The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has decided to cut formal ties to the AFL-CIO.
In a letter to AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, the ILWU executive director, Robert McEllrath, cited “a growing surge of attacks from various affiliates.”
“A particularly outrageous raid occurred in 2011, when one affiliate slipped into fill longshore jobs at the new EGT grain facility in the port of Longview, Washington and then walked through ILWU picket lines for six months until we were able to secure this critical longshore jurisdiction,” McEllrath wrote to Trumka.
“Your office added insult to injury by issuing a directive to the Oregon State Federation to rescind its support of the ILWU fight at EGT, which threatened to be the first marine terminal on the West Coast to go non-ILWU.”
McEllrath said his union is becoming “increasingly frustrated with” the AFL-CIO’s “moderate, overly compromising policy positions on such important matters as immigration, labor law reform, health care reform, and international labor issues.”
“We feel the Federation has done a great disservice to the labor movement and to all working people by going along to get along,” McEllrath wrote. “The Federation has not stood its ground on issues that are most important to our members. As a labor movement, we need to stand up and be the voice for our members and working people. We cannot continue to compromise on the issues that benefit and protect the working men and women of America.”
McEllrath said that the ILWU has “a long and proud history of militant independence inside and outside the House of Labor.”
“With roots from the old Wobblies (IWW), our union arose from industrial based organizing, against the tradition of craft based unionism, to become a founding member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO),” McEllrath wrote. “This affiliation itself, however, did not last long. During the anti-labor McCarthy period, the ILWU was kicked out of the CIO for being ‘too red’ and too independent and we did not join the merged AFL-CIO until 1988. In short, the ILWU has been independent and unaffiliated for most of its history. Today, the ILWU returns to its tradition.”