This is MY reply to Dori Monson, host of his self-titled talk show on Seattle’s KIRO Radio 97.3 FM, who referred to longshore workers as thieves and criminals on a segment which aired Tuesday 01/20/2015. Dear Mr. Monson: My name is Vivian and my husband, George, and I have been married for almost 17 years. We have four children ages 6, 9, 12, and 14. Our family lives in Long Beach, CA and we do just about everything within a ten mile radius of our home; we shop at local stores and frequent nearby restaurants, our kids attend area schools, we worship and serve the childrens ministry of our church, we support our local parks and recreation by allowing our children to play sports and by coaching their teams, and we participate in a wide range of community activities. Every single year for the past 15 years my family has faithfully volunteered to feed thousands with Thanksgiving baskets our jobs provide, and for the past 10 years my children have volunteered to serve underprivileged kids during a Christmas charity event also funded by where we work. We pay our taxes dutifully, vote in every election, help our family, friends, and neighbors when we can, and contribute meaningfully to society. Yet, today, I heard a radio broadcast in which you referred to us as thieves. THIEVES! You also called us criminals even though neither one of us has any criminal history. All because we are longshore workers. I, sir, am no thief. My husband is not a thief, either. Neither one of us is a criminal. We have the great fortune of belonging to one of the most honorable labor unions IN THE WORLD. When my husband comes home at 5am after 10 hours of straight, laborious lashing dozens of containers to bug-and-germ-infested vessels with bruises all over his body and an occasional broken finger, all so consumerism the world over will continue through one more peak season, the last thing I would call him is a thief. His modest wages do not compare to the ridiculous profits enjoyed by the steamship owners - who barely pay the shipmates working those vessels for six-months straight without leave enough for a weekly bag of rice in their native countries. When he came home with blood crusted around a two inch gash on his scalp from hitting a low-lying bar while crawling on his hands and knees untying cars for eight hours in the hold of a six-story auto carrier, or when he had to have metal particles surgically removed from both of his eyes after cleaning up the chutes and tunnels of the largest coal dock on the West Coast, calling my husband a hard-worker would have been more appropriate than calling him a criminal. Let me tell you about some of the hardships I have endured while working on the waterfront and then you tell me if you still think Im a thief or a criminal when Im done. For many nights in a row I often drove a heavy lift in reverse carrying pallets of fruit through narrow passageways in large, freezing cold, rodent-infested warehouses with chemical preservatives dripping on me from the low-hanging tarps above me and surrounded by unstable boxed piles I couldnt even see over. What about the nights I moved humongous unsteady cargo like coils, pipes, plates, and tires across uneven terrain and stacked them perfectly in the dark with nothing but the dim light of my heavy lift to guide me? Was I a thief then, sometimes moving 500 pieces of steel that would only take ONE small piece to maim or kill someone if it slid off my lift and landed on a dockman working nearby? In your radio rant you mentioned that we are paid for eight hours even though we only work four. That is true sometimes, for some jobs, on some occasions. But that is not the case the majority of the time. We rejoice in the reward of getting off early after completing our job just like some teachers enjoy short days each quarter. Some secretaries have short weeks on occasion, some nurses have short shifts every blue moon, and some bus drivers have short routes every now and then. Those are refreshing perks enjoyed in any job. Are you implying that teachers, secretaries, nurses, and bus drivers are criminals because they get off early from time to time? Federal and state labor laws require us to take certain breaks which we sometimes combine to enhance productivity. Stopping operation on a large machine while we take a fifteen minute law-ordained coffee break because the machine cannot sit idle is not always conducive to production. Combining that coffee break with our lunch hour makes more sense; production continues uninterrupted because there is no down time while a worker climbs up and down a machine and waits for it to turn on or off. We don’t work with typewriters and ten-key adding machines that are controlled by small power buttons. We work with very large machines that require extensive coordination to maneuver and experienced manipulation to operate. A transtainer used to load containers directly onto transport chassis can take up to ten minutes to warm up. So yes, combining a coffee break into the meal hour makes lots more sense and would give the impression that we work “less” time, when in actuality, we are working the same amount of time, without the interruption of a coffee break. You talk about our wages being higher than other workers. Indeed they might be higher than some other workers in some other industries. But that is relative to the nature of the work itself. Our wages are comparable to the sacrifices we make with our bodies and our health, which is why our benefits are compensatory to those sacrifices. We work in an environment that is uber dangerous to the Nth degree. Injuries on our jobs are not paper cuts and stress headaches. We lose limbs, and we lose lives. We suffer from chronic pain due to repetitive motion. Our bodies show evidence of years on the job in our posture, our gait, and our immune systems. Most of our retirees leave the industry with partial, if not total, hearing loss and many of our colleagues injured on the job are often permanently disabled. We work around equipment with large moving parts, around the clock (24 hours a day, for 361 days of the year) in every possible type of inclement weather you can imagine. We inhale cancer-causing toxins from vessels, trains, big rig trucks, cranes, and highways every second that we are at work. If you want my honest opinion, all things considered, we should be compensated more for the hazards we endure when compared to the profits we make for the executives who operate the terminals. You briefly touched upon the terminal operators in your rant, referring to them as thieves, too. While I am offended that you would call me a thief, I am MORE offended that you would call me anything EQUAL to them. The average $75k our workers earned last year working our butts off 5-6 days per week, 8-10 hours per day, climbing slippery gangways, hoisting greasy lashing bars that weigh more than 50 pounds each, and being tethered to a cage 100 feet above sea-level while lying flat on our stomachs on a seven-high container looking down into the dark waters of the Pacific while unhooking safety lashing pins with our bare hands is nothing, NOTHING compared to the $900k the president of PMA earned last year sitting behind a mahogany desk trying to figure out how to exploit more foreign workers by cutting more American jobs. Now THAT, is criminal. You were very defensive about the plight of truck drivers. You stated that they are being “wiped out of their livelihoods.” I am agreement with you on that point because I too feel for them and their less than favorable working conditions. I work with outside truckers every night and I’ve gotten to know some of them very well. It is shameful that companies pay them no more than $50 per load when they spend hours waiting on terminals for computers to help them, all the while paying the high costs of operating their own rigs, gas, repairs, and taxes out of their own salaries. The automated systems companies are using to expedite container truck delivery are costly in both time and money. Computers function slowly, provide the wrong information, and frequently crash. Our union has tried to organize truckers to help them alleviate the wrongful working conditions they endure but large companies employ all sorts of tactics to prevent that. Subsequently, many truckers live in poverty because of this flawed system which has nothing to do with the ILWU. Everything about the service provided to truck drivers is regulated by companies who are systematically attempting to replace humans with automated machines and a mockery of robots. My husband and I struggle like every other decent American couple to provide for our family, to hold on to the first and only home we saved for years to buy, to drive two American-made cars, to educate our children through college, and to put something away for our retirement. We are not thieves and we are not criminals. The executives who own two or three vacation homes in exotic places, who have multiple foreign cars in their garages, and who chuckle at the widening gap between the rich and the poor in this country...they are thieves and criminals. They are robbing our country of the financial security that can only come from a thriving middle class. A middle class funded by hard working men and women who earn enough decent wages to pay appropriate taxes and invest in their communities by dining out on Friday night and taking the kids to the movies every now and then. Middle class families who can afford to repair the homes they own and can afford to send their kids to college keep this countrys economic pulse healthy and stable. Those who can take an annual vacation and those who can buy a used car for that newly licensed teenager are not THIEVES, they are blessed with living the American Dream promised to every one of us by birthright in this country but denied by greedy corporate THIEVES who would rather get a tax break by opening a factory in a third world country paying pennies to laborers - some who are children - just to avoid paying minimum wage to their fellow Americans. These corporate thieves are thereby perpetuating poverty and unemployment and inadequate social services and fostering parents who have to work two or three jobs while their kids raise themselves afterschool, adding to crime, delinquency, and the further demise of families. Those are the real criminals. You tell me, who are the real thieves? The hard working men and women who risk their health and lives DAILY to move goods in and out of our ports, or the machines that terminal operators are trying to replace us with? Robots will not dine at local restaurants and buy supplies at your neighborhood stores. Robots will not teach your kids in Sunday school or coach your kids at the park. Robots will not hold your hand while you pick out groceries for your Thanksgiving dinner - groceries donated by the very same longshore workers you call thieves. Robots will not stand up for any worker, anywhere in the world to defend him against unfair practices from his employer. But the hard working men and women of the west coast ports will, and do. You also mention that we display a lack of effort while on the job. Have you ever stepped foot on a west coast terminal and watched us work? Mr. Monson, Id like to invite you to join us at work one day. I can assure you that nothing about your plush seat behind a radio console will have prepared you for a day in the international maritime industry which our union has served for almost 100 years. Ill even offer you the choice of which job youd like to take. Would you like to stand all day on a dock facing away from a giant vessel while seven cranes move containers on and off the ship to and from utility tractor rovers - as many as 60 - which are driving past and all around you while you remove universal stacking cones from cans as they are suspended by thin cables right above your head? Maybe youd prefer to stand on the hatch of a ship in the pouring rain at 3am while the rough waters below rock it back in forth making sure the lashers are safe and the catwalk is not too slippery for the heavy gear all around you. How about if you crawl down four stories deep into a break bulk cargo ship at 1pm in the heat of the day to degrees above 130 F and untie fastening belts and undo hooks and then stand still against the hatch while a wench claw grabs the cargo and hoists it directly above you, knowing it could snap and kill you if something went wrong? You sound like the type of guy who can easily climb 300 steps vertically in a narrow shaft to get to a hammerhead crane and then execute 250 moves perfectly from a glass-enclosed cab that trollies back and forth and gantries side to side every second youre up there. You will be paid minimum wage for doing that, because you are the type to purport that our salary should be commensurate with experience. In just one day, you will be able to see for yourself all of the mismanagement that truly happens down on our ports and the legitimate corruption of American values that you speak of. Buying politicians? You bet. That is exactly why innocent, impoverished maquila workers all over the world are being used to increase the wealth of corporations who enjoy duty-free manufacturing rebates by importing through our very own American ports. I wish I had the money to buy a politician who can say NO MORE to exporting good jobs overseas which only widen the gap between the very rich and the very poor, and YES to developing communities right here, through the same respectable blue-collar workforce that built the American middle class. President Obama said in his recent State of Union address that he believes we could reverse the tide of outsourcing and draw new jobs to our shores…AMEN. He applauded the middle class by stating that “middle class economics works.” Guess who built the middle class? LABOR UNIONS LIKE THE ILWU. It is my opinion that anyone who can sit in a cozy room with a microphone in his face insulting and judging hard working Americans is a thief robbing of us of the dignity and respect we are due. My union brothers and sisters and our fellow working Americans are neither thieves nor criminals. We are everyday working heroes – HEROES - building on the courage and strength of our forefathers and committed to preserving solid middle class jobs and values for future generations. You owe ALL OF US an apology. Respectfully Submitted, -Vivian J. Malauulu Longshore Worker
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 20:24:24 +0000
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