ILA hiring practices under fire

News 20 Jul 2016 by WCN Editorial

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is stepping up his campaign to reform ILA hiring practices.

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This week Newark Mayor Ras Baraka led a motorcade protest around the Port of Newark to highlight the lack of racial and gender diversity in the waterfront labour force at Port Newark. Baraka, who is African American, has been pushing for the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) to address its membership demographics for some time now.

This is not a new issue, and both the ILA and the Waterfront Commission that overseas its hiring practices have in fact moved to address diversity previously. The New York Shipping Association has highlighted that, after establishing a “new and innovative hiring plan” in 2014, “over 60% of all new hires have identified as minorities, with African Americans and Hispanics making up 34% and 20.5% of new hires.” It claims that “As of April 2016, African American and Hispanic workers now make up 24.6% and 14.2% of the workforce, respectively, with an increase of four and one percentage points compared to the Port’s workforce in 2012. at April 2016.”

For Baraka, however, the pressing issue is that his constituency, the people of Newark, remain severely underrepresented in the biggest ILA locals at the Port of Newark. Just 299 of the 3,299 registered longshore workers at the port had Newark addresses in 2015. This is also an ethnicity issue as the Newark population is around 75% black and hispanic .

Earlier this year Baraka appealed to US Labour Secretary Thomas Perez to do something about the lack of diversity in ILA Locals 1 and 1804-1 in particular, which had less than 50 African American members out of around 1300 in 2015. Nothing, however, has happened and the Mayor and his supporters are stepping up their campaign.

It is important to note that this is running at the same time as the Black Lives Matter protests are putting segregation, economic disadvantage and discrimination by public authorities in the spotlight. As if to highlight these issues the New York New Jersey Port Authority Police force actively tried to prevent this week’s motorcade protest, which had a permit and was led by the mayor of the city, accessing port roads.

Tensions are rising: addressing the crowd the Mayor said only ILA Local 1233 has been “hiring us in a democratic way – all the rest of the locals are racist and need to be done away with immediately”. ILA Local 1233 is known as the ‘black local’, and in 2015 contained 523 of the 787 registered black workers in the New Jersey ILA.

The ILA did not officially respond, but some of its members took to social media, with one posting that City of Newark politicians (many of whom are African American) were looking for a free ride into waterfront employment for their supporters when “my family has been here for four generations.”

Baraka highlighted this post as the very issue at heart of the system it is fighting against – a systematic lack of opportunity that has kept African Americans in particular in poverty. “The dichotomy is that four generations of other peoples' families that live a stones throw from the port have grown up in debilitating poverty,” he said.

The Mayor faces a tough task if he wants to reform the ILA, which is practically a family organisation. When current President Harold Daggett was elected in 2015 he was just the ninth President in the ILA’s 124 year history. Daggett is a third generation ILA member, himself coming through New Jersey local 1840-1, whose father was in the ILA for no less than 57 years.