Companies try to bust unions at Texas refineries, CA ports

Stand strong, strikers.

Deer Park, TX

In what one local union official is calling a new brand of aggressive strike-breaking tactics, energy companies are trying to lure employees back to work by going around the United Steelworkers union.

BP issued a statement Wednesday that it has begun to train additional replacements for its absent workers while Lyondell-Basell posted an open letter to its striking employees asking them to return to work.

Shell Oil Co. is also asking workers at its Deer Park refinery to cross the picket line. About 50 out of the 800 strikers have done so, said Lee Medley, president of the United Steelworkers Local 13-1.

In the third week of a nationwide oil workers strike, the targeted companies are playing hardball, said Medley, who could not recall another time when companies so openly courted their striking employees. He said the union is contemplating the filing of an unfair labor practice charge against Shell for directly contacting its striking employees.

"The steps they're taking are not novel," said Robert Bruno, professor at the School of Labor & Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

What's unusual, he said, is how quickly the effort began. That tells Bruno that the strike is causing pain for the oil companies. It may be they can't continue to operate with the labor they have or they can't get the production they need, he said. They may believe they have to go on the offensive.

The primary reason this strike is happening is not for increased pay or benefits (although those are, as always, on the table).  The workers want safety improvements at the plants, less forced overtime, and an end to outsourcing of work to contractors.  That's what the oil companies are balking at.  To use only the most recent examples of petrochemical corporation malfeasance, DuPont's LaPorte facility killed four workers three months ago because of shoddy design and inoperable ventilation fans.  The Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, Ca, exploded like a nuclear bomb just yesterday morning, with residents still sheltering in place, their homes covered in ash.

The refiners simply don't want to pay what it costs to safeguard their employees.  Look what they will pay the scabs, though.

Over the past few days, companies that specialize in staffing refineries and chemical plants during labor disputes have been advertising in Houston for experienced control room operators.

Madi Corp., for example, has an online job posting offering $48 an hour, plus $40 per day for expenses, along with free hotel and airfare for experienced oil refinery console operators in Houston. Operators are guaranteed a minimum of 60 hours a week but are expected to work 84 hours a week.

"Shift the power to your side of the negotiating table during contract negotiations with your unions," the company's website beckons to employers. It says it can place the "right strike replacement workers in the right jobs" in 24 to 72 hours.

My mouth is hanging open.  Yours?

Update:

Union negotiators on Thursday rejected the latest contract offer from oil companies and said the largest U.S. refinery strike since 1980 may spread to more plants beyond the 11 where walkouts are underway.

The United Steelworkers union (USW) said in a message to members and news media including Reuters that the latest proposal from lead oil company negotiator Royal Dutch Shell Plc failed to improve safety at refineries and chemical plants in an "enforceable way."

The union also told workers not on strike to be prepared to walk out in the coming days.

It's a similar story in Seattle, Los Angeles, Long Beach, CA and other busy West Coast ports, where the cargo operators are cajoling the longshoremen as well.

Long Beach, CA

Seattle, WA

Cargo companies have gone straight to West Coast dockworkers with what they call their "last, best and final" offer in a contract crisis that has choked off billions of dollars in international trade.

In a move very likely to upset union leaders who were negotiating behind closed doors under a media blackout, the employers distributed letters with the contract offer to rank-and-file longshoremen at ports from Los Angeles to Washington state.

Employers appear to hope that union members will conclude the offer — which the letter said includes wage and pension increases and the maintenance of low-cost health benefits — is strong, and dockworkers will then pressure their negotiators to accept it.

One labor expert questioned whether that would work, especially with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which has a history of fighting employers and winning contracts that are the envy of other blue-collar industries. Under the prior contract, which expired in July, average wages exceed $50 an hour, according to the maritime association.

"Handing out the leaflets is a provocative move with questionable gain," said Harley Shaiken, a professor and labor relations expert at the University of California, Berkeley. "We're in the end game, and you don't want to complicate things, and that is the risk."

The letter's "last, best and final offer" language is significant because it could lay the groundwork for the declaration of an impasse and therefore a full lockout of workers by employers.

Meanwhile, negotiators for the union and the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents employers, met with U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez in San Francisco.

The involvement of the nation's top labor official underscored rising political and economic pressure to reach a contract deal and free cargo bottlenecks at 29 ports that handle about $1 trillion of trade annually. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker also attended sessions Wednesday.

I was born into a labor household.  My mom was a teacher and my dad was an OCAW member -- the union for refinery workers before they were consolidated with the Steelworkers -- for thirty-five years.  I remember short and peaceful strikes, and long and contentious ones.  Dad even took a job as a cashier at at Walgreens once to tide our family over when they went out for an extended time.  Here's a great article from the Beaumont Enterprise about the early days (1940s) and the waning of union influence that began after 1980's 114-day strike, a slow slide to obsolescence that continues to this day because of thuggish actions by company men like those described above.

I am all in with the USW and the ILWU as they demand better from the corporations.

Should college degrees and passports be requisites for the presidency?

I say yes, but some say no.  Chris Cillizza, WaPo:

In the wake of Dave Fahrenthold's great piece about Scott Walker's college years, Democrats have begun to openly question the Wisconsin governor's ability and readiness to be president, given that he doesn't have a college degree.

[...]

This seems to me to be a MAJOR strategic mistake that could badly backfire on Democrats if Walker happened to become the Republican nominee in 2016. Here's why...

He lists three reasons.  No More Mister Nice Blog even thinks it's a trap.

Jim Newell argues at Salon that it's a bad idea for Democrats to attack Scott Walker for not having a college degree. As I said last week, I agree -- it comes off as elitist and condescending, in a country where most people don't have a boatload of degrees from fancy schools and aren't quite sure what they think about people who do. I think many voters who hear attacks like this will feel they're being personally insulted. It's a bad move.

And now we have this, from Olivia Nuzzi at the Daily Beast, and I really hope no Democrat tries to follow up...

[...]

The story smells like opposition research fed to a journalist -- but by whom? It could be the Clinton campaign, but it could just as easily be the campaign of a better-traveled Republican, or it could be an organization on the right that's determined to prevent the insufficiently hawkish Paul from winning the nomination. Nuzzi's story certainly lists a lot of travel by a number of Paul's likely primary competitors:

Go ahead and click over; there's lots to take in at all those links.

Sorry, Cillizza and Mister, but this is Texas, and if we weren't allowed to ridicule stupid Republicans, then we wouldn't have much of anything to blog about.  Hell, Juanita Jean would have to close down the beauty salon if the topic of ignorant conservatives was embargoed.  I've also never been keen on politicians whose appeal is to the lowest common denominator.  Bill Clinton said it nicer: "when people think, we (Democrats) win".

I agree with NMMrNB about Rand Paul's humanitarian missions; I can give him a pass on the passport thing.  But Paul has straight up lied about holding an undergraduate degree, and the reason that matters, as David Knowles at Bloomberg pointed out, can be summed up in two words: Brian Williams.  Paul is also adept at trolling the critics of his malaprops, especially those in the media  -- thanks to this guy -- but it strikes me as a little paranoid that a right-wing conspiracy of  "elitist contempt" is active as a loose caucus among the GOP.  Pretty sure that ground is well covered by the TeaBaggers, and while they may succeed in nominating the candidate, I hold some degree of confidence that an ignorant and arrogant conservative cannot get elected president... again.

Yes, GWB barely traveled outside the US before the Supreme Court selected him to the White House.  And he will likely will never again leave the country, for fear of arrest for his war crimes.  But I don't think it's accurate to say that 'the public didn't care' about that in 2000.  Yes, there was a majority of swing voters in 2004 -- some I knew personally, even -- who said they'd like to have a beer with a recovering alcoholic in denial and probably a dry drunk.  (Although I remain unconvinced, personally, that he ever stopped drinking.)  And all that disregards the curious case of those 250,000 registered Florida Democrats who voted for W, who deserve far more of the blame for Al Gore losing than Ralph Nader, a stubborn myth about which I have also written.  Al Gore should have been able to handily defeat W Bush,  but his own errors, many of them unforced, and Murphy's Law (Theresa LePore's butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, for one) conspired with a few bad apples -- Katherine Harris, Clay Roberts, Choicepoint, etc. --  to spoil 2000 for him.  It is not an accurate statement, then and to this day, that Bush won the presidency in 2000, IMHO.  For the sake of expediency, I'll ignore the shenanigans around Cuyahoga and other Ohio counties in 2004 that helped John Kerry lose in 2004, because like Gore he was his own worst enemy in too many ways well before election day.

But as to the counterpoints to sheepskins and the lack thereof, let's check in first with Susan Newell at US News and World Report (no bastion of liberal media).

We need to take the stigma away from those who choose not to go to college, and we also need to emphasize community college for those who need more education, but not a four-year program. But it’s also not unreasonable to expect that our political elite -- and there’s nothing more elite than being president of the United States -- have a semi-elite level of formal education.

Now let's roll with Rude Pundit's rejoinder, which is closer to where I am (warning: cursing).

See, to conservatives, "college" is itself a signifier of "indoctrinated into leftist beliefs." And, of course, "college" only means the Ivy League. Says (Instapundit's Glenn) Reynolds, after listing the Harvard, Yale, et al credentials of President Obama and the Supreme Court, "All this credentialism means that we should have the best, most efficiently and intelligently run government ever, right? Well, just look around. Anyone who has ever attended a faculty meeting should recognize that more education doesn't produce better decision makers, and our educated mandarinate doesn't seem to have done much for the country." Serious question: Is Reynolds a total cock at his own faculty meetings? And the Rude Pundit has long believed that Ivy League incest has harmed the nation. But the solution is not to say, "Well, obviously, college makes people dumb." It's to say, "Hey, how about some leaders who came from state schools?"

There's much more of this righteous rant, but let's close with this.

As the Rude Pundit has said before, if you believe that colleges are merely bastions of bolshevik liberalism, spend some time with professors in the business majors or, really, the STEM profs. Oh, wait. They believe in science, so maybe not.

As for Scott Walker, let's dismiss his inability to answer a question about evolution as craven political expedience. What does matter is, as governor, he has bought into the right-wing attack on higher education and he wants to fuck the universities of his state with huge budget cuts, just like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana. That shit looks sketchy, especially when you don't have a degree.

If you can be successful at something without a diploma, good on you, future  Bill Gates or Louis CK or Oprah. Obviously, people can be just like you. Except for the almost everyone who can't.

If our American Idiots have devolved enough to fool me twice and elect George W Bush 2.0 -- and I'm not talking about Jeb -- I'll be searching retirement properties in Costa Rica.  Not everyone has that privilege, of course, but everybody we leave behind will mostly be the ones responsible for their own fate.  That would be the people who elect Scott Walker -- or Mike Huckabee or Ben Carson, or Rick Perry or Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham, or even Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.  And of course the Democrats who couldn't be motivated to vote against any of them.

You're all fending for yourselves if Hillary Clinton screws up so badly she loses like Al Gore.  I'm out.

Update: As if on cue, Walker plays the E card, and Dirty Jobs dude joins the chorus.