Different Rules of Law

by Alexander Cockburn

To gain a sense of perspective on "the rule of the law" and on the rights of labor at this hour, no parable could be as instructive as the recent history of efforts to form a union at the Avondale Shipyards in Louisiana, on the Mississippi.

In 1993, Avondale workers voted to join the New Orleans Metal Trades Council. In these days of management threats and crude efforts to subvert such votes, the union organizers scored an extraordinary victory in a region particularly noted for its virulent "right to work" status and its anti-union posture.

Five years later, efforts by the owners of Avondale to deny the rule of law has resulted in the largest case in the history of the National Labor Relations Board, founded in 1935. These owners have refused to recognize the election, have refused to bargain and have unrelentingly fought the NLRB's decision, which accepted the union vote as legitimate.

Amidst this recalcitrance on the part of Avondale's owners, a federal administrative law judge found the company guilty of more than a hundred unfair labor practices, imposed $3 million in fines and ordered the reinstatement of 28 workers fired for union activities. This judgment, too, is being appealed by Avondale.

Now, Avondale is no offshore company, flouting the rights of workers in some distant part of the globe. Not only does it lie within the jurisdiction of U.S. law, but its main customer is the U.S. Navy. Avondale builds 60 percent of all U.S. amphibious assault ships. It makes half the nation's Strategic Sealift ships, and since the beginning of the present labor conflict in 1993, it has received $2.73 billion in U.S. government contracts. Avondale has additionally received at least $98 million in subsidies from the state of Louisiana, in such forms as tax abatements, research and development assistance through the University of New Orleans and tax-exempt bonds.

Nor can this company, as it battles unionization, claim that it teeters on the edge of bankruptcy and that the slightest hike in its wage bill will finish it off. Avondale's income is up 400 percent since the union vote, yet it continues to be the lowest-paying shipyard in America. At Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, skilled shipyard workers make $21.74 an hour. In Ingall's shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., skilled workers make $14.07 an hour. At Avondale, which alone among the largest shipbuilders is without a union, the skilled workers make $9.45 an hour.

What this means is that the average Avondale worker with a family of four qualifies for food stamps despite working a 40-hour week. All these figures come courtesy of the AFL-CIO, which has made Avondale the centerpiece of its right-to-organize campaign. News reports citing these figures have not been challenged by Avondale.

Thus far, ill-paid workers at Avondale haven't been able to enjoy the always nebulous protection of U.S. labor law and of regulations on health and safety. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has cited Avondale for having an injury rate at least twice the average in private industry. Since 1990, three times as many workers have been killed on the job at Avondale as at any other major Navy shipyard.

Avondale strips more than one illusion away from the basic capitalist business of extracting surplus from workers. Back in 1985, the owners set up an employees' stock ownership plan or ESOP -- a bit of window dressing adored by many sentimental progressives. At that time, the workers therefore owned, on paper, the company, and their pension money was invested in it. The catch has been that the company's board of trustees, which includes no workers, has sold off so many of the employees' shares that today, the workers hold only 13 percent of the stock. Some workers, after 30 years in the shipyard, are receiving pensions as low as $83 a month.

So, as Rep. Hoekstra snarls about Harold Ickes daring to talk to striking workers and about a call from Mickey Kantor to Diamond Walnut at a time he was U.S. trade representative, we see a government-subsidized company rewarded for punishing its workers. We see the secretary of the Navy doing nothing.

We see Rep. Robert Livingston, a Republican from Louisiana, pushing for additional Pentagon contracts from Avondale, a demand muscled by his rank as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. And we see Al Gore, who has taken to thundering his devotion to workers' rights, acting as if the government has no power to intervene in a situation where workers' rights are being violently abused. Rep. Hoekstra should summon all these parties and congratulate them warmly for their comportment.

The rule of law? As Harry Lee Thompson Jr., a pipe fitter at Avondale, put it: The workers have "lost all faith that the law works. Really, if you get right down to it, they're right. It seems like America's laws just don't apply to us."