Finding Workplace Power

T he recent AFL-CIO debates have generated much smoke and thunder. What’s lacking is a short- to medium-term strategy that gets at how workers and unions can tap the strength they find on the job. Unions and workers have always had the power to stop the wheels of industry. But with traditional “all-out” strikes on the decline in the United States, the labor movement has had to find new ways to exercise this power. 

One of these places can be found in what the business press calls “the logistics revolution”—the expanding system of docks, railways, trucking barns, intermodal yards, warehouses, distribution centers, dispatch offices, and other work- places that keep massive amounts of goods flowing into retail outlets. 

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer and employer, pushed its way into market dominance in large part due to its mastering of this revolution, according to a paper by Tom Reifer, a researcher specializing in logistics. Making use of technologies that track goods all the way from the factory to the point of sale (including the world’s largest privately-owned satellite communications network), Wal-Mart has refined its “just-in-time” distribution much as manufacturers have refined lean or “just-in-time” production. Suppliers and competing retailers have been forced to adopt, in part or in whole, similar systems. But while these supply chains are becoming hyper-efficient, they are also increasingly exposed to potential disruption. 

Chokepoints=Power 

T here is power and leverage to be had in this sector,” observed Edna Bonachich, professor of sociology at UC Riverside, in comments about the rail and trucking industries ( Labor Notes , April 2004). “The corporations have created extended supply chains and depend on timely delivery. Inventory has been cut to the bone, so that any blockage in the system can cause them major problems.” 

More and more goods are coming into this country—mostly from Pacific Rim countries like China. Textile imports from China alone, for instance, increased more than 63 percent in 2004, according to a U.S. Commerce Department report. This trade is flowing into more concentrated points. 

By 2002, 80 percent of all Asian cargo (over 50 percent of total imports) was coming into the United States through container ships unloading in West Coast ports. The great bulk of this West Coast traffic is further concentrated in one giant port, Los Angeles/Long Beach. Traveling through congested ports and rail lines, this system has become ove-stretched and fragile, placing more potential power in the hands of workers. 

Size Not The Issue 

F or instance, a two-hour walk-out by 100 train dispatchers in Fort Worth, Texas on March 2, snarled traffic up and down the 32,000 miles of track operated by BNSF Railways, one of the nation’s largest rail carriers. 

BNSF had tried to unilaterally implement changes in paid leave and comp time in its contract with the dispatchers’ union, the American Train Dispatchers Association. Instead of rolling over, workers at the Network Operations Center walked and BNSF trains stopped all over the country. 

According to company reports, close to 50 percent of rail traffic was stopped in the Pacific Northwest—thousands of miles from the Texas-based dispatch center. Similarly, commuter trains operated by the railroad in Chicago, Seattle, and Tacoma, Washington were shut down, stranding passengers throughout all three cities.