U.S. UNIONS IN PUERTO RICO
east, NACLA & Project, The Puerto Rican
Introduction At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States entered a phase of imperial expansion beyond its territorial borders. Among the first casualties of this expansion was...
...labor has a long and militant history, much of it expressed through the organization and practice of labor unions...
...camp...
...had he been born just a few miles away in Key West, instead of San Juan, might well have become the President of the United States ." 19 The history of the Seafarers International Union (SIU) in Puerto Rico goes back to the 1940's, but only in the 1950's did they actively increase their organizing drives...
...The Challenge to Union Leeches The struggle against trade union bureaucrats, autocrats and those who have grown complacent or corrupt at the head of the workers' movement is a constant feature of any militant union movement...
...But we Puerto Ricans must be very strong and work very hard...
...But as cement production fell off drastically and production costs skyrocketed, his losses rose above the $2 million level during the first quarter of 1975...
...They were imprisoned on trumped up charges and held on exorbitant bails...
...In Puerto Rico, they may have wanted to press for higher wages to balance off inflation, but they were unprepared and uncomfortable with the acceleration of worker solidarity...
...9. Sidney Lens, The Crisis of American Labor (New York: A.S...
...And the ILGWU position on minimum wage legislation, for example, was a recurrent source of friction with the ruling Popular Democratic Party...
...government, and urgently needed to strengthen the union...
...Since 1947, more than 2,000 manufacturing plants have sprouted on the island...
...has replaced with new workers the strikers who have not returned to their jobs...
...executive and the AFL reacted immediately to Iglesias' arrest...
...That ally was the leadership of the American Federation of Labor, with its long history of collaboration with business and government, and its all-out struggle against progressive tendencies within the labor movement both at home and abroad...
...and 4) business taxes including license fees and exise taxes for ten years...
...As important as these structural constraints on labor were the explicitly political constraints imposed by the law...
...In other words, the very capitalists whose incessant drive is to increase profits at the expense of the working class would be allowed to determine whether higher wages would induce them to close up shop on the island...
...Army as a result of government manipulation...
...Organizationally, business unions are characterized by hierarchical and undemocratic structures...
...7 (May-June 1974), 12...
...After the Teamsters left the AFL-CIO, the SIU often was used to wrest workers away from the "renegade" truckers union...
...2 While this falls short of the Teamsters' high (85 elections), it is almost three times greater than the number of elections into which the Boilermakers, another active union and AFL-affiliate, entered...
...capitalist class has gotten good mileage from its Puerto Rican Bootstraps: 25 years of soaring profits-in fact, the highest return on investment under the U.S...
...The Teamsters' leader in Puerto Rico was a man named Frank Chavez, a Mexican-American from Los Angeles who had been groomed by Hoffa for a big future in the union...
...Motorized vehicles had come of age by this time, and an elaborate system of highways was constructed to accompany their growth...
...Finally, on August 1, the UIET voted to end the 102-day strike-the longest in Telephone Company history...
...And in May 1964, a more complicated confrontation with the government took place over yet another hotel...
...Last year, for example, Federico Cintron, the current Executive Secretary, was arrested on trumped up bank robbery charges and held on $500,000 bail...
...The colonial government called in the police to occupy the schools and arrested union leaders as the teachers defied a court order to return to work...
...Yet the government was well aware that its development plans could only succeed if labor stayed cheap, past the initial stage of attracting foreign capital to the island...
...16 Dave Beck being that Hoffa surpassed even Beck's past record, leading the Senate Rackets Committee to write: "[Hoffa] runs a hoodlum empire, the members of which are steeped in iniquity and dedicated to the proposition that no thug need starve if there is a Teamster payroll handy...
...The 500 workers at the Puerto Rican Cement Company in Ponce have spent more than a year in their "strike school," a year filled with notable advances in terms of the growing solidarity between unions and the pro-independence movement, and more than a few disappointments and hardships...
...23 This is especially true in the notoriously badly handled Central Area and Southern States pension fund...
...This was not a case of "yancophilia" on the part of the Puerto Rican working class...
...While this phenomena has been characterized as "yancophilia" or reformism, its origins are actually much more complex...
...flag...
...In that year the CGT split, primarily over the issue of independence, into two labor federations, one under the leadership of Ram6n Barreto Perez, a PPD Senator, and the other, the CGT Aut:ntica, under the leadership of independentista, Francisco Col6n Gordiany...
...P.S.P., "Inventario de uniones principales de Puerto Rico," 1975...
...The SIU's defense of its members' rights was amply demonstrated in 1971...
...land in most cars, and in some induitrie many time* mor,e...
...6. Santiago Iglesias, Libros Emancipadores (San Juan: Cantero Fernan- dez & Co., 1929...
...can eam higher profit...
...Not only did Puerto Rico's trade union leaders face the difficulties arising from the composition of the working class They also faced legal and extra legal attacks by the local ruling class...
...More specifically, the economic relations that proletarianized the peasant and artesan sectors were accompanied by a bourgeois democratic legality that permitted workers to organize and unionize in the metropolis...
...The Teamsters might be somewhat "unreliable," but in comparison to the developing new trade union movement, they also might be more responsible than previously imagined...
...Nevertheless, Chavez confidently proclaimed, "The rival truck union chartered by the AFL-CIO was state-sponsored, state-owned, state-dominated, state-controlled...
...By 1975, Puerto Rico had amassed a whopping public debt of $5.6 billion, which required nearly $200 million in debt service annually...
...Such charges have been brought against the Central Unica de Trabajadores del Estado (CUTE, Central Union of State Workers) and the Frente Unido de Trabajadores (FUT, United Workers Front...
...On May 30, 1960, the afternoon editorial staff of the newspaper set up picket lines demanding the reinstatement of several discharged workers...
...Essentially, this meant that he simply had to share power with the area conference heads who had often been by-passed by Hoffa, but it clearly did not mean greater democratization within the union...
...The union was organized along industrial lines, including not only drivers but mechanics and other salaried workers from the transport industry as well...
...Michael Myerson, "The ILGWU: Fighting for Lower Wages," New England Free Press (Boston, Mass...
...5 The second was exemplified by the CGT's fraternal ties with labor federations throughout the Americas, including the CIO and the leftist-oriented CTAL (Confederacibn de Trabajadores de America Latina...
...For example the Telephone Workers (UIET), a local independent, underwent a three year struggle to expell the "leeches" in their union who, according to the UIET's current president, "grab onto the union for their own benefit, those who live off the union and sell out the workers...
...As the switch from labor to capital-intensive industries was accelerating, another root of the capitalist crisis was sinking deeper into Puerto Rican soil...
...invasion of the island in 1898...
...The AFLCIO had lost its largest and richest union, but the IBT drove on to bigger and better things...
...What is the Teamster Union," op...
...While the SLP saw the U.S...
...and most fundamentally, it accepted the need to promote capitalist development as beneficial to workers and capitalists alike...
...This new development strategy had to be actively promoted, propagandized both at home and abroad...
...Even the CGT worked closely with the PPD, particularly in the area of New Deal reforms...
...LXI, No...
...This was the case even though Puefto Rico is one of the largest oil refining nations in the world...
...He was Hoffa's man in Puerto Rico, operating in much the same way as his mentor, and, out of loyalty to Hoffa, had even threatened to pull the Puerto Rican Local 901 out of the International when there was talk of re-merger with the AFL-CIO...
...These a not isolated eam...
...Iglesias was even granted an audience with President McKinley to brief the President on the needs and expectations of the Puerto Rican worker within the new colonial relationship...
...A decentralized union was no longer adequate when faced with an increasingly inter-state industry...
...9 * "I Run the Union Just Like a Business...
...Puerto Rico IAbre, op...
...In this contest between the IBT and the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters have often been labelled as mavericks, as "unreliable" partners for business and as a model of "irresponsible" unionism...
...Such contradictory images can only be deciphered within a more general historical context...
...The Teamsters' Organizing Claims...
...That way they get to understand the employer's problem as well as the employee's problem...
...penetration into the Third World and the exceptional form at that...
...To the extent that Puerto Rico has been more fully integrated into the capitalist world, providing a new and fertile field for industrial investment, Bootstrap has worked...
...Once they start working for a company with an ILGWU contract, they automatically join the union and are bound by the existing agreements...
...MOU, "Qui es el Movimiento Obrero Unido...
...The first was demonstrated by the words of Juan Saez Corales, General Secretary of the CGT, when he said: "We Puerto Ricans cannot speak of economic emancipation without working to obtain our political liberty at the same time...
...According to Pablo Rivera, the MOU's former Secretary for Education and Propaganda, ". . . the labor movement of this country has a lot to say about the political situation...
...4a As more and more workers in Puerto Rico realize that it is only through their hard work that wealth is created, and not by some mythical goose, they will decisively throw Teamster philosophy out the window and continue the long struggle of overthrowing capitalism, putting their eggs in an altogether different basket...
...4 (Third Quarter, 1975...
...International Teamster, December 1968...
...The largest was in the form of a loan from the Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund to the Isla Verde Hotel Corporation, which owns the Holiday Inn of San Juan...
...But it would be simplistic to attribute the FLT's failure to the AFL alone...
...In 1947, when a third labor federation, the General Workers Union (UGT) was organized by Saez and other militant unionists, Mufioz Marin accelerated his repressive measures...
...The implementation of Operation Bootstrap had not gone unnoticed by the mainland unions...
...Roosevelt intervened directly and the AFL initiated a campaign in defense of the FLT...
...6 While one strike does not make a new workers movement the GE strike of 1969-70 was a symbolic turning point...
...A general slump in the garment industry had provoked a flight of homework to rural areas, where organizing was exceedingly difficult...
...The Taft-Hartley Law, passed in 1946 during the period of9 reaction that marked the beginning of the Cold War, outlawed secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes and the closed shop...
...And the NLRB's record in Puerto Rico would make Taft, Hartley and the rest of the capitalist class very happy...
...Previously he had journeyed to the United States to enlist the help of the U.S...
...The SIU began to grow under the aggressive leadership of Keith Terpe, head of their Puerto Rican affiliate, organizing the docks, fish and canning plants, restaurant and hotel workers and even truck drivers...
...corporate interests, the AFL was attempting to enlist worker support in laying the foundation for the economic penetration of Puerto Rico by the large U.S...
...In addition, the U.S...
...Lo In spite of Gompers' intervention in Puerto Rican party politics, the alliance between the FLT and the Unionist Party was short-lived...
...13 At the same time, they further shifted the burden to workers, laying off employees in the public sector, freezing wages, raising prices and general exise taxes, and arguing for wholesale wage cuts and a reduction in workers' benefits...
...43 The decisions of the Chief of Personnel would supercede any agreement reached through collective bargaining...
...cit., p. 77...
...Not only AFL-CIO unions, but others as well, competed to organize the Puerto Rican working class...
...On the international front, the Communist Parties had opted for a popular front strategy and in much the same way that the U.S...
...Socialist Labor Party, but while the SLP had dis-5 cussed and tried to publicize the plight of the Puerto Rican worker, no concrete assistance had been forthcoming...
...The first skirmish involved a trucking company, Valencia Baxt Express, where both the Teamsters and the SIU were competing for worker representation...
...Thus, according to one source, "to keep busy and to justify operational expenses, many internationals started organizing outside their jurisdictions...
...Harking back to the Bootstrap days of yore, Tobin argues that for Puerto Rico to attract U.S...
...4s The UNT began to tangle with the NLRB in mid-1973 over the issue of a strike at Construcciones Werl, Inc., a construction sight where the UNT was organizing...
...But George Meany, supported by the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Committee, was close behind with admonishing words for any labor leader who took the Fifth Amendment...
...Truckers are not satisfied with the union leadership, but they're fearful of it...
...Is the solution to plunge the industry into bankruptcy...
...2 When Fitzsimmons came to replace Hoffa officially and decisively in 1971, he was essentially a chip off the same block...
...and Puerto Rican working classes joining hands against U.S...
...After only a year in office, Pagan won an important contract for 600 workers at the Puerto Rican Telephone Company, making the Teamsters the largest union on the island at that time...
...36 The striking cement workers were always clear on the importance of the conflict at Ponce Cement...
...executive branch...
...While we cannot enter into a full discussion of the economic crisis here, we can point out some of its elements which have become objective factors in the radicalization of the labor movement in the 1970's...
...4s But even after the election, there was still no contract and the union held out on strike...
...n Puertoi "Re...
...The winning of this contract was not due to extensive organizing efforts, but to a settlement reached directly with the employers through simultaneous negotiations with the parent offices in New York and their subsidiaries in Puerto Rico...
...For it is through this understanding that the particularities of each country can be analyzed and strategies for liberation formulated...
...Herbert Weissberg, principal owner of the hotel, claimed that no Teamster money had been used in construction and that he was in the process of buying Mr...
...Between 1928 and 1939, income from the export of agricultural products declined by 32.2 per cent...
...Remaining unions would be highly bureaucratic, union democracy would be destroyed and white and blue collar employees divided...
...The Teamsters have never encouraged general strikes or sympathy strikes...
...At the same time, Puerto Rican union leaders often looked to the AFL only in times of crisis when they needed material support...
...This is evident when we look at the results of multi-union elections held on the island in the last decade...
...The 1868 bourgeois revolution in Spain created the basis for the emergence of the first craft associations within the colony...
...By examining the role of the IBT in the United States and Puerto Rico, it hopefully will become apparent that the Teamsters' school teaches primarily by negative example...
...According to Luis Lausell, current president of UTIER's 3,000 member San Juan local, "These leaders had a new focus, new methods of work...
...The existence of a trade union movement in Puerto Rico, while weak and fragmented by the late 1940's, was a potential threat to the construction of a lasting "labor peace...
...Indeed, with "friends" like the SIU and the NLRB, Puerto Rican workers don't need enemies...
...In the same year, all unions remaining in the CGT were affiliated with the United Packinghouse Workers, a CIO union...
...This structure had enabled the union's leadership to negotiate contracts favorable to business and highly detrimental to the workers...
...Mufioz Marin personally took upon himself the task, of convincing the U.S...
...In the first place, leaders of the Socialist Party in Puerto Rico had long held internationalist principles and understood the particular needs of a colonial work force for an international perspective...
...In June, many unions voted to increase their concrete support of the strikers...
...If a bribe was not paid to an IBT official, and a little more muscle was not convincing, then a strike could easily eliminate one employer from an already crowded field...
...Thus, while the PPD formally supported independence, its practice by no means generated major contradictions with the U.S...
...After all, the Teamster philosophy maintains that: "It is of benefit to nobody to perform a hysterectomy on the goose that lays the golden egg...
...The response of organized labor on the mainland was to launch an all-out campaign to combat the runaway shop syndrome, by intensifying their organizing drives in Puerto Rico and by demanding higher wages for Puerto Rican workers...
...By the mid-1950's, they controlled more than 75 percent of the organized labor movement in Puerto Rico...
...There are International unions which maintain a strong position within the trade union movement-there are few, but they exist.' 2 1 It is therefore more important to ask questions which apply to both the Internationals and the independent unions: do they represent the class interests of the workers, are their structures democratic, what has their practice been...
...4. Banco Popular, Progress in Puerto Rico, Vol...
...And, while the trade unionists in the MOU support a variety of political positions from pro-statehood to proindependence, the latter position predominates...
...34 Eventually, the Teamsters were able to claim worker representation at seven of the island's largest hotels...
...Well, if U.S...
...T Within months of its formation, the Puerto Rican Socialist Labor Party was incorporated as a "state branch" of the U.S...
...And finally, to add icing to the capitalists' cake, the Report calls for a variety of tax breaks for U.S...
...The economic context surrounding the demise of the CGT as a militant labor federation was provided, as we have seen, by the industrialization program tagged Operation Bootstrap...
...But that struggle was only a build-up for the strike at El Imparcial, an important newspaper on the island...
...17, 50...
...Workers Struggles, Community Support: The Ponce Cement Strike The fourth element of the new workers movement in Puerto Rico is the linking of workers' struggles with larger political movements, in particular the independence struggle...
...Before the major invasion of the Internationals to Puerto Rico in the mid-1950's, inter-union conflicts on the island often were no more than a carry-over of disputes which had originated on the mainland...
...In 1957, when Hoff, came in, the Teamster membership stood at 1,393,164...
...During the first two weeks of July 1973, Puerto Rican sanitation, electrical and water workers and firemen walked off their jobs...
...49,000 workers were employed in the needle trades-9,000 in garment factories and 40,000 at home.23Thus, Puerto Rico was seen as a dangerous threat to the jobs of U.S...
...What was of primary importance to the AFL was that the Socialist Party limit itself to electoral politics and the FLT to economist reformism...
...A "paper local" is a union with no members which has been granted a charter on the basis of the "union leader's" friendship with the Teamster leadership...
...The information on the Teamsters in Puerto Rico is not extensive enough to reach a firm decision, but their role on the island does appear to be historically similar to the one they've played for decades in the United States...
...The winning over of organized labor in Puerto Rico to the "American way" was seen as a means of isolating any "national" opposition to U.S...
...Thus for the Puerto Rican worker, acceptance of this new legality was absolutely necessary as an instrument of class struggle not only against the Puerto Rican landholding class but also against the U.S...
...Workers have little if anything to say about what goes in these settlements...
...The 1940's, however, presented a different set of choices than the 1930's, both within Puerto Rico and internationally...
...This was the reaction of a colonial work force, that was in the process of becoming a social class, to worker institutions that corresponded to a developed capitalist society...
...And in 1974 they walked away with 23 of the 30 contests...
...1 1. Charles F. Phillips...
...6 The number of unemployed workers increased by 42 per cent in the third quarter of 1975...
...It also recommends the reduction of federal minimum wage standards for all workers, especially those under 20 years old, and a "thorough review" of the workers' hard-earned fringe benefits...
...Thus the CGT was founded with a committment to union and political struggle, not to partisan politics and the resolution of labor conflicts "through the bureaucratic machinery of the Department of Labor...
...8. Miami Herald, September 29, 1975...
...There is considerable evidence that, although the Teamsters did not always employ traditional or legal means in order to increase their membership, they were never worthy of emulation...
...Those public agencies not subject to the Unionization Law would still be subject to the Personnel Law...
...A niche was being carved out for them and their reputation as a militant, hard-hitting union proved to be no disadvantage...
...The Federal Party thus ran two FLT members on its slate and promised to push through pro-worker reforms...
...labor movement occurred within a few years of the U.S...
...According to Sanchez Villela,former governor of Puerto Rico, the colonial government offered the AFL a free hand in organizing on the island if the AFL would use its political power in Washington to support this new solution to the status question...
...Puerto Rican workers "adapt quickly to factory routine," the ads report, and "have become well-known for their high productivity, low absenteeism and low turnover rate...
...2 6. Justice, July 15, 1955...
...Yet Puerto Rico's colonial status and structure were important elements which distinguished the configuration of Puerto Rican populism...
...The Helfeld Bill proposes a complete change in the organizational structure of public employee unions...
...And, in 1964, Hoffa negotiated the first national contract for overthe-road truckers...
...The SIU took on its mission with a vengeance, entering into countless head-on battles with the Teamsters...
...International Teamster, monthly union magazine of the IBT, July 6, 1960...
...The NLRB agreed to new elections...
...It maintains a strike fund which is at the disposal of any member union...
...39 By 1974, public workers accounted for nearly onethird of the island's work force...
...s The agricultural workers' dispersion throughout the countryside and the seasonal nature of their employment made organizing agricultural unions extremely difficult...
...It nevertheless remains critical to separate out the appearances (reputation, rhetoric and tactical maneuverings) from the reality of Teamster unionism, in order to assess its particular role in Puerto Rico...
...Most unions in the MOU coalition, however, are fairly small...
...I. The Public Sector: The Legal Assassination of Unionism Since the 1950's, the Puerto Rican government has taken over many critical sectors of the economy including electrical energy, transportation, communications, ports, shipping and waterworks...
...When the expulsion did come, it gave the union a kick in the pants and propelled them full force into Puerto Rico, among other places...
...Away with Runaways While the AFL had been present in Puerto Rico since 1901, it was not until the industrialization drive of the 1940's and '50's that the American Internationals began a veritable invasion of the island...
...There is no question however but that the AFL played a role in isolating radical sectors within the Puerto Rican labor movement by providing the ideology of busines unionism and class collaboration as an alternative to socialism and anarchism...
...investors, consistently argued for the island's total exemption from all minimum wage legislation...
...7. Banco Popular, Progress in Puerto Rico...
...Barnes, 1961) p. 13...
...Daily World...
...6. Ibid., p. 68 7. Ibid., p. 67...
...Studs Terkel, op...
...As a 50-year old worker put it, "We are out here to save our union...
...bourgeoisie...
...labor taking such a sudden interest in their Latin brothers and sisters...
...Wih the threat manfac- t1ers fact these dayr-correnct flacioatiiec, inflaron, -onemic uncertainty...
...Much of the following information was taken from a NACLA interview conducted in Ponce in May 1975 and from Puerto Rico Libre!, June and August 1975, January and February 1976...
...With Hoffa at the wheel, the IBT became even more centralized than it was under Beck, by-passing the area conference heads and locating all power in either Hoffa's own hands or in those of his loyal lieutenants...
...The second stage, beginning at the end of the 1940's, concentrated on the development of light, privately owned industry...
...However, Hoffa himself came to the island to help lead the battle and called for a new election, charging the SIU with intimidation of the workers...
...11 (October 1974), 1-2, 20-22...
...For example, prior to the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, many of the AFL's conflicts with the CIO were reflected in Puerto Rico...
...Gompers arrived on the island to find the Federal Party changing its name to the Unionist Party and calling for the unity of the great "Puerto Rican family...
...From the downwardly mobile former elites to the uprooted arrivals to the urban areas, to the working class and the unemployed, populist reformism was widely embraced...
...Claridad, December 16, 1974...
...For its part, the company agreed to boost the workers pay by 12 cents an hour...
...Ibid...
...American Federation of Labor...
...By the early 1930's, the IBT was still a narrow craft union of approximately 75,000 members,4 who were primarily milk, bread and ice truckers...
...We Deal in One Commodity-Labor" (Dave Beck) 10 Despite the cordial relationship between labor and capital inherent in Teamster ideology, there remained considerable anti-union sentiment among employers...
...Ibid...
...And in the process, it has convinced many workers that the interests of the working class are inexorably linked to an independent, socialist Puerto Rico...
...real and persoal property municipal taxes...
...3 3 Despite the attack, the picket line held...
...And, finally, the development of solid links between labor struggles and the independence movement.17 I. Independents and Internationals: The Growth of Radical Unions As we have seen, the U.S.-based international unions controlled the majority of the organized labor force on the island throughout most of the 1950's and 1960's...
...The Puerto Rican Senate led an investigation, criticizitig" the Teamsters for intimidation of the Hotel Workers and general malpractices...
...Between 1950 and 1955, for example, employment in the corset and brassiere industry of Puerto Rico rose by 560 per cent...
...And, when the rank-and-file members were recruited into the union, they entered into an undemocratic, top-down structure...
...Meany's rhetoric aside, however, what actually differentiated the Teamsters from many other AFL-CIO unions was not the fact of corruption, but rather the extent of it...
...The last article in this Report, then, analyzes the specific content of Teamster tactics and ideology, as reflected by its mainland history and its penetration into Puerto Rico...
...industries from the mainland-and precisely those which employed the greatest number of laborers...
...Claridad...
...colonial rule...
...government and U.S...
...Striking While the Iron's Hot To an increasing extent, the history of the organized labor movement in Puerto Rico in the 1970's has been written in a series of prolonged, bitter, militant strikes...
...corporations...
...laws and government agencies that govern Puerto Rico but are beyond the power of Puerto Rico's people to alter, or through collaboration with U.S.-based firms and unions, that the ILGWU has managed to resist the challenge of the independent labor movement in Puerto Rico.15 III.Marriage on the Rocks, Militancy on the Rise...
...9 ** Bankruptcy filings reached a record high in 1974...
...Ibid., Vol III No...
...You have to remove that union . . That's what happened with the OCAW...
...we shall all have new hope...
...The purchasing power of this minimum wage, then, had actually declined by 29 percent.16 American labor was also suffering the consequences, as mainland industries accelerated their exodus to the paradise of cheap labor in the Caribbean...
...2 ' To give the local leadership some semblance of representation, Dubinsky appointed a Puerto Rican in 1964 to the post of vice-president of the union, representing Puerto Rico...
...From the start of the strike to the present, the SIU, the NLRB and Ferr6 have worked in harmony to crush the OCWU...
...The armed work-camp atmosphere was justified by the government on the ostensible grounds of protecting the workers from acts of sabotage...
...As we have seen, Bootstrap was founded on the dual premise of low wages for workers and tax incentives for business...
...LESSONS OF THE GE STRIKE In 1969, General Electric operated 19 non-union plants in Puerto Rico...
...It was for these reasons that the AFL, in conjunction with the executive branch of the U.S...
...Trucking is therefore at the heart of the economy, and while the Teamsters organize in such diverse areas as tourism and construction as well, it is from truckers that the IBT gains its strength...
...Much of the sabotage, however, was allegedly government initiated...
...In Puerto Rico there was no identifiable bourgeoisie and the petit-bourgeois leadership of the PPD ultimately responded not to the historical interests of a class that currently existed in Puerto Rico, but to an ideology with diverse class roots...
...corporations operating in Puerto Rico...
...For this reason, the contradiction between the Puerto Rican elite and the U.S...
...cit., p. 33...
...In representational elections at the VCA plant in Caguas, for example, an examination of the ballots cast in the SIU's favor revealed the names of a number of dead workers, not to mention some who had lost their jobs months before the election...
...Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Directory of National Unions and Employee Associations, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), 1972...
...Government employees were forbidden to strike, and injunctions and restraining orders for unions charged with "unfair labor practices" were reinstituted...
...He was peronally involved in the SIU-IBT conflict in 1958 as Executive Secretary of the SIU and was given the task of leading the attack on the Teamsters...
...sugar companies and strongly supported the CGT over the AFL-supported FLT...
...By 1954, hourly wages in Puerto Rico were $1.31 lower than U.S...
...As independent drivers, they had waged a long and militant struggle against the large U.S...
...The Helfeld Bill would institute horizontal organizing...
...Tobin, an arch-opponent of industrial unionism, was still in power, giving local leaders free reign to develop their fiefdoms only in so far as his personal power remained unchallenged...
...The Puerto Rican labor movement did not realize, however, that this new legality was threatening to the local landowners precisely because it represented their approaching extinction at the hands of the U.S...
...But the others followed, not so far behind...
...But if in spite of these legal barriers an independent union were able to organize workers in a company and win official representation, it would have to confront other obstacles that are beyond the power of any independent union in Puerto Rico to alter...
...unions organizing in Puerto Rico during this period belonged to the AFL, which played an important role economically and politically as well, with regard to the question of Puerto Rico's colonial status...
...Things Are Seldom as They Seem, Milk Masquerades as Cream All this sounds impressive, and the real gains for workers have been significant...
...MAS, however, was more a reflection of the union leaders' desire for unity than an objective expression of the state of the trade union movement, and as a consequence it never got off the ground...
...It is only by recourse to U.S...
...3 Sound good...
...Nuevo Dia, December 11, 1974...
...Thus, the reaction of a large sector of this class was a nostalgia for Spanish colonial rule which guaranteed their material base as a class...
...At the time of the "Ponce de Leon" confrontation, Frank Chavez, just as Jimmy Hoffa, was under indictment, charged with stealing $150,000 from the International treasury...
...Much of the growing hostility between the AFL and the IBT was attributed to corruption within the Teamster union, to which George Meany reacted with righteous indignation...
...It is also apparent that their leadership was repudiated by the phone workers themselves who, as recently as January 1976, reelected the independent union leadership...
...32 On June 9, the IBT claimed that 400 SIU goons, with the help of local police, charged Teamster picket lines, leaving one Teamster dead, many badly beaten and still more arrested...
...27 The leadership of both locals 600 and 601 in Puerto Rico has been occupied by North Americans at all times...
...The -charges were corruption, fraud, illegal business, illegal union practices and connections with organized crime...
...workers had to help maintain the profitability of mainland industries in order to preserve their own jobs...
...The Popular Party administration which masterminded the growth strategy of the 1940's and 1950's was equally adept at planning the containment of the working class...
...And, once the workers answer these questions, they are faced with adopting a course of action in regard to those unions which do not represent their interests...
...Thus, better to sit at a bargaining table in New York City with a David Dubinsky, for example, than haggle out the issues with an unpredictable, unknown and autonomous union structure in Puerto Rico...
...The government (both in Puerto Rico and the United States) frequently used this provision of the Taft-Hartley Law to smash radical union leadership...
...Within this confusion, the FLT found itself opposed by the Republican Party, whose constituency was the professional sector, and courted by the Federal Party, the political representative of the landowners...
...In the midst of harsh anti-labor repression following a series of island-wide strikes in 1900, Santiago Iglesias, one of the FLT's most important leaders, left Puerto Rico for New York...
...3o Puerto Rico had become a major arena for the Teamster's fight with the AFL-CIO...
...cit., p. 150, citing R. Neuberger...
...A prime feature of these contracts is the clause forbidding slow-downs, work stoppages, wildcat strikes, or any other form of protest initiated by the workers in Puerto Rico in response to local conditions...
...Two further elections at the plant confirmed the original vote in favor of the IAM...
...Furthermore, the law grants job security only "to those employees who satisfy the criteria of productivity, efficiency, order and discipline...
...This move, however, must be viewed in light of the conditions faced by organized labor in Puerto Rico: firstly that this occurred during a period of great social tension which found union leaders seriously threatened by the continued operation of an old legality which corresponded to outmoded relations of production...
...separate this country's labor movement from this country's political situation...
...No case is so illu-22 strative of this point as that of the National Workers Union's (UNT) dispute with the NLRB...
...The FLT's failure to provide lasting leadership for the rural work force led to the decline of the Federation...
...firms...
...These unions are challenging the premises of business unionism in Puerto Rico by restoring internal union democracy to their organizations, building labor unity, combatting collaboration with the capitalists and active.ly carving out a role in the political struggles of their nation...
...The difficulty of organizing the Puerto Rican working class was for the most part due to the specific make-up of that class...
...For example, as of 1972, only 9 percent of the members of the Central States Area Conference would ever receive a pension while nearly $5 million a week was accumulating in the fund itself...
...The drafters of the Helfeld Bill-called together to advise the Governor on organized labor in the public sector-were fairly explicit about what they saw as the "dangers" of public employees unions...
...In 1970, for example, 3,672 public employees were involved in 11 strikes...
...The government and the capitalists responded with a full range of counterattacks (which we examine below), including NLRB injunctions, local police, National Guard troops, the FBI and the use of collaborationist unions...
...The decision to incorporate was made for a number of reasons...
...This unbalanced ethnic representation is just as pronounced on the mainland, where 85 per cent of the union's members are women, mostly black and Puerto Rican, but the leadership is overwhelmingly white and male...
...They apparently had tapped a large amount of worker dissatisfaction with the Teamsters, for in 1971 the UIET won the election, not to mention what seems to be a better contract: 874 total raise during a three year period...
...The two most powerful lobbying groups were the colonial government and organized labor in the United States...
...Finally, a third reason points to the political leadership of the CGT...
...Coming in contact with all sectors of the population, they became one of the most consistent vehicles of communication in areas ranging from political commentary to local gossip...
...Thus, throughout the early period of industrialization in Puerto Rico, the gap which already existed between mainland and insular wages was allowed to continuously widen...
...In 1905, drives by FLT militants in the countryside successfully led thousands of Puerto Rican workers out on strike...
...sugar companies...
...On the one hand, this sector and its political representatives were initially attracted by the "modernization" ideology of the United States...
...Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1959...
...A. Personnel Law: The End of Collective Bargaining The "Personnel Law" was signed by Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon in October 1975 in spite of a one day protest strike by more than 80 percent of all public employees and a massive march to the Capitol building...
...This time Iglesias met with members of the American Federation of Labor who advised him to seek AFL endorsement for immediate reforms on the island...
...The MOU is the latest in a long series of attempts to unify the Puerto Rican labor movement which go back to the beginning of the century...
...Investment in this period was primarily being channelled into small and medium-scale manufacturing, requiring a relatively low level of investment in heavy machinery and infrastructure...
...Subscriptions: $10 per year for individuals ($18 for two years), $16 per year for non-profit institutions ($30 for two years...
...Within Latin America, the case of Puerto Rico is unique...
...It was nearly impossible to establish national norms or a wage-rate system which could accomodate local variations...
...Much of this article, therefore, will focus on the IBT's development within the United States, on its past and present practice, not as a definitive history but as a guide to evaluating the union's particular role in Puerto Rico...
...22 But perhaps the biggest union manipulation of all has been in reference to the celebrated pension funds which eventually led Hoffa to the Lewisburg Penitentiary and led a rank-and-file worker to state: "Fringe benefits don't really come from the company to the worker...
...Thus, the rise in petroleum import costs in 1973 may have acted like an ill wind by blowing away Bootstrap's cover, but it was not the cause of the Puerto Rican economic crisis, as many economists have claimed...
...Ibid., May 30, 1964...
...The OCWU had tried to reach an agreement with the company, owned by the powerful Ferr6 family since November 1974, but without success...
...In 1969 the IBT loaned the hotel $4 million-only a small portion of which was repaid by 1972 (statistics provided by the staff of Overdrive...
...The traditional political parties, claiming adherents within the artesan sector, immediately initiated attempts to coopt the Federation...
...Puerto Rico Libre!, Vol...
...And, as important as these points, the GE strike proved how critical broad political support was to the labor movement...
...X, No...
...Rather, a policy of cooperation between labor and management had become the union's hallmark, epitomized by the phrase, "Don't ask too much of business or it will go away and leave us with nothing...
...These concerted maneuvers by the ILGWU and business make it almost impossible for an independent union to organize...
...it established a tone of worker militancy on the picket lines...
...During the campaign, Chavez, believing that intimidation is a two-way street, challenged: "The SIU has two roads to follow...
...they come from the worker to the union...
...Has Bootstrap really "worked...
...Agosto, "El movimiento obrero en la etapa actual," 11...
...Almost as quickly, the Teamster union attempted unsuccessfully to end the wildcats and send the workers back to work...
...stacsess stony The happy experience of other manufacturers in Puerto Rice can be repeated by you...
...5 (no date), 3-5...
...Insurgents in the union have charged the current union president, Felix Rodriguez, with inept leadership and partisan politicking...
...Founded on socialist principles at the turn of the century, the ILGWU had long since shed any semblance of militancy by the time it entered Puerto Rico...
...For a time Ferr6 gave in and negotiated, but on May 22, 1975 he broke off negotiations and announced that "the Puerto Rican Cement Co...
...The major difference was that he did not have quite as strong a stranglehold on the entire national apparatus as Hoffa did, so he was forced to "decentralize...
...2. Gervasio Garcia, La Primera Decada de la Federaci6n Ubre de Trabajadores de Puerto Rico (San Juan: CEREP, 1974...
...In the manufacturing industries, the AFL-CIO organized 857 workers in 1974 compared with 2,245 workers the previous year...
...In the beginning...
...p. 53, and George Sullivan, "Rank and File Upsurge in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters," Liberation, Vol...
...Interview with Pedro Grant...
...Socialist Party claimed the right to organize on the island along with Puerto Rican workers, they saw Puerto Rican trade union leaders as the true representatives of the working class in the colony, with the understanding that they should enjoy the same rights as North American citizens...
...But the FTPR, headed by Hip6lito Marcano, seemed to be more concerned with tying up a solid relationship between the Popular Democratic Party and labor than in untangling jurisdictional disputes among the Internationals...
...While the Puerto Rican working class correctly identified bourgeois democratic institutions as an important vehicle of class struggle, the conflicts that this new vehicle provoked served to confuse the focus of that struggle...
...On June 2, the hotel closed down and discharged the hotel employees with two days severance pay...
...On May 28, five striking workers were arrested on charges of sabotage, based on information obtained from an employee who was severely beaten at police headquarters...
...the most extreme case of this sort, the so-called general strike...
...Three years later, 20,085 employees took part in 53 strikes in the public sector...
...Freedom of association and the right to strike were restored...
...Recent moves on the part of the government in Puerto Rico and the United States visibly demonstrate that they are gearing up for battle...
...Thus, the major outlays of capital went to pay low wages to a large work force...
...At present, the MOU is a coalition of more than 40 unions with over 100 locals, and represents approximately 40,000 workers...
...A joint pact was signed in Miami between the Puerto Rican leaders of the IBT and the SIU, giving the Teamsters the right to organize all transport and cargo workers on the docks and elsewhere, while the SIU would concentrate on production and maintenance workers...
...control over the island, however, Gompers participated in its founding convention, thus killing two birds with one stone...
...Hereafter cited as NLRB Election Returns...
...When it was all over, the Teamsters had turned the tables on the SIU, winning a 103-84 victory...
...39 By 1971, Teamster membership stood at 10,128 including workers in diverse and critical sectors of the economy...
...Productivity matches U.S...
...Statistical Analysis Branch, National Labor Relations Board Divison of Administration, The United States National Labor Relations Board Election Returns (Washington, D.C.: General Printing Office), 1974...
...Leaving aside the political bias of the Board, the mere complexity of the administrative rules exacted by the NLRB put independent Puerto Rican unions at a disadvantage in relation to the U.S.-based Internationals...
...to the US...
...Clearly, the Puerto Rican labor leader was familiar with the nature of AFL unionism...
...This period represents the highest level of activity by U.S...
...We did just exactly what business would do...
...Some of these tactics have been employed to win real victories for Teamster members...
...44 Thus, in one stroke of his pen, Governor Colon returned public employees to the nineteenth century, dismissing their rights to collective bargaining and job security, rights which they had won after decades of struggle...
...In 1898, the Regional Workers Federation was founded...
...Under these conditions it was little less than impossible to fight successfully to improve the living and working conditions of the workers and the few efforts working in that direction had provided little results...
...21 Thus, not only the SIU and the Teamsters, but almost all the Internationals were running into each other in Puerto Rico in the 1960's...
...An example of the dangers that are present is the idea of the sympathy strike, and...
...I don't think you can afioed to everlook Puerto Rico when cosidering any plans fit expansion...
...19 Secondly, the workers are rejecting the U.S.-based unions in favor of Puerto Rican unions...
...An examination of the particular development of the trucking industry, paralleling the growth of the IBT, can provide some insight into the roots of corruption and their growth in Puerto Rico...
...Yet, also in the agreement were stipulations that GE would not rehire workers fired for strike activity, pay for the workers' medical plan, or even recognize the IAM in future negotiations...
...But given the craft character from which the FLT arose, given the difficulty in permanently organizing the island's agricultural workers and given the absence of a strong industrial proletariat, these elements were unable to shed their utopian visions to form a strong united working class movement.II.Tying the Knot I The world capitalist crisis of the 1930's had a devastating effect on the Puerto Rican economy, the Puerto Rican worker and the Puerto Rican labor movement...
...A primary target was the largely unorganized labor force in Puerto Rico...
...Important to this process was the prohibition in Spain of all worker organizations affiliated to the First International and the nurturing of alternative worker associations that could be controlled by the government...
...Ibid., 1974...
...To cite only one industrial example, the minimum wage in silk underwear had risen from 15 to 21 cents an hour between 1940 and 1955...
...In 1932, the Socialist Party entered into a coalition with a disaffected branch of the Republican Party against an alliance of the traditional parties...
...But what can be said is that their credibility has been severely shaken...
...In March of 1940, the constituting assembly of the Confederacibn General de Trabaiadores (CGT) was held, attended by 112 delegates from 42 unions...
...In 1906 and 1908 the FLT went to the elections as a political party but without measurable success...
...Finally, while the U.S...
...Only three unions in the coalition have more than 4,000 members and 70% have less than 1,000 workers...
...But, as Pedro Grant, the MOU's Coordinator, affirms, underlying the militancy of the new workers' movement...
...5 (February 1976), 5. 35...
...6 As a movement which tried to mitigate class distinctions by purporting to lead the "people", which saw the enemy not in political or economic but in moral terms, and which disseminated a utopian vision of development with no visible development strategy, the Popular Democratic Party bore a close resemblance to many movements that were gaining a following in Latin America in the post-war period...
...47 Tobin linked public and private employees by arguing that salary scales for the private sector were raised by higher wages in the public sector...
...46 CONCLUSION Not having regained the telephone workers, Teamster membership in Puerto Rico has remained at approximately 8,500,47 although other estimates are considerably lower...
...the labor movement's only real road is that of sacrifice and struggle, standing up to the persecution of the government, police and the bosses...
...The printers saw the paper as a vehicle for unifying and politicizing Puerto Rican artesans...
...The MOU draws its strength from petrochemical workers, public employees and the construction trades...
...To understand the destruction of the CGT by these political forces, and to understand the present period in Puerto Rico, we must first briefly examine the development of populism on the island as embodied in the rise of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD...
...Opposition has long existed, as a member of one such rank-and-file group explained: "The grievances are very, very deep with the Teamster Union...
...But the new laws which have been passed or are presently under the consideration of the Puerto Rican legislature do reflect a new level of struggle which requires a broader response by the capitalists...
...bourgeoisie...
...1975...
...One major field of battle was the U.S...
...We will begin by examining the union's growth from a narrow craft union to one of the most powerful industrial unions...
...4 6 Such a return to the craft form of organizing would seriously limit a union's potential strength and effectiveness...
...Tugwell was to work closely with the PPD leadership becoming one of the major architects of the PPD's development strategy...
...The subsequent 1955 merger of the AFL and the CIO threatened to take the steam out of the Teamsters' expanding membership drive (fewer members were tantamount to much less money and power), and was the basis of many of the antagonisms that developed between George Meany and the Teamster leadership...
...31 Bitter strikes continued to spread throughout the island...
...8 (April 15, 1975), 5-6...
...One compromise is that the workers may receive pay increases, but at a high cost: giving up any rank-and-file control-in fact, any semblance of internal democracy-while the companies receive in return "labor peace...
...They were followed almost immediately by wildcat and solidarity strikes by truck drivers of other commodities...
...The struggle to establish effective, militant leaders in the unions is being waged in both the local independent unions and the Internationals...
...courts and U.S...
...In fact, the SIU and the Teamsters have been the two most consistently active unions in Puerto Rico in the last decade...
...Strate out...
...To qualify a worker must prove 20 years of service which often presents several problems...
...20 While the growth of local independent unions on the island is indicative of an anti-colonial trend among organized workers, in and of itself it does not speak to the political changes which are taking place inside the unions...
...But within four days, in the heat of the struggle, the UTIER turned to pro-independence and socialist organizations for support, for the first time in that union's history...
...SLP had entered a stage of decline and was in no position to bargain with the dominant political institutions within the metropolis...
...George Lipsitz, "Beyond the Fringe Benefits: Rank and File Teamsters in St...
...cit., p. 27...
...In the meantime, though, the hard task of struggling for greater unity and against class collaboration, complacency and corruption in all unions, both Internationals and local independents, continues to be the order of the day.23 TEAMSTERS IN HIGH GEAR The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) figures prominently in the labor movement in Puerto Rico, just as it has for decades in the United States...
...The PPD, which in 1940 was presenting itself as pro-independence and anti-U.S...
...unions in Puerto Rico...
...s3 And in genuine strikes, Chavez was charged with padding the strike lists and asking for strike benefits for as long as six months after the conflict ended...
...And yet it is clear that the only "hope" that Operation Bootstrap has offered is the capitalists' hope for higher profits, and that the only people who are paying the price for that in their hard work are the Puerto Rican working class...
...the critical construction industry spun into a nose dive with a drastic decline in construction permits...
...domestic agricultural producers...
...3 (March 1970), p. 122...
...In fact, in 1974, an internal NLRB report cited the UNT as the second most active union on the island (after the Teamsters) in terms of organizing drives...
...Workers throughout the island began to organize a number of meetings to discuss their response...
...says Goveroar Hesiande -Colnn "The people o rhe Common...
...3. Jose Ferrer y Ferrer, Los Ideales del Sigio XX (San Juan: Tipografia La Correspondencia, 1932...
...The Teamsters, he said, would retaliate and call a strike at all hotels, airports and docks in Puerto Rico and in four U.S...
...The systematic destruction of the CGT was a necessary preliminary step toward breaking the back of labor militancy on the island...
...Samuel Gompers, Discurso Sobre Puerto Rico (Federacion Libre de Trabajadores: 1904...
...Likewise, a struggle is shaping up in the AFL-CIO affiliated Teachers Federation over upcoming union elections...
...The weakness of the U.S...
...FLT leaders began to raise the demand of U.S...
...NY.4 Origins of the Organization of the Puerto Rican Working Class The first worker organizations emerged in Puerto Rico toward the end of the nineteenth century...
...labor unions on the island...
...Essentially, it appears that the Teamsters have tried to ride the fence, evolving a role of being all things to all people...
...Teamsters were also in a unique position to "interfere" with deliveries to companies that did not "contribute" to the local officials' "well-being...
...a ** Puerto Rico's real gross product fell by 3.5 percent for fiscal 1975, the second straight year of decline...
...His presence at the Convention also cemented the relationship between the Unionist Party and the FLT to keep the FLT out of the sugar fields and safely within the fold of electoral politics...
...That same day two members of the UIET's leadership were arrested for violation of the Federal Arms Law...
...If passed, public employee unions would find themselves isolated from the rest of the trade union movement...
...Regardless of the particular mechanisms used, the results of this expansion have been devastating for the working class of third world countries...
...Statistical Analysis Branch, National Labor Relations Board Divi- sion of Administration, The United States National Labor Relations Board Election Returns (Washington, D.C.: General Printing Office), 1974...
...For the Puerto Rican worker, on the other hand, the transformations of social and juridical relations brought about by the revolution in the relations of production were in large part welcome...
...This brought them into direct jurisdictional conflict with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, also actively organizing on the island (see article on Teamsters...
...Puerto Rico to New York: The Profit Shuttle," NACLA's Latin America & Empire Report, Vol...
...Often, however, the IBT simply intimidated workers into joining, either because it was working in concert with employers to smash more radical unions, or because there were lucrative personal pay-offs involved in expanding the union membership...
...Finally, on January 31, 1975, the company provoked a strike by refusing to give sick pay to several employees and halving the pension payments to retired workers, negating stipulations of the existing contract...
...To a much greater degree than the private sector," they wrote, in the public sector employees organizations, especially the large ones, have a real potential to extend their spheres of action, their radius of influence, to the political arena...
...It was within this context that the first labor union organized on the island sought relations with the American Federation of Labor (AFL...
...By examining each, we can come to a better understanding of the movement as a whole...
...Laborers could now look to the Legislature, he argued, and not to a weakened union structure for protection against the abuses of capitalist development...
...The AFL's traditional and unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist system as best for both workers and capitalists logically led to its unqualified support for the Bootstrap ideology...
...On the contrary, Beck's theory dictated that Big Labor and Big Business must combine forces to stabilize the industry and provide a larger share for each...
...The 1938 law was amended to exempt Puerto Rico from U.S...
...XVIII, No...
...This maneuver was needed in order to control the rank and file, and was one of the basic mechanisms used by Beck in his drive towards the centralization of the union...
...all statements submitted to the NLRB and all of the Board's findings must be issued in English...
...This means," according to the Helfeld Report, "that for negotiating purposes, the collective bargaining unit be structured on the basis of similar or closely linked occupations and professions throughout the different agencies...
...The press and composer-room workers refused to cross the picket lines and, once again, the Teamsters and the SIU began viciously fighting each other in an attempt to become the bargaining agent for the non-editorial staff...
...LXXXI, No...
...Hoffa readily rolled in to take his place as president in September 1957...
...Thus, to lower wages overall, first lower public sector wages...
...In the meantime, it rid itself of the nuisance it had originally nourished, the CGT...
...But the NLRB has also broken new ground on the island...
...Hoffa's base salary was $100,000 plus expenses, which was paid to him even while he was in jail for defrauding the union...
...began...
...Based in the artesan sector, the FLT had been unable to provide leadership for the rural proletariat on the large U.S...
...One of the most radical unions within the FLT was the Cigarmakers, an AFL affiliate...
...This hierarchical decision-making process is also characteristic of the Puerto Rican locals' internal organization...
...It was thus within the context of heated repression of the working class by government bureaucrats, politicians and the police, that labor leaders began to look for protection from a new source, from within the metropolis...
...After a short stay in jail, he was released, only to be charged with misuse of union funds again...
...Refusing to do it, he resigned in 1959...
...Election Returns...
...Prominent among these methods are the application of the Taft-Hartley Law and National Labor Relations Board rulings, and the employment of collaborationist unions to help raid and smash militant trade unions...
...Paradoxically, the Teamsters have been portrayed as one of the more "progressive" international unions in Puerto Rico, while at the same time their racist, collusive attempts to break the United Farm Workers in the United States have come under sharp attack...
...Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Economic Development Admini- stration, Puerto Rico: Profit Island, USA, 1974, 7. 39...
...The AFL organized skilled workers and only a small sector of the Puerto Rican labor force had specialized skills...
...A few months ago we were babies here . . . now we are a going concern...
...2 3 Still, the MOU itself is composed of both U.S.-based Internationals, such as the Meat Cutters and Boilermakers, and local independents, underlying the fact that the problem facing the Puerto Rican trade union movement is not one of simply replacing U.S.-based unions with Puerto Rican unions...
...The CGT saw the government bureaucracy not only as an obstacle to the absolute necessity of union democracy, but as an obstacle to its political task of struggling for radical economic change and against the domination of U.S...
...More often than not, such support was not forthcoming...
...And when tobacco manufacture entered a period of decline in Puerto Rico, the labor movement lost what in fact had constituted the ideological vanguard against reformism...
...5. Report on the Census of Puerto Rico (Washington D.C.: Govern- ment Printing Office, 1900...
...While the Federation was limited to urban artesans who constituted a tiny minority compared to the masses of agricultural workers, it provided the basis for the first serious attempts to organize trade unions on the island...
...There was one major snag in this design, however...
...All the striking unions were local independent unions, but were far from being united politically...
...Hampered by a craft union orientation that was unable to respond to an increasingly complex division of labor within the work-force and held no precedent for the organizing of the unemployed, the FLT and the Socialist Party turned to electoral politics and the government bureaucracy...
...Rather, it provoked a resurgence of interest in organizing activities on the island for reasons to be examined below...
...In 1968 the Teamsters had been voted in to represent the workers at the ITT-owned company...
...According to the IBT, the government, the NLRB and the AFL-CIO were using their collective assortment of political and economic pressures to threaten to close down companies that allowed Teamster representation...
...8. Leiter, op...
...43 Subsequently the government bought out ITT and was not at all pleased with the independent union...
...In addition, the goal of the Committee was to slow...
...a While the U.S...
...Now, Mr...
...7 (March 1976),9...
...Daily World, March 7, 1970...
...investment in Puerto Rico meant more jobs for Puerto Rican workers, it meant precisely the opposite for American labor...
...But opposition to Hoffa was rolling along as well, and after Hoffa's uncooperative appearance before the McClellan Committee, Meany and the AFL-CIO had the ammunition they needed...
...2) personal income tax on dividends or profits for seven years...
...Technicians from Bell Telephone were hired to replace the striking technicians who had been among the most militant workers at the phone company...
...In light of the ambiguous tenets of populism and the subsequent betrayal of the CGT by the Popular Party, the question may well be asked of why the CGT collaborated with the PPD...
...Rafael Alonso Jones, Cuarenta Anos de Lucha Proletario (San Juan: Imprenta Boldrich, 1939...
...31 Moreover, the hot cement ovens at Ponce-which normally produced 60% of Puerto Rico's grey cement-could not tolerate the shutdown and were cracking...
...The Federation was determined to break the power of its rival and, since the Teamsters took a lot of members with them at their expulsion, to replenish their ranks...
...In this way, the local union was totally indebted to the International...
...Like a pair of shoes without laces, Bootstrap without a controlled labor movement would be nonfunctional...
...As one observer noted: "It is the employers, rather than the employees, whom [Beck] impresses with the wisdom and advantage of 'signing up.' " 11 Union democracy was clearly left out of the Teamster strategy for rapid growth and power brokerage...
...The garment industry in New York City was among the hardest hit by the exodus of U.S...
...Rather, they are appointed from above, starting with the locals' executives, who are appointed by the national office, down to the shop delegates who are selected, in turn, by the executives of the locals...
...In 1963, ten out of the eleven affected industries, employing one third of the island's entire work force, were partially or totally exempted from the legislated wage increases...
...Without an abundant supply of cheap labor,10 Operation Bootstrap would remain a capitalist's dream and nothing more...
...This did in fact prove to be true in the short run, for the rupture created between the economic structure and the social and political superstructure did allow the working class some social victories...
...All in all, it is clear that the capitalists have found a friend in the SIU and will employ it as they would any other weapon...
...By 1952, he was powerful enough to replace the aging Tobin as Teamster president...
...Released in December 1975, at the height of the economic crisis, the Tobin Report suggests that the burden of Puerto Rico's crisis be shifted to the workers...
...Under his direction, the IBT began to emerge as a powerful and growing organization...
...In these contests, two or more unions are vying for the affiliation of the workers...
...It should be noted that the creation of the Free Associated State had the active backing of the powerful U.S...
...In the first two decades of the twentieth century, trucking primarily consisted of intracity deliveries and pick-ups, and wages and rates were correspondingly determined by local conditions...
...As of 1958 they set out to consolidate and expand by any means available in order to ensure their future viability as an "independent" union...
...What is more, these links were seen as a means for obtaining badly needed material assistance...
...And, as the 10-20 year free status of many factories in Puerto Rico ran out in the late 1960's and early '70's, investors simply gathered up their moneybags and left...
...Among other reasons, it reflected the nature of the trucking industry itself during this period...
...Chavez was replaced by Luis Pagan who since that time has remained as head of the union in Puerto Rico...
...yes...
...In an agreement with the Telephone Authority, the union won reinstatement of all workers who had been charged with sabotage or suspended from their jobs if they were absolved in court...
...I9 The Populist Alternative While the CGT was seeking to redefine the parameters of class struggle in Puerto Rico, a new political leadership in government was defining the struggle as one which incorporated all disaffected sectors, regardless of class...
...5 (February 1976), 6. 33...
...7. Lyman Gould, La Ley Foraker: Raices de la Politica Colonial de los Estados Unidos (Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1975...
...The Work Relations Board would be empowered to determine which public corporations operate as private enterprises and which function as public agencies...
...The National Labor Relations Board found UTI guilty as charged, for trying to sabotage relations between the ILGWU and the manufacturers' group, comprising four plants owned by the Bali Company...
...Open a plant that provides woruk ibr om people and we'll guarantee you no tames, federal or local" -Rated Hemindez-CsnGoenmor thu industry is booming in ArIa=e Rico, we are far fosm fali n employment...
...All union officials were forced to file affidavits swearing that they were not communists...
...Thus the opening of relations between the FLT and the AFL was initiated by the FLT...
...When they had signed up nearly every worker in the plant, they (and the workers) were informed that the plant was already represented by the SIU...
...The 1970's have been characterized by the definitive failure of the Bootstrap approach to unemployment, by the shift from light industry to capital-intensive investment, and by attempts to mitigate Puerto Rico's precarious economic situation by renegotiating the terms of the island's colonial status...
...And I am honored today to recognize in David Dubinsky a leader of great vision and in the union he heads one of the greatest labor unions of the world-not so much because of the number of its members as for the profound human quality of its objectives...
...Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Ponce Cement strike of 1975-76...
...41 They are also among the most combative, as shown by their increasing participation in strikes...
...13 But Beck surpassed himself when it came to the creation of "paper locals...
...capital investments on the island...
...Ibid., February, 1976...
...While Ferrd lined up some formidable allies, the strikers were able to forge a solid base of support from the working class and independence movement...
...12 At this, the banks began to feel it was time to put the pinch on their colonial clients...
...The expose of union corruption was used as a wedge to weaken the trade union movement and as a base to attack the working class in general...
...In October 1959, nine months after his arrival, Chavez boasted of a membership of 800 drivers and warehousemen, although the AFL-CIO claimed that the IBT's real strength stood at 200 to 250...
...9. Igualdad Iglesias, El Obrerismo en Puerto Rico Epoca de Santiago Iglesias (1898-1905) (Palencia de Castilla: Editorial Juan Ponce de Leon, 1973...
...Most of the U.S...
...Before long, the UNT had become a very active organizer in the construction trades and related fields...
...By 1872, both the government and the press in Puerto Rico had embarked on an official campaign to publicize the benefits of cooperative societies as the antidote to the "disruptive ideals of socialism...
...minimum wage standards on the island and the crushing of a militant labor movement, high profits are guaranteed through liberal tax incentives for businesses operating in Puerto Rico...
...Ibid., pp...
...the road of the law and that of the hoodlums...
...4. "Hoffa: No Fighter for the Proletariat," Revolution editorial, September, 1975...
...1" As the colonial government hysterically predicted that Operation Bootstrap would become "Operation Backslide" if wages were allowed to rise in Puerto Rico, the U.S.-based international unions stepped up their drive to organize workers in Puerto Rico for higher wages...
...GE reports plenty of screened workers," Commonwealth promotionals gushed...
...Slowly, the Teamsters were being accepted as a non-threatening union, even by the colonial administration...
...22 Faced with an intense organizing drive against it, the OCAW has been forced off the island in the last few years...
...As Beck explained, "If an employer agrees that his men are ill paid and work too long hours, but tells us conditions are such that he will be ruined if he betters their conditions, what should we do...
...Ibid., p. 10...
...II TYING THE KNOT 1. A.G...
...labor establishment, such as the Seafarers International Union's unwritten agreement not to unload any garment shipment from Puerto Rico unless it bears the ILGWU label...
...Having tired of simply ruling that the capitalists always negotiate in good faith and the workers are always hopelessly malicious, the NLRB has gone a step further in Puerto Rico by actually outlawing those unions which commit the crime of supporting their workers...
...sugar companies and banks, the small landowners and rural workers who had been uprooted from their traditional social milieu to find jobs in the growing service and nascent manufacturing sectors, or to join the growing army of the urban unemployed, and the oppressed rural work force that remained in the countryside, supplementing their income through the burgeoning home garment industry-all could fit under the giant umbrella of populism...
...2168) which would raise the minimum wage on the mainland from 75 cents to one dollar, and increase the island minimum by the same amount...
...Senate passed a bill (No...
...invasion through the Second World War...
...The third part of this analysis deals with the present period...
...The landowners had decided that unionism, if it remained in the craft sector, was not a threat to them...
...No longer did they have the backing of the Federation and they were under sharp attack from the U.S...
...The IBT lost the first election 106-64, leading the SIU's international president, Paul Hall, to boast that the Teamsters were no match for the Seafarers...
...Thus it is useful to examine its growth in some detail as well as describing the nature of the attack which it currently faces...
...Within a very short period of time, it had become the dominant force in the garment industry, establishing a virtual monopoly on all labor contracts...
...Puerto Rico Libre!, Vol...
...In the first place, the "good old days" were good only if you happened to be a capitalist...
...The success of the ILGWU's organizing drive did not, however, reflect the fruits of massive campaigns at the base level...
...As Hoffa himself put it, "I don't object to my men having business outside of the union...
...The history of the Knights of Labor, the IWW and the early CIO clearly demonstrates the progressive role of some labor unions in the North American class struggle...
...2 Yet while Puerto Rican agricultural workers were recognizing not only the degree but also the basis of their exploitation in the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, the FLT was signing peace pacts with the Sugar Producers Association and the Socialist Party was maintaining a pro-U.S...
...This beautiful plant, this concentrated effort, this planning, are all for them...
...Puerto Rico Libre!, Vol...
...Get rid of it and organize an independent union...
...Other labor actions affected truck and bus drivers, waterworks employees, telephone and newspaper workers and dockers...
...The bill simply proposed to prevent a widening of the gap, by having both rise proportionately...
...29 These strategic and legal arrangements underscore how the ILGWU's domination of labor in Puerto Rico's garment industry rests upon the existing colonial structure...
...6. Quintero Rivera, p. 80...
...In December, 1958 both George Meany and Governor Muftoz Marin allegedly put the heat on Paul Hall and Keith Terpe, leaders of the SIU, to break the pact...
...10 (June 15, 1975), and Vol...
...The level of militant strikes began to increase in 1971 and 1972 with the conflicts at National Packing, New York Department Stores, the Telephone Company and the seven month strike at the U.S.-owned newspaper, El Mundo...
...By 1955, San Juan was more expensive to live in than any American city, and real wages were steadily declining...
...And in Seattle, Dave Beck began to build the Western Conference of Teamsters, becoming an ideologue of Teamster unionism in his own right...
...Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Report to Industry on Productivity and Profit Potential,no date...
...governor of Puerto Rico, soliciting his recognition of and cooperation with Iglesias in his new capacity as AFL representative...
...At that time, the government refused to negotiate a new agreement until union elections were held, and fired several workers for alleged violation of "company discipline...
...2 Foreign investment in,Puerto Rico grew by 870 per cent between 1960 and 1975...
...Their success, however, was not primarily due to the Internationals' acknowledged expertise in the intricacies of union electioneering and collective bargaining procedures imported from the mainland...
...We're sure that this struggle will be won in the streets with the workers and not in the courts...
...On an island with high unemployment, such threats are devastatingly effective...
...By 1975 the IBT claimed 2,230,000 members (one out of every nine members of organized labor), of whom only approximately 25 percent are truckers...
...This was done through rate-fixing, restricting "freedom of entry" by small new companies or operator-owners and by pushing for government regulation and control...
...Thus, for example, by defining a government agency (such as shipping or the telephone company) as a public agency and not an "agency of the government which functions as a private business," workers in that firm would lose their rights to organize freely and would be subject to the organizing procedures established under the Helfeld Bill...
...capital a "friend" in the "people's program" for development...
...47-49...
...According to Popular Party designs, then, Puerto Rico was to become the hemisphere's "showcase of development" and its showcase of labor-capital harmony as well...
...NOTES I EARLY COURTSHIP 1. Ricardo Campos, Origenes del Cooperativismo en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Puertorriquena [CEREP], 1974...
...Department of Justice because it violated the terms of Hoffa's parole, it clearly signified a departure from the government's past attitude...
...At that time the UNT was carrying out an organizing drive among the workers of the Swiss Precision Co...
...In Puerto Rico, U.S...
...government officials...
...22 . Galvin, Collective Bargaining in the Public Sector, p. 211...
...It has pitted the strikers against major economic and political interests in Puerto Rico and the United States who have gathered around them their allies and agents, from business unions to the police and the established media...
...Their answer was an emphatic "Yes...
...It is known that companies holding ILGWU contracts have closed up when management thought wages were too high, only to reopen after a few days-with a new name and lower wages...
...S. New York Times, March 14, 1966...
...The first was extensive and exceptionally corrupt union practices, and the second was massive and escalating jurisdictional disputes with both AFL and CIO affiliates...
...This was Iglesias' second trip to New York that year...
...They tried to exacerbate the internal divisions within the independent union and in general propagandized against the strike...
...For two years, the island saw militant and often violent confrontations between agricultural workers and the repressive apparatus of the insular government...
...Edwin Melendez, head of the PSP's labor division and a member of that party's central committee, was recently arrested and jailed with three other PSP members...
...Puerto Rico Librel, Vol...
...It also had little interest in the expansion of the craft sector on the island...
...Fitzsimmons earned $125,000 as of 1971 plus the usual additions.25 James R. Hoffa and Dove Beck in 1953 stockholders wouldn't hold an election to see who the hell was going in if they open up a new plant...
...After the SIU filed for an election at the Ponce plant, the company could legally (according to "impartial" NLRB rules) stop bargaining with the OCWU's striking workers, which they quickly did...
...On February 13, 1974, nearly 4,400 workers, the bulk of whom transported construction materials, went out on strike...
...Mufloz Marin had been advised that the Teamsters, with their image of "irresponsible" unionism, could threaten the labor peace required for the success of Operation Bootstrap...
...34 Finally, in 1974, the union selected a new group of leaders who were able to direct a successful 102 day strike against the government-owned Puerto Rican Telephone Authority in 1975...
...The movement did not represent an attempt to harness a mass base within the context of a intra-ruling class struggle...
...Some of the Finest Men I Know Are Employers" (Dave Beck) s Two local leaders began their rise to prominence within the union during this period...
...The following articles represent an attempt to examine the history of U.S...
...4 o0 Besides being a large percentage of the work force, government workers are among the most unionized sectors on the island...
...Much of this information was gathered from an interview held in December, 1975 with Pedro Grant, co-ordinator for the MOU and president of the Boilermakers' Union...
...In 1975, out of a total of 184,127 unionized workers, 57% belonged to independent Puerto Rican unions while only 43% were in U.S.-based affiliates.'" The cause of the decline can most likely be found in two factors...
...4 (January, 1976), p. 5 14...
...Many progressive union leaders have emerged following strikes in their unions, periods which often become the acid test of a union leader's true colors...
...The SIU's tangle with the Teamsters highlights one of the most characteristic elements of the Internationals' operations in Puerto Rico in the late 1950's and 1960's: inter-union conflicts and rivalry...
...organized labor were courting the FLT and offering legal and material concessions to Puerto Rican workers, the insular elites were continuing their repression of the Puerto Rican labor movement...
...The U.S...
...Business unionism denotes a particular ideological and organizational conception of labor's role within the capitalist system...
...I 5 The Puerto Rican government continued to lobby for keeping wages down in Puerto Rico...
...Garnel, op...
...and, P.S.P., "La politica obrera y sindical del PSP," Chispa, Edici6n Especial (September 1973)1, 21...
...The government called upon the pro-government wing of the CGT to break UGT strikes, while red-baiting and the harrassment of communists and political dissidents became common...
...By the 1930's, the FLT had almost completely lost its base within the Puerto Rican working class...
...Justice, July 15, 1955...
...And the Guard had encountered significant resistance when it tried to take over the fire trucks of striking workers...
...In Puerto Rico, for example, UGT-organizer Juan Saez Corales and other UGT members refused to submit affidavits...
...Not only was talk of self-government on the part of the Puerto Rican landowners worrisome, but ties with the AFL had by no means extinguished anarchist and socialist sentiments within the labor movement...
...9 The U.S...
...Second, an increase in worker militancy and combativity as a product of a higher level of consciousness, better organization and leadership and the objective economic situation on the island...
...If the AFL-CIO has any idea of issuing rival Teamster charters in the United States, all they have to do is look at Puerto Rico...
...The trucking companies, suffering under inflated gasoline prices and the introduction of gas rationing, were particularly affected...
...If trade unionism could not be eradicated in Puerto Rico, Mufioz Marin and the colonial government were intent on shaping it to suit the needs of Bootstrap...
...In that year, the U.S...
...25 per year for profit-making and government organizations ($48 for two years...
...UNITY AND THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT Trade union unity still remains a serious problem for Puerto Rican workers, one which is exacerbated by the actions of collaborationist unions like the SIU...
...While the ramifications of the island's status can be studied from a variety of perspectivesjuridical, economic, cultural, etc.-an examination of the class contradiction between the Puerto Rican working class and the U.S...
...Department of Organizing, IBT, "What is the Teamster Union," 1975, p. 1.21...
...To top it off, the Teamsters have exported to the island an image they have cultivated for decades in the United States: that of a militant, "rough and ready" union that despite all odds, including government harrassment and interference, fights for its membership and organizes the unorganized...
...In other words, for the Puerto Rican worker, ties to the AFL were not only a matter of declarations but signified active support...
...All directions must come from the national office...
...This hegemony was generally extended by means of economic penetration, often mediated by capitalist sectors within third world countries, and indirect political control through mechanisms that extended from direct military intervention to the use of multilateral institutions...
...For many years diviCHART I: PEACEN OFP WOR FORCE UNIONIZED BY INDUSTRY, 1965-1975 INDUSTRY 1965 1970 1973 1974 1975 All Industry 19% 20% 19% 16% 14% Agriculture 33 29 21 17 16 Non-Agricultural Sectors 16 20 18 16 14 Construction 14 17 17 11 9 Manufacture 32 30 34 29 24 Commerce 4 6 5 5 4 Transport, Communica- tion, Public Utility 41 61 56 54 54 Services 3 7 6 7 7 Public Administration 10 20 16 13 11 Other Services * * * * * *Saawle too small Source: Puerto Rico, Departmeat of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Work Force, 1975.18 sion and factionalism had been the outstanding characteristic of the Puerto Rican labor movement," a MOU document states...
...TEAMSTERS 1. New York Times, February 19, 1972...
...GE responded by appealing the union election to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and firing eight workers for good measure...
...Moreover, the ILGWU itself had just emerged from an internal struggle between left and right-wing forces, which depleted the union's membership and most of its financial resources...
...In fact, in the late 1960's and 1970's, several significant, if neither stable nor revolutionary, rank-and-file movements have arisen that are beginning to crack the veneer of the one big happy, militant brotherhood the Teamsters have fairly successfully managed to project over the years...
...And the third stage, starting in the mid-1960's, was concerned with the development of heavy industry...
...For the AFL and the U.S...
...E4 Cl) 0J 4J 4. q) 4. Q, .4...
...Studs Terkel, "Truck Power," New Times (1973), p. 27...
...As will be remembered, the Teamsters were entangled in the McClellan Com-27 mittee investigations, Dave Beck was soon to be replaced by James Hoffa and the union was about to be expelled from the AFL-CIO...
...minimum wage laws and to establish separate procedures for the island...
...II, No...
...WHY SHOULD TRUCK DRIVERS AND BOTTLE WASHERS BE ALLOWED TO MAKE BIG DECISIONS AFFECTING UNION POLICY...
...And, what little ability the FTPR had to discipline and unify the Internationals was further undercut when the SI's director in Puerto Rico, Keith Terpe, formed his own "Central Labor Council for San Juan" in 1963...
...0095-5930 NACLA'S LATIN AMERICA & EMPIRE REPORT Vol...
...We think they'll top try icher plan, rite...
...THE ILGWU: THREADBARE UNIONISM The history of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Puerto Rico, and its rapid rise to a dominant position within the island's burgeoning garment sector, is an illustrative example of collaboration between labor, government and business...
...All of this provoked the wrath of the colonial government which has singled out MOU leaders for attack...
...From the evidence, seen in light of their history, the Teamster performance in Puerto Rico does not seem at variance with their U.S...
...no date...
...While some of these organizations limited themselves to recreational activities, others served as schools where workers learned to read and write, and studied the classics of the French Revolution...
...This, too, is not an easy question...
...While this may be true, it should be remembered that leaders like Hoffa don't drop from the sky...
...Organizing from above" thus became one of the distinguishing features of Teamster organizing drives...
...cit., p. 33...
...According to the MOU, the OCAW in Puerto Rico was a tremendously reactionary union, a union that merrily sold out its workers without the slightest twinge of remorse, and, of course with a structure that didn't permit the slightest argument-internal democracy in the OCAW was a big zero...
...In the first place, the colonial government had just passed an "industrial incentives act," which was designed to court U.S...
...Max D. Danish, The World of David Dubinsky (World Publishing Company: Cleveland, New York), 1957, p. 234...
...Secondly, while the IBT is an "international" union, its history, ideology and organization can only be understood by studying its original development inside the United States...
...II, No...
...A common vehicle employed by Beck "in the name of efficiency" was the highly undemocratic use of trusteeships...
...At the base of this tax incentive plan is a program for tax exemptions which includes exemptions on: 1) business income tax (both of individuals and corporations) for ten years...
...labor unions on the island...
...The formation of the UGT coincided with a new phase of repression in the workers' movement which stemmed from two sources...
...labor legislation, such as minimum wage, have been applied to Puerto Rico selectively at best and often not at all, the most repressive laws have been extended to the island in full force...
...The predominance of the AFL in Puerto Rico often tends to overshadow the role played by U.S...
...In March 1962, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union was in trouble...
...And the government will help you find and train the workers you need...
...The law's basic aim was to centralize decision making power over public employees outside of the unions...
...With Bootstrap industries paying no Commonwealth taxes, no exise or local taxes (not to mention federal tax on corporate profits), how did the colonial administrators raise tax revenues...
...But government harassment was a constant factor in virtually every situation...
...government, however, support for the FLT's right to strike by no means represented a sacrifice...
...Meany was on the war path and reasoned that no AFL affiliate should cooperate with the Teamsters, anywhere, anyhow...
...This was an increase of 36 percent, while the growth rate for the entire labor movement in the same period was only 12 percent...
...2 6 While the MOU is a labor coalition and not a political party, its actions obviously have a political impact in Puerto Rico...
...Other MOU leaders have been arrested, harrassed and threatened...
...Yet, it is one thing to argue that point and another to win it...
...It was defeated in union elections at the CORCO (Commonwealth Oil Refining Company of Puerto Rico) refinery in Pefluelas, at the Carborundum plant in Mayaguez and at the Gulf refinery in Catano, as well as being decertified in Fiber's International in Guayama...
...In the eyes of investors and government authorities in Puerto Rico, the American Internationals were a far more likeable alternative than the CGT of the early forties...
...And due to the nature of the trucking industry, the road was left wide and clear for a decentralized union, adept at collusion and extortion and frequently involved in violent jurisdictional disputes with other unions...
...In that year, the CGT formally affiliated with the CIO which had been purging its own radical elements since the end of World War II...
...Still, 25 years is a long time, and the economic crisis which is currently ravaging the island is proving that the Puerto Rican boots are nearly worn out...
...flag, epjpys duty-fre access...
...sugar companies and its objectives as "land and bread for the unemployed" and "economic power to create industries...
...Although the situation remains unresolved, what is clear is the role the Teamsters willingly played-aspiring saboteurs of an independent union...
...Organized and reorganized several times, they were often transitional in nature...
...More prominent among the Teamster leadership's organizing techniques was an emphasis on "organizing the employer," through "sweetheart" contracts, "backdoor deals," etc...
...Rapprochement came gradually...
...Especially in Puerto Rico, where approximately 85-90 per cent of all shipping to the-island is containerized, 1 the economy is highly vulnerable to strikes or slowdowns by truckers who move all goods inland from the-docks...
...More importantly, they did not see the FLT as a threat to U.S...
...Clearly, the imposition of a social and political superstructure that corresponded to a developed capitalist country on a society that was just emerging from pre-capitalist relations of production, had an enormous impact on all sectors within Puerto Rico...
...2 The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was finally formed inside the AFL in 1903, out of various fractionalized teamster organizations...
...unions are not only numerically dominant, but also control organized labor in the most important sectors of the economy...
...A primarily agricultural island in 1930, Puerto Rico is now a highly industrialized region with virtually no space left to grow food for its own population...
...But the contract was very poorly administered, and an independent30 union, the Independent Union of Telephone Employees (UIET), began preparing to contest Teamster representation when the contract expired...
...This is not to imply that the AFL's interest in the Puerto Rican labor movement was based on the same premises as the FLT's interests in the AFL...
...It laid to rest government claims of a docile work force...
...labor leaders negotiated these contracts with the parent firm on the mainland, and Puerto Rican workers had no choice but to join that union or look for work elsewhere...
...8 (April 15, 1975), 6. 22...
...6. Ibid., October 15, 1976...
...Sidney Lens, op...
...In fact, productivity increases in Puerto Rico were keeping pace with the mainland in comparable industries...
...SLP left the Puerto Rican workers' party and the FLT alone to confront what was truly an overwhelming task...
...In good Teamster tradition, Dave Beck responded by extending and refining the sophisticated armory of "strong arm" tactics which have become the Teamsters' claim to fame as fighters for the working class...
...0-916024-17-2 ISSN No...
...The PSP and other pro-independence movements have mobilized support for the strikers and raised thousands of dollars for the strike fund both in Puerto Rico and the United States...
...28 II...
...If anything, recent attacks on the PSP prove that violent repression is increasing...
...At the time of the U.S...
...Robert Kennedy, an aspiring young star serving as counsel and investigator for the Committee, spearheaded the attack...
...Thus, a situation was created in which the employment capacity of capitalist enterprises as structured in colonial Puerto Rico had no where to go but down...
...They thought that we would accept the agreement because we're tired of the strike," one worker commented, adding "we'll never go back to work unless the plant takes back our coworkers who were fired and we receive better working conditions and fair salaries...
...Yaou can t all the labor you need-at reasonable wae-e And ye can operate confidently in the only place in the world that is under the U.S...
...stance...
...organized labor, we must first understand the broad social and economic context within which this relationship originated...
...s Small towns like Jayuya reportan outrageous 96 per cent unemployment figure...
...Operation Bootstrap provoked a significant exodus of U.S...
...Governor Ferre wanted him to act as a mediator in a trucking strike because Hoffa's participation was agreeable to both the Teamsters and the trucking companies...
...In addition, since labor costs were very high (often as much as 70 percent of total operating costs), 3 cut-throat competition often induced the employer to offer a kick-back and secure a "sweetheart" * contract from the Teamsters...
...The Teamsters do have investments in Puerto Rico, which they reported as totaling $4,300,540 in 1972...
...The eradication of Spanish legality was already an irreversible process...
...As both salaried and independent drivers, they provided the only mode of transportation available to most Puerto Rican workers...
...XVI, No...
...Typsetting by O.B.U...
...It is important, however, to point out the particular forms that U.S...
...Secretary Treasurer of the UNT currently facing criminal contempt charges for his role in the union's activities, the struggle to oust the NLRB from the island will be a difficult one: "The Taft-Hartley Law [and the NLRB] are imposed upon us by the colonial structure...
...s 6 The FUT, which also concentrates its organizing in the public sector, also seems to be a fairly weak federation...
...The Private Sector: The Attack on Radical Unions While the offensive against public sector unions is fundamentally based on new legislative measures, the capitalist attack on radical unions in the private sector makes use of much older methods...
...f f- i P-Re' ,e- sslon t panics already in Puerto Rico...
...The well-being of every worker, this propaganda assured, was tied to the profitability of business on the island-and the latter was inexorably tied to low wages...
...military invasion of the island, however, and the subsequent invasion of Puerto Rico by the large U.S...
...Claridad, November 14, 1971...
...The top company officials would pick out the best man they could get their hands on and they'd put him in there as manager...
...Although the request was denied by the U.S...
...standards...
...In 1934, sugar workers struck throughout the island, demonstrating their outrage against sugar producers whose ability to maintain high profits despite a drop in world sugar prices was a direct result of wages that provided less than 65 per cent of the food needs of a Puerto Rican family...
...Far from organizing the rising discontent of the Puerto Rican working class and the unemployed, both the FLT and the Socialist Party abandoned the field of union activity for a role in the government apparatus...
...The first occurred in February 1974...
...Beneath the froth and glitter of economic boom lay the structural roots of the present crisis...
...companies holding ILGWU contracts on the mainland to adopt a modified version (i.e...
...Wages stay close to the $1.15 minimum...
...and manufacturing industries reduced employment by over 23,000 workers in fiscal 1975...
...4 (November 15, 1975), 9. 44...
...firms in search of cheap labor abroad...
...Part II of the Report examines the period of Puerto Rico's early industrialization and the institutionalization of Operation Bootstrap through the 1960's...
...The North American invasion and the consequent tr ansformation in the Puerto Rican legal structure opened the way to the creation of a genuine craft union...
...In the first place, little information about the Teamsters in Puerto Rico has been collected and an in-depth analysis of its role remains to be written...
...I T a I L .a...
...A Tax Prqogram to Encourage Puerto Rico's Economic Growth (Washington D.C.: National Planning Association, 1958), p. 17...
...One company in the Foarte WD00 - amns re than 30 percent of in total oorte peoflt.frmn itr plant In Puerto Rico...
...Also see: Jonathan Kwitny, "The Billion-Dollar Reason for Hoffa's Disappearance," Village Voice, September 8, 1975, p. 6-7...
...Whenever workers have complained that the ILGWU was not truly representing them, and turned to independent unions for help in organizing a strike, management has retaliated by threatening to close the firm and fire the entire work force...
...THE DEFENSE OF PROFIT ISLAND In numerous glossy advertisements such as the recent 20-page brochure, "Puerto Rico: Profit Island, USA," the colonial government paints Puerto Rico's workers as docile cogs in the great profit machine...
...7 ** Over 70 percent of the island's residents depend on the Federal Food Stamp Program and nearly 90 percent meet eligibility requirements...
...3 The SIU has excelled when challenging other unions for the right to represent workers...
...27 The MOU's active support of trade union unity has determined its constant presence on picket lines, at demonstrations and at workers' meetings...
...4221 It is hardly surprising, then, that the colonial government would seize upon the public sector as the focus of some of its sharpest attacks against the labor movement as a whole...
...5. Garnel, op...
...III, No...
...Finally, in order to weaken the strikers still further, the government appealed to the Teamsters for help...
...When the ILGWU signed its first contract in Puerto Rico, covering 3,000 workers in the brassiere and corset industries, Governor Mufioz Marin sent David Dubinsky his most effusive compliments: "It is an honor to honor," he said...
...The second reason stemmed from the vulnerability of both the Socialist Party and the FLT...
...New York Times, May 29, 1964...
...And, while it represented no one, it could cast votes in regional council elections to tip the scale against any opposition candidates...
...Ibid...
...Or is it proper for us to see what is necessary to make the industry economically sound...
...NLRB...
...Throughout the 1940's and '50's, the union lobbied extensively for the application of U.S...
...All told, more than 320 factories had closed for lack of electricity...
...As we have seen, many of the electrical workers were dissatisfied with their union's (UTIER) settlement of the July 1973 strike...
...Workers in New York City and other garment centers in the United States began to fear for their livelihood...
...Rapidly, the repression increased...
...They will come here to work...
...One of the AFL's first tactical moves within the "Americanization" strategy was the introduction of FLT leaders to U.S...