Just days before another vote on a port labor contract, dozens of Baltimore dockworkers alleged in a federal lawsuit that national union officials illegally wrested control of their local chapter and thinned its ranks to push through an unfavorable agreement drafted in collusion with port employers.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, is the latest salvo in a power struggle between the former leaders of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 333 and the ILA’s national leadership, which placed Local 333 under trusteeship late last year amid allegations that the local leaders inappropriately stacked membership rolls ahead of local elections.
Members of Local 333 are set to vote Wednesday on a tentative contract reached between ILA Trustee Wilbert Rowell, placed in control of the local in November, and the Steamship Trade Association of Baltimore, which represents local shippers.
The deal is considered crucial to alleviating concerns about labor instability in Baltimore that have lingered since Local 333, Baltimore’s largest dockworkers union, cost shippers millions by striking for three days in late 2013.
The lawsuit, however, asks the court to nullify any agreements reached under the trusteeship so Local 333’s ousted elected leaders can be reinstated to lead the contract negotiations. Filed Friday, it also calls for some 500 members removed from the union’s ranks under the trusteeship — including 86 listed as co-plaintiffs in the case — to be returned to the local’s rolls.
The lawsuit asks the court to order enhanced federal oversight over the ILA and the STA, both listed as defendants, for what it alleges is widespread racial discrimination against black longshoremen and black chapter leaders, including President Riker “Rocky” McKenzie and recording secretary Ezekiel Givens, the other plaintiffs in the case.
Bruce Luchansky, an attorney for McKenzie and other plaintiffs in the case, said they will challenge the validity of the contract negotiated by Rowell even if Local 333’s members vote to approve it Wednesday.
“We believe that the democratically elected representatives of Local 333 should be given the opportunity to negotiate their own contract for their membership,” Luchansky said.
Rowell, reached by phone, declined to comment. Jim McNamara, a national ILA spokesman, also declined to comment, directing questions to ILA attorney Kevin Marrinan. Marrinan did not respond to requests for comment.
Michael Collins, an attorney for the STA, said he hadn’t had a chance to review the lawsuit as of Monday afternoon, but questioned whether it would have any impact on the outcome of the contract vote Wednesday.
“If the Local 333 membership votes in the new local agreement, then they voted in a new local agreement, and that will be the new agreement applicable under the law,” he said.
McKenzie, reached by phone Monday, said he was too busy to talk and hung up.
James White, executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, said for a lawsuit of this kind to be filed just before the upcoming contract vote “seems a little frivolous,” but noted the MPA is not a party to the case.
He also said he believes the trusteeship has been positive for the port and the members of Local 333.
The lawsuit claims the ILA has deprived Local 333 members of their “statutorily mandated union-related and civil rights” by “wrongfully usurping the authority” of local leaders using “baseless charges” about the way new members were brought into the local, and accuses the ILA and the STA of “regular, continuing and institutionalized acts of racial discrimination” that violate a decades-old consent decree ordering racial equality on the docks.
It claims national ILA leadership is overwhelmingly white; that white longshoremen in Baltimore are routinely and arbitrarily selected for “premier” positions on the docks, including 22 of 23 prized “gear man and mechanic positions,” over more senior black longshoremen; and that black longshoremen are disproportionately targeted by mostly white supervisors for disciplinary action and drug and alcohol testing.
The lawsuit says that under the trusteeship, all of Local 333’s executive board members were dismissed and stripped of leadership duties except Scott Cowan — the board’s only white member and a rival of McKenzie’s — who was tapped to “craft contract proposals and negotiate with the STA” in concert with Rowell. Cowan declined to comment.
The lawsuit also claims that Rowell and the ILA have used “intimidation” to stifle dissent among the Local 333 ranks. It claims that every time opposition has been voiced at membership meetings, “Rowell would attempt to intimidate the members, stating that the speaker was ‘hostile,’ or that the person was ‘trying to incite a riot.’ “
The lawsuit comes after a vote last month by Local 333 members to reject a local contract agreement tentatively agreed to by the ILA and the STA.
Port officials said the local’s members were provided misinformation about the contract’s provisions by previous leaders, including McKenzie, but the lawsuit says the local’s members rightly identified the agreement before them as a “devastatingly bad proposal that would have significantly compromised the best interests of Local 333 and its members in connection with a wide range of issues.”
The lawsuit does not describe those issues in detail.
The vote Wednesday was scheduled to give members another chance to approve the contract.
White said the contract may be “the only shot our port has” to move past its ingrained labor struggles. “I’m just hopeful that we can get this behind us.”
Rowell said in a recent letter to Local 333 members that terms of the proposed contract have been tweaked since last month and “include a number of significant gains for Local 333.”
The proposal includes guaranteed wage increases through 2018, ensures all jobs will be filled with ILA labor and ends hiring nonunion workers off the pier.
The deal, which would cover the handling of automobiles and other forms of non-containerized cargo at the port, also would forgive a $3.8 million award that a federal arbitrator ordered Local 333 to pay Baltimore shippers for damages sustained during the 2013 strike. The strike shut down all work at the port’s public terminals, which the arbitrator found violated a no-strike provision in a separate so-called master contract governing containerized cargo.
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