Kucinich tells dockworkers that he will repeal Taft-Hartley Act

Posted on Sat, Jul. 05, 2003
Kucinich visits dockworkers in another California campaign swing
JEREMIAH MARQUEZ
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES - Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich focused his campaign on California Saturday, promoting a peace agenda in the Bay Area and donning boxing gloves while wooing a politically powerful dockworkers union in San Pedro.

Union members who work at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex chanted "knock out Bush" as the Ohio congressman slipped on the gloves during a barbecue at a harbor-area park. The twin ports handle 42 percent of the nation's cargo,

Kucinich is among nine Democrats seeking the party's nod in 2004. The congressman pledged that, as president, he would protect collective bargaining rights and repeal agreements such as NAFTA, the free trade treaty with Mexico that dockworkers view as a threat to union jobs.

Kucinich also told about 500 dockworkers that he would repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, which President Bush invoked to reopen the ports during a labor dispute last fall between shipping companies and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

more. . .

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/6241288.htm


Here's an excerpt about Taft-Hartley from "Class War in America" by Charles M. Kelly. Parts of the book are online at

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com

(Thanks to RichM for mentioning this link in a thread last night.)


The Coalition from Workers' Hell: Republicans and Conservative Democrats

p110
That same coalition had previously passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over President Truman's veto. Taft-Hartley allowed states to pass "right-to-work" laws, which made it almost impossible for unions to gain a foothold in them. The southern and western states that passed these anti-worker laws were then able to attract industry from other states that didn't offer corporations a union-free environment, with its guaranteed low wages and draconian working conditions.

Thus began the exodus of industry from the North to the South, and the degeneration of pay and working conditions in the North. This very same coalition, Republicans and conservative Democrats, has done it to workers again. NAFTA and GATT are today's equivalent of the Taft-Hartley Bill of 1947. Except now, the strategy of pitting workers from different states against each other has been extended to the world "free market." Apparently, today's voters have been conned into believing that it is a good idea to pit workers of the world against American workers.

and cuts through all the bull...

Go Dennis

Peace
DR

Ya Kucinich!:bounce:

I'm not decided on candidates yet but stuff like this helps.

:kick:

I am so thrilled. Whats next Dennis Kucinich to support legislation out of his own pocket for a workers' memorial. Dennis please continue fighting you really love this country keep up the fight. A return to the union days yay I bet my great grand parents would be so proud.

nm

This is what we get when our candidates listen to people instead of polls and focus groups.

I am gonna suggest my workers' memorial idea to him he'll love it the best out of anyone I think Gephardt would too but Dennis who wants to repeal NAFTA, WTO, and that goddamn Taft-Hartley will truly understand that the American worker must be honored. Dennis has been reading my mind I swear abolish Taft-Hartley my good friend have you been snooping around DU and saw me or what I think it could be us that we were both thinking it.

I wish!

I just contributed $100.

which should be about 10 dollars and DU will get 10 bucks too.

good going, John!

where he stands on the Railway Labor Act?

BTW Anna I saw that Union Now avatar you have in sticker form in the air traffic control tower today. I am not a controller being too young I am an office aide.

PATCO and Reagan, right, John? My brother-in-law struck with PATCO and was fired. And today he's pro-Bush*. :shrug:

tell me more. Well the teamsters are pretty conservative for a union, trof the DUer tells me the pilots are conservative for a union, and I didnt talk to the guys about politics. Well I would say the union leans democratic for a number of reasons: one most unions lean dem, they are fighting privatization of their jobs something a republican would do and support, what happened with Reagan, and they are an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. People change also I think that could be the case with your brother in law remember Horowitz was a socialist. I saw Union Now and stuff for their unions. Also would you call that work blue collar or white collar and BTW the tower has a beautiful view and the controllers are great guys I dont work with them really.

"Kucinich also criticized the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policy, including the Patriot Act and the potential use of secret military tribunals. He said the administration is "taking us into the direction that is profoundly antidemocratic."

When I saw him at a local church in May, he spoke to cheers of abandoning plans for the Missile Defense Shield. Nobody else in the candidate field is willing to take these brave, truly progressive positions.

It seems like Kucinich is getting out in front on labor issues...specifcally issues directly related to unions (like this proposed repeal of Taft Hartly).

Id expect he would be getting at least some endorsements out of this.

Gephardt and him are the biggest union people of the bunch. *gets pen and writes down* thats another reason why I am iffy on Dean hes not big on the unions and as a person who admires workers and is kinda one himself I gotta support the union man with the big heart and Kucinich is that.

The labor vote is sort of taken for granted, and Gep and Dennis are, as you say, the only candidates really making a play for it.

nt

the GOP Congress would shoot it down?

To scoff at it like you seem to be doing, is to say that Democrats shouldn't even bother saying anything at all, unless they have the numbers in Congress to make it law. This, of course, would reduce them to never saying anything.

They should have repealed it when they had chances. Its great for him to wanna do this. I have been wanting to this. Dream the impossible it can and will happen.

as we ALL MUST. We can't leave Dennis out there all alone fighting DeLier DeLay!@!

We have to work LIKE HELL, NATIONALLY for President Kucinich, In our STATES for the right(right, not right-wing) Senators, AND IN OUR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS.

"No man is an island."

...thats why I think this election might not be so key from a big policy push perspective...more of a holding action until we get Congress back.

we could have the Congress, too. It doesn't take any more effort to rubberband 2 leaflets to a doorknob than it does to do 1.

The problem is the number of starry-eyed people who test out on Dennis's side but don't care.

can change the make-up of the Congress as well as the occupant of the White House.

I suppose I could start inserting a standard disclaimer "Of course the GOP will fight everything Kucinich works for " in all my posts but I thought we all knew that they oppose anything any Dem wants to do.

:shrug:

Thanks for sharing this. I think Harry S Truman will sleep well in his grave tonight knowing that someone shares the same vision he shared to abolish that thing.

I think the GOP has a lock on Congress (probably moreso the House) for some time.

First of all, kudos to Dennis for bringing this issue to the forefront. Taft-Hartley should have been repealed a long time ago, and its repeal should be made a plank in the 2004 Democratic platform.

How Did the Taft-Hartley Act Come About?
By Steven Wagner
Mr. Wagner, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of History, Department of Social Science, Missouri Southern State College.

On June 23, 1947, the Republican-controlled Congress passed, over President Truman's veto, the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947 (The Taft-Hartley Act, co-sponsored by Republican Senators Robert Taft of Ohio and Fred Hartley of New Jersey). The Taft-Hartley Act retained the features of the earlier Wagner Act but added to it in ways widely interpreted as anti-labor. Labor leaders dubbed it a "slave labor" bill and twenty-eight Democratic members of Congress declared it a "new guarantee of industrial slavery."

The act allowed the president, when he believed that a strike would endanger national health or safety, to appoint a board of inquiry to investigate the dispute. After receiving the report of the investigation, the president could ask the Attorney General to seek a federal court injunction to block or prevent the continuation of the strike. If the court found that the strike was endangering the nation's health or safety it would grant the injunction, requiring the parties in the dispute to attempt to settle their differences within the next sixty days. Other provisions extended the negotiating period by twenty days, in effect creating an eighty-day "cooling off" period during which the law would prohibit a "national emergency strike."

To the Wagner Act's list of prohibited management practices, the Taft-Hartley Act added a list of prohibited labor union practices. These practices included secondary boycotts (when a union induces employees to strike against their employer to get him or her to stop doing business with another employer with whom the real dispute exists); sympathy strikes or boycotts (attempting to compel an employer, other than one's own, to recognize or bargain with an unrecognized union--a practice anti-labor groups often called "blackmail picketing"); and jurisdictional strikes and boycotts (attempting to force an employer to give work to members of one particular union instead of another). Also outlawed were the closed shop and union hiring halls that discriminated against non-union members. The law allowed union shops as long as state law did not forbid them. This led to movements in several states for the passage of so-called "right-to-work" laws. Another provision that would become contentious required all union officers to file a non-communist affidavit and take an oath that they were not communists.

http://hnn.us/articles/1036.html

added my post #30. Guess I didn't look through the thread that time.

56 years of Taft-Hartley is more than enough!

(I am just waking up) Is the writer of this Mr. Wagner related to Senator Robert Wagner who established the Wagner act. How about when President Kucinich repeals Taft-Hartley with congress we put that in again with more provisions.

the ILWU, check out David Bacon's article (originally published in Z magazine, February 2003) at this link:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Labor/Barbed_Wire.html

A sample to pique your interest:

"Before negotiations began in June, the shippers and some of their biggest customers, including the Gap, Target, Mattel, and Home Depot, organized the West Coast Waterfront Coalition. Together, they held secret meetings with a Bush administration task force headed by White House advisor Carlos Bonilla. Once negotiations began, Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge, and representatives of the Department of Labor, phoned ILWU President Jim Spinosa, warning him that the Administration would view any strike or interruption of work on the docks as a threat to national security. They threatened to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, to use the military to replace striking workers, to place the waterfront under the Railway Labor Act (making a strike virtually illegal), and removing the union's ability to negotiate a single labor agreement covering all ports on the coast.

The ILWU avoided being provoked into a strike, but finally, at the peak shipping season, employers locked out their own workers. As a pretext, the PMA accused the union of organizing an alleged work slowdown. According to the Journal of Commerce, however, 30 percent more cargo was crossing the docks than last year-the greatest volume in history. The speedup on the docks was so intense that the accident rate shot up, costing the lives of five longshore workers in 2002. When the union told its members to work at a safe speed, the PMA called it a slowdown.

Once the dockers were locked out, employers then demanded Bush invoke Taft- Hartley. The Administration's legal brief before Judge Alsup voiced a startling new philosophy, elaborated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield. He held that all commercial cargo could be considered important to the military, not just specifically goods intended for military use abroad. Any stoppage on the docks, therefore, was a threat to national security.

Instead of defining a threat to national security in terms of vital life-dependent services, this use of national security defines it as economic. Any strike halting the continued operation of an industry or a large profitable enterprise could be defined as such a threat and made illegal."

A LOCKOUT BY EMPLOYERS!!

BTW, just came from a meeting of Maryknoll workers in Mexico. They say NAFTA is KILLING Mexican farmers and that's why so many of them are so desperate to come to the U. S, even risking their lives. One village they work with lost 8 people to suffocation in a trailer. So who does NAFTA help? American agri-business...and our family farmers lose out too.

"Kucinich is a keeper!!"

A THREADKILLER.Man, gotta go to bed or sumthin'.

disinclined to study up on Taft-Hartley (understandable -- sometimes a person just doesn't want to do much reading), but NOT YOU making this thread sink!

:hi: revcarol:

GO DENNIS!


TWL

If you're sick of corporate whores, stop voting for them!

DK in '04!

And DK will bring it back. Go Dennis.

How can anyone not see the worth of this man.

Jeremy