Possible early contract still alive after contentious meeting prompts reconciliation

The top two officers at the International Longshoremen’s Association proclaimed peace within the union on Wednesday in the immediate aftermath of an acrimonious leadership meeting that drew picketing by union activists.

“Harold and I shook hands together and said we’re going to work together and move forward on negotiations,” Hughes said. “We’ve agreed to work together as a team.” “We do not want to split this union,” Daggett said. “We will work together for the rank and file.” An hour earlier, Hughes won a vote of confidence by 24-2 of the ILA’s executive council at the meeting in Washington. Four council members abstained.

Minutes after the meeting, Daggett complained that the vote had been “railroaded” and that he had been denied the right to speak. Later, Daggett and Hughes said the controversy in the meeting was mooted by their agreement to bury the hatchet. The meeting was called after Daggett sharply criticized Hughes’ attempts to negotiate a new contract with port management a year before the expiration of the current agreement.

That effort has divided the ILA, and about 30 members of the dissident Longshore Workers Coalition picketed outside the Washington hotel against the plan for an early contract extension. “Right now, with the economy being where it is, we’re in a position that’s to the advantage of the employer,” said Kimoko Harris, a longshore worker with Local 1883 in Wilmington, Del.

Hughes disputed claims that he has already agreed to “givebacks,” saying any potential agreement will have to go to the ILA’s wage scale committee at a meeting next week in Orlando, Fla. “We’ll have to see,” he said. Whether the union gives up anything “depends on what they give us on the other end. You’ve got to have the whole package.”

Daggett, meanwhile, had said in response to a reporter’s question that he planned to run for the ILA presidency in 2011, even if Hughes seeks re-election. After he and Hughes announced they’d work together, he said he still plans to run, but he and Hughes sought to deflect attention from union politics to the impending contract negotiations. “That’s two years down the road,” Daggett said.

The current contract doesn’t expire till Sept. 30, 2010, but Hughes and management’s United States Maritime Alliance have been meeting to discuss an early extension that would deter shippers from shifting cargo to other coasts out of fear of a potential work stoppage.