU Canada, were locked out Jan. 3 after they refused to work Christmas holidays without overtime pay, a right guaranteed to non-agricultural workers by the provincial Labour Stan-dards Act.

The members of Local 1450 filed with the Labour Relations Board for an arbitrated first contract under the Trade Union Act May 12. The law provides for 120 days of mediated dispute resolution, or if mediation doesn’t work, for a three-person arbitration board that will impose a settlement. The workers will remain on the job during that time, taking care of the 18,000 pigs in several barns in the area. The union expects to go immediately to arbitration.

“If management prefers to have a collective bargaining agreement im-posed on them by a third party rather than negotiating one, so be it,” GSU bargaining spokesman Larry Hubich said.

Since negotiations began Febru-ary 1998 the company has refused to budge on overtime and work-hours issues. Prior to the lockout workers frequently put in 200 hours a month without overtime pay, 11 days on and three days off, doing everything from giving the pigs shots to aiding in their birthing and taking care of the equipment. As many as 55,000 pigs are born and processed through the various barns in a year, and when those little pigs go to market they bring in $150 each. Labor makes up about five percent of the costs.

“We’ve supported one another throughout this battle, and we’ll keep on doing it now,” Local 1450 President Sherry Bellamy said. “Only from here on, it’s from the inside, not on the street.”

The company, owned by the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, a major economic player in provincial politics, has been able to hide behind the Labour Standards Act’s definition of workers as farmers. Despite the huge size of the factory farms and their blatantly industrial nature, agribusiness operations throughout Canada is treated under current law as if they are small farms. So the factory farm workers are denied basic rights all other Canadian workers enjoy.

“The company claims the rights of small farmers while they are actually running the small farms out of business,” Hubich said.

Responding to NAFTA de-regulation, Canada’s agribiz has gone into factory meat production in a big way. To compete with huge factory farms in the U.S., they claim, they must have government help. Various government agencies have snuggled up to the pig companies, writing into law exceptions to environmental as well as labor standards for agricultural operations. The factory farms avoid environmental law by claiming to be small farms.

Recently the environmental cost of factory farming hit home in Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 4,800. An outbreak of E-coli bacterial poisoning sent nearly 1,000 people to the hospital and killed 11 since May 16. Health officials have been unable to definitively pinpoint the cause, but experts strongly suspect runoff from nearby factory farms contaminated drinking water. A 1995 study showed nearly one third of the area’s wells had unacceptable levels of fecal contamination. Cattle raised in extremely cramped barns are the main source of the infection in humans. Small-farm regulations allow animal wastes to be spread on fields. Factory farms do the same, except in vastly greater concentrations, and the field runoff ends up in local wells.

When Ontario’s Conservative Party government took over from the leftist New Democratic Party in mid-1995, it promptly cut back water inspections and slashed environmental spending from the NDP’s high point of $824 million in 1991 to $210 million in 2000.

Labor and environmentalists are demanding major overhaul of the laws regulating factory farming, and in Saskatchewan Local 1450 leads the way with its lobbying efforts on labor legislation. Environmental groups such as Hog Wash and the Sierra Club are proposing stricter environmental regulation, and the Walkerton incident has motivated a national reform effort.

“There may be a ticking time bomb in Saskatchewan,” Hubich said. “If the government is not prepared to ensure workers’ rights, we are not confident they can ensure the environmental rights either.”

—Tom Price

Solidarity at Hyatt Regency Maui leads to settlement

Ka’anapali-Hyatt Regency Maui members sent a strong and clear message to management when they rallied to support their union’s efforts to win a fair contract. More than 90 percent of the membership signed a petition calling for a fair contract. Then, while management negotiators were meeting with the union on March 21, hundreds of members attended a demonstration to voice their objections to any cuts in their hard-earned wages and benefits.

With strong support from the membership the union negotiating committee was able to convince Hyatt management to drop their proposed takeaways and agree to a fair contract. The hotel withdrew its proposal to have employees pay for a large portion of both single and family medical and dental benefits and its plan to increase the number of rooms housekeepers are expected to clean each day. And the hotel backed away from suspending its contribution into the pension fund.

Instead, the ILWU and Hyatt agreed to a four-year contract with a total wage increase of 12.5 percent for non-tipped workers and 5.5 percent for tipping workers, with the first increases going into effect when the contract was ratified in late April.

The most significant gain for the union was the elimination of the “favored nations” language that would have allowed the Hyatt to reopen negotiations or terminate the contract if another hotel negotiated different wages or benefits with the union. The problem with the language is that the membership at another hotel may have different priorities, and may, for example, choose to put more money into pension benefits instead of wages. Under the “favored nations” language, Hyatt could then say they wanted to pay the same lower wages as the other hotel and not take into account the fact the other hotel is paying a higher pension. By eliminating the “favored nations” language, once the contract is negotiated, then the terms remain unchanged until the end of the contract.

Improvements were made in other areas as well. Bell department workers will get an increase of porterage from $2.50 to $2.75 effective Oct. 1, 2000, and then another increase of the porterage to $3.00 per person on Oct. 1, 2002. Mainte-nance employees who are required to have a license will see an increase in premium to $.25 an hour. Sushi Cooks will receive a $1.00 an hour upgrade over their current cook rates and banquet captains will get an upgrade of $.15 over the current waithelp captain rate. Funeral benefits were extended to include grandparents, the group life insurance benefit was increased from $7,500 to $10,000 and the current medical and dental benefits will be maintained with no increase in the share of premiums paid by employees.

—Voice of the ILWU