Posted:
August 4, 2011
By Tom Bethel
National President
As national president of American Maritime Officers, I am focused almost exclusively on keeping AMO members working in deep-sea, Great Lakes and inland waters trades - and I have enough sense to know that there are no jobs when employers cannot remain competitive and keep their vessels operating profitably. I also know that mutual trust, steady communication between my administration and AMO employers and a real effort by our union to meet the employers' legitimate business needs are critical to long-term job and benefit security for AMO members everywhere.
Late in July and into the early morning of August 1, I learned that American Steamship Co. - the largest employer of AMO members on the Great Lakes - does not share my sense of responsibility to its vessel officers and stewards or my commitment to candid, honest negotiation. This company threatened a productive, mutually beneficial collective bargaining relationship spanning generations by forcing AMO to strike its active fleet of 14 bulk carriers once these vessels were secured to iron ore, coal and stone docks in various Great Lakes ports.
This strike was the inevitable result of the company's chronic failure to bargain in good faith on a five-year successor agreement, a strategy ordered up and handed down by American Steamship's parent firm, GATX Corp. - which, by its own description in financial documents pitched at shareholders and potential investors, "controls one of the largest railcar fleets in the world."
With rail freight as its principal business, GATX has no direct knowledge of or experience in the unique economics of Great Lakes shipping. GATX has no understanding of the work done each day by the marine engineers, mates and stewards employed in the American Steamship fleet and no sense of how the multiemployer AMO Pension, Medical, Vacation, Safety and Education and Defined Contribution Plans are funded or how they operate.
Nevertheless, GATX - which had for years kept out of the day-to-day business of American Steamship Co. - seized the management lead during limited talks with our union in July. AMO was at the table with businessmen who plainly did not want to acknowledge or reward the difficult work AMO members had done so well or the role these engineers, mates and stewards had played in securing American Steamship's sustained and sizable profit margins.
This situation developed more than six months ago, when I offered American Steamship Co. an early start on negotiations leading to a successor agreement that would set the Great Lakes pattern (all collective bargaining agreements between AMO and Great Lakes bulk vessel operators were to expire on August 1).
American Steamship Co. did not accept this offer and did not explain why it had decided to pass on early bargaining. AMO later presented its contract proposal - modest but well deserved wage increases and continued participation in the AMO benefit funds at current levels over five years - to the remaining Great Lakes employers. Not one of these companies found our union's proposal to be excessive, unreasonable or unaffordable.
When American Steamship Co. agreed at long last to meet with AMO in mid-July, the GATX/American Steamship negotiators said they wanted to learn the mechanics of AMO Plans - a peculiar request, considering that a well known American Steamship executive had at that point served for many years as an employer trustee of the AMO benefit funds.
AMO responded by bringing AMO Plans Executive Director Steve Nickerson, AMO Plans Finance Director John Macuski and representatives of the Plans' actuarial firm - Kevin Culp and Stan Goldfarb, of Horizon Actuarial Services LLC - in to the initial meeting in my office in Washington DC. All questions from GATX and American Steamship Co. were answered completely during the daylong discussion.
A week later, as August 1 approached, the GATX/American Steamship Co. negotiators met for three days in Philadelphia with AMO National Executive Vice President Bob Kiefer, Great Lakes Special Assistant to the National President Don Cree and Chris Holmes, our union's contract analyst. The GATX/American Steamship Co. delegation submitted a contract proposal that called for the immediate elimination of 14 stewards' jobs, the right to eliminate up to 56 vessel jobs at American Steamship Co.'s discretion, and no funding of the AMO Medical, Pension and Safety and Education Plans.
This was unacceptable to me, to Kiefer and Cree and to the AMO members in the American Steamship fleet - 99 percent of the 140 AMO members involved turned the proposal down and voted to strike.
Meanwhile, AMO asked GATX/American Steamship Co. to submit a final proposal for consideration by the fleet's engineers, mates and stewards. There was no response to this routine, reasonable request from our union before or after the August 1 deadline.
One unvarnished truth here is that GATX/American Steamship Co. never intended to negotiate in good faith and never intended to sign any successor agreement with AMO. GATX and American Steamship Co. sought this strike, American Maritime Officers did not - 31 years had passed since AMO's last strike on the Great Lakes.
Another truth is that GATX and American Steamship Co. want a non-union fleet, and they want to "railroad" their way to this end. It has not drawn much notice outside the Great Lakes region recently, but a strike against the company by United Steelworkers Local 5000 - which represents unlicensed crews on vessels acquired by American Steamship from the defunct Oglebay Norton Co. - entered its second year in July.
As this publication neared press time, American Steamship Co. was recruiting "replacement officers" for its fleet, plumbing the muck for engineers and mates with no integrity and no honor - a tactic that began while GATX and American Steamship Co. were feigning interest in negotiating and settling with AMO.
American Steamship Co. appeared to concede difficulty finding qualified, reliable engineers and mates when it said it was planning to "operate our full contingent of vessels in 2012 with other qualified crew members" - a statement that left the company's customers uncertain about delivery of their raw materials through the rest of this year.
American Steamship Co.'s indifference to its contractual commitments to its customers was exceeded by its reprehensible effort to bribe key vessel personnel to ignore the strike and work the vessels. The company was dispensing cash like water to targeted officers, promising signing and recruitment bonuses and offering benefit packages with little or no specific detail.
This experience has caused me to reassess the way our union does business on the Great Lakes. Previous AMO administrations failed to acknowledge the developments that have transformed the Great Lakes shipping industry over the last 30 years - the rise of the "thousand footer," the consequent displacement of smaller vessels, the collapse of the basic steel industry that once sustained a fleet of more than 125 vessels, economic downturns that hit the industrial Midwest and the Great Lakes region especially hard. For too long, these AMO administrations acted as though nothing had changed in the Great Lakes shipping industry, when in fact conditions had changed dramatically and permanently.
While I cannot reverse poor policy decisions made 30, 20 or 10 years ago, I can promise everyone in our union and every AMO employer on the Great Lakes a new day and a new way.
I value the professional relationships American Maritime Officers has had with these employers for many years. Unlike GATX and its corporate stepchild, these employers recognize the hard work and the dedication each AMO engineer, mate and steward brings to the job each day on each vessel. I will be in touch with these employers over the next several weeks - we have much to discuss in the wake of the shameful actions of American Steamship Co.
Meanwhile, I thank the AMO engineers, mates and stewards who have stood fast in support of our union during this crisis - I pledge to them that I will not bow to GATX and American Steamship Co., no matter how this strike saga plays out.
AMO and ASC: the strike our union did not want
By Tom Bethel
National President
As national president of American Maritime Officers, I am focused almost exclusively on keeping AMO members working in deep-sea, Great Lakes and inland waters trades - and I have enough sense to know that there are no jobs when employers cannot remain competitive and keep their vessels operating profitably. I also know that mutual trust, steady communication between my administration and AMO employers and a real effort by our union to meet the employers' legitimate business needs are critical to long-term job and benefit security for AMO members everywhere.
Late in July and into the early morning of August 1, I learned that American Steamship Co. - the largest employer of AMO members on the Great Lakes - does not share my sense of responsibility to its vessel officers and stewards or my commitment to candid, honest negotiation. This company threatened a productive, mutually beneficial collective bargaining relationship spanning generations by forcing AMO to strike its active fleet of 14 bulk carriers once these vessels were secured to iron ore, coal and stone docks in various Great Lakes ports.
This strike was the inevitable result of the company's chronic failure to bargain in good faith on a five-year successor agreement, a strategy ordered up and handed down by American Steamship's parent firm, GATX Corp. - which, by its own description in financial documents pitched at shareholders and potential investors, "controls one of the largest railcar fleets in the world."
With rail freight as its principal business, GATX has no direct knowledge of or experience in the unique economics of Great Lakes shipping. GATX has no understanding of the work done each day by the marine engineers, mates and stewards employed in the American Steamship fleet and no sense of how the multiemployer AMO Pension, Medical, Vacation, Safety and Education and Defined Contribution Plans are funded or how they operate.
Nevertheless, GATX - which had for years kept out of the day-to-day business of American Steamship Co. - seized the management lead during limited talks with our union in July. AMO was at the table with businessmen who plainly did not want to acknowledge or reward the difficult work AMO members had done so well or the role these engineers, mates and stewards had played in securing American Steamship's sustained and sizable profit margins.
This situation developed more than six months ago, when I offered American Steamship Co. an early start on negotiations leading to a successor agreement that would set the Great Lakes pattern (all collective bargaining agreements between AMO and Great Lakes bulk vessel operators were to expire on August 1).
American Steamship Co. did not accept this offer and did not explain why it had decided to pass on early bargaining. AMO later presented its contract proposal - modest but well deserved wage increases and continued participation in the AMO benefit funds at current levels over five years - to the remaining Great Lakes employers. Not one of these companies found our union's proposal to be excessive, unreasonable or unaffordable.
When American Steamship Co. agreed at long last to meet with AMO in mid-July, the GATX/American Steamship negotiators said they wanted to learn the mechanics of AMO Plans - a peculiar request, considering that a well known American Steamship executive had at that point served for many years as an employer trustee of the AMO benefit funds.
AMO responded by bringing AMO Plans Executive Director Steve Nickerson, AMO Plans Finance Director John Macuski and representatives of the Plans' actuarial firm - Kevin Culp and Stan Goldfarb, of Horizon Actuarial Services LLC - in to the initial meeting in my office in Washington DC. All questions from GATX and American Steamship Co. were answered completely during the daylong discussion.
A week later, as August 1 approached, the GATX/American Steamship Co. negotiators met for three days in Philadelphia with AMO National Executive Vice President Bob Kiefer, Great Lakes Special Assistant to the National President Don Cree and Chris Holmes, our union's contract analyst. The GATX/American Steamship Co. delegation submitted a contract proposal that called for the immediate elimination of 14 stewards' jobs, the right to eliminate up to 56 vessel jobs at American Steamship Co.'s discretion, and no funding of the AMO Medical, Pension and Safety and Education Plans.
This was unacceptable to me, to Kiefer and Cree and to the AMO members in the American Steamship fleet - 99 percent of the 140 AMO members involved turned the proposal down and voted to strike.
Meanwhile, AMO asked GATX/American Steamship Co. to submit a final proposal for consideration by the fleet's engineers, mates and stewards. There was no response to this routine, reasonable request from our union before or after the August 1 deadline.
One unvarnished truth here is that GATX/American Steamship Co. never intended to negotiate in good faith and never intended to sign any successor agreement with AMO. GATX and American Steamship Co. sought this strike, American Maritime Officers did not - 31 years had passed since AMO's last strike on the Great Lakes.
Another truth is that GATX and American Steamship Co. want a non-union fleet, and they want to "railroad" their way to this end. It has not drawn much notice outside the Great Lakes region recently, but a strike against the company by United Steelworkers Local 5000 - which represents unlicensed crews on vessels acquired by American Steamship from the defunct Oglebay Norton Co. - entered its second year in July.
As this publication neared press time, American Steamship Co. was recruiting "replacement officers" for its fleet, plumbing the muck for engineers and mates with no integrity and no honor - a tactic that began while GATX and American Steamship Co. were feigning interest in negotiating and settling with AMO.
American Steamship Co. appeared to concede difficulty finding qualified, reliable engineers and mates when it said it was planning to "operate our full contingent of vessels in 2012 with other qualified crew members" - a statement that left the company's customers uncertain about delivery of their raw materials through the rest of this year.
American Steamship Co.'s indifference to its contractual commitments to its customers was exceeded by its reprehensible effort to bribe key vessel personnel to ignore the strike and work the vessels. The company was dispensing cash like water to targeted officers, promising signing and recruitment bonuses and offering benefit packages with little or no specific detail.
This experience has caused me to reassess the way our union does business on the Great Lakes. Previous AMO administrations failed to acknowledge the developments that have transformed the Great Lakes shipping industry over the last 30 years - the rise of the "thousand footer," the consequent displacement of smaller vessels, the collapse of the basic steel industry that once sustained a fleet of more than 125 vessels, economic downturns that hit the industrial Midwest and the Great Lakes region especially hard. For too long, these AMO administrations acted as though nothing had changed in the Great Lakes shipping industry, when in fact conditions had changed dramatically and permanently.
While I cannot reverse poor policy decisions made 30, 20 or 10 years ago, I can promise everyone in our union and every AMO employer on the Great Lakes a new day and a new way.
I value the professional relationships American Maritime Officers has had with these employers for many years. Unlike GATX and its corporate stepchild, these employers recognize the hard work and the dedication each AMO engineer, mate and steward brings to the job each day on each vessel. I will be in touch with these employers over the next several weeks - we have much to discuss in the wake of the shameful actions of American Steamship Co.
Meanwhile, I thank the AMO engineers, mates and stewards who have stood fast in support of our union during this crisis - I pledge to them that I will not bow to GATX and American Steamship Co., no matter how this strike saga plays out.