Minorities, Women Paying In Grief For Jobs On The Docks

Longshoremen have the best-paying blue-collar jobs in the country. Average earnings last year: $65,000 - more for union members. Pay for the top jobs exceeds $100,000. The waterfront has long been a white, male world. Minorities and women who manage to break in say they are met with harassment, discrimination and intimidation.

Albert Collins had labored on the Seattle waterfront 28 years and believed he had earned the respect of his fellow longshoremen. Then one day last fall, his former union boss called him the worst thing you can call an African-American. Not once, but three times.

Tacoma dockworker Linda Nyland said she was unloading a ship a few years ago when a longshore official grabbed her by the hips and pulled her to him, saying: "This is what you get for bending over."

Welcome to the waterfront.

The stories of Collins and Nyland are not unusual, many women and minority dockworkers in Seattle and Tacoma say. Frustrated by what they believe is a corrupt internal grievance system, 74 longshoremen, male and female, black and white, have taken their stories of discrimination to the courthouse.

In three years, Seattle and Tacoma dockworkers have filed eight discrimination lawsuits against three Northwest locals of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union: Local 23 of Tacoma, Local 19 of Seattle and Local 98, the Federal Way-based foremen's union. The suits also are directed at the Pacific Maritime

Association (PMA), which represents the shipping and stevedoring companies that hire the longshoremen.

The allegations in the lawsuits, denied by the union and maritime association, portray a waterfront rife with racial tension, sexual harassment and nepotism - a place where rules are bent and laws are broken, where individuals who question the system are intimidated and threatened, and sometimes, face violence.

All of the suits allege key points, which interviews with 35 dockworkers reinforce:

-- Women and minorities are denied promotion to better jobs because of their sex or race.

-- Many women and minorities are subjected to a hostile working environment that involves racial slurs, sexual harassment and violence.

-- Union and maritime-association officials have ignored pleas and court orders to eliminate racial and sexual discrimination.

Dockworkers say they have raised their concerns with the union and employer-labor committees. But time after time, they say, the labor committees have ignored their complaints.

The dockworkers who filed lawsuits say they were a last resort in an effort to resolve the problems.

Others, who agreed to interviews with The Times, are telling their stories for the first time, knowing they may face retaliation for going public.

"There has been discrimination on the waterfront," said Jim Walls, former business agent for Local 23. "(It's) not only directed at black and female members, but it's been directed at all members when they challenge the ruling elite" in the union and maritime association.

Walls said he received 14 death threats from dockworkers while serving as union business agent in 1991 and 1992. He thinks the threats resulted from his questioning of Local 23's hiring practices and for being the first white union official to testify that racial discrimination exists in the union.

"If you challenge the system, you are branded as a radical and could face threats and retaliation," he said.

Union and maritime-association officials deny there's discrimination in either Seattle or Tacoma and say they review discrimination complaints fairly.

The suits result from competition for a shrinking number of high-paying jobs, said Craig Johnson, area manager for the maritime association.

"There's a lot of people who want to get these longshore jobs that pay $75,000 a year. . . . People are frustrated over the procedures and rules" for getting them, he said.

20 years to join the union

For decades, the Northwest longshore locals have remained a tight club of mostly white men. They once toiled under gritty, often dangerous, working conditions, where crushed bones were common and the pay was marginal.

Today, longshoremen have the best-paying blue-collar jobs in the country. Average annual wage last year was $65,000, but for registered union members it exceeded $70,000. Crane operators, clerks and foremen earned more than $100,000. They have generous benefits, from fully paid medical insurance to as much as six weeks vacation.

But the waiting list to join the union is long; some people wait 20 years.

Mechanization of the ports has eliminated much of the heavy lifting and thinned the ranks of workers by more than two-thirds. As a result, the number of longshoremen on the West Coast has shrunk from 25,000 in the mid-1970s to 8,000 today.

At the same time, women and minorities are competing more aggressively for the dwindling number of jobs. They say the discrimination complaints reflect a reluctance by the unions and the maritime association to change with the times.

The Pacific Maritime Association is composed of steamship, terminal and stevedoring companies from San Diego to Seattle. It is responsible for hiring dockworkers for the companies as well as bargaining with the Longshoremen's Union. The association represents such maritime transportation giants as American President Lines, Sea-Land Services, Stevedoring Services of America, Jones Stevedoring, Matson Terminals and Hanjin.

For many reasons, joining the local longshore unions always has been difficult. Until recently, nepotism was embraced proudly. Many longtime members got their sons and grandsons into the union.

These veteran members resisted accepting women and minorities into their ranks, say dockworkers. It took federal civil-rights rulings to force the union and the maritime association to begin hiring women and people of color.

Women and minorities now represent 3 to 5 percent of the roughly 1,000 Seattle and Tacoma dockworkers who are full members of the Longshoremen's Union, according to local unions sources. Local 19 and maritime-association officials declined to release exact numbers.

Even for the insiders, competition is fierce for plum jobs such as crane driver, clerk or foreman. And while union officials say advancement is based on seniority, minority dockworkers offer examples where seniority was overlooked.

Only one black man has ever been promoted to clerk in Tacoma Local 23. He was 62 years old and had to seek arbitration to advance. Other younger black men have been eligible but have not been selected.

For advancement to clerk, employers select half of the candidates and the union chooses the other half. But employers do not have to base their decisions on seniority. Tacoma dockworker Doug Woods is eligible and has tried several times to become a clerk but has never been selected. In the most recent promotion in 1994, the union and the PMA selected eight white men and no minorities.

The one black clerk in Tacoma represents 1.4 percent of the 68 clerks employed there. The statistic fails to mirror the black population of 7.2 percent in Pierce County.

In his appeals to the union and the employers, Woods cited two federal rulings that required Los Angeles longshore locals to promote a "racially balanced work force consistent with the racial composition of the general population."

After Woods had pursued his appeal for nearly two years, the "coast arbitrator," who makes the final decision in labor disputes between union and PMA, said he had no authority to decide the case.

Frustrated, Woods joined one of the discrimination lawsuits.

"If blacks can't be chosen by seniority, then employers (the PMA) should pick some minorities as well as white candidates to reflect the racial balance of the community," Woods said. "This is a lucrative job. I want all minorities and women to have an equal shot."

Scott Mason, president of Local 23 in Tacoma, agrees the number of minority clerks does not reflect the racial makeup of Pierce County.

"But our hands our tied," he said. "We can only promote people to clerk registration based on straight seniority."

It's unlikely the union will ever abandon the seniority system, which is held sacred by members. Even if a local wanted to, it couldn't do it on its own. Such a change would have to be adopted throughout the whole union, coastwide.

As for the management side, the PMA's Johnson said late Friday that in reviewing applicants for promotion to clerk the maritime association does consider issues of diversity. In the next five weeks, he said there will be 16 more clerks and five foremen in Seattle and Tacoma. Then the PMA will request another 16 more clerks.

"All of the issues of diversity are being addressed in the current (promotion) process," Johnson said. "We're addressing the problem and we're working on it."

African American Dave Williams, a Seattle longshoreman for Local 19, toiled for nearly 43 years before he became a foreman.

The foreman's union - Local 98 - has about 80 foremen who serve the Northwest ports. Seattle has approximately five African-American and one Hispanic foremen. Tacoma has two African-American foremen. There are no women.

For much of his career, Williams drove a $6 million crane - a job that requires a sharp mind and a cool head. Crane drivers are considered the hot shots of the waterfront and can save or cost an employer money. Sitting up in a 120-foot tower that sometimes sways in the wind, top drivers like Williams can lift more than 45 containers an hour and set the pace for the whole operation.

Most capable crane drivers can advance to foreman - the best-paying job on the docks at about $129,000 a year. It's a natural fit. Both jobs have lots of responsibility and require snap decisions.

For 20 years, Williams wanted to become a foreman. But he wasn't promoted until he was 62. He has not filed a lawsuit, but he did testify in one of the discrimination cases.

Despite his seniority and skills, Williams says the foremen's union and the maritime association opposed his promotion. Later, the maritime association supported his bid but Local 98 opposed it. He had to seek arbitration to win advancement.

"When I first started down here - I mean, you just didn't have the mental attitude of thinking that you could get in the foremen's union," Williams said. "Blacks, we were conditioned to the fact that we could not get those jobs. Not that we couldn't do it, but you just couldn't get them."

Referring to less-skilled jobs, he said, "You could drive winches, you could work in the (ship's) hole, but you couldn't be in charge. And that was the social attitude not only on the waterfront but through society."

"The only reason I think they (promoted) me was I've got 42 years on the waterfront, I'm a black person, I have an excellent work record, and if I took it to court, they couldn't win it."

Paul Wieser, president of Local 98, the foremen's union, declined to respond to requests for comment on the delay in promoting Williams or the cases against his local.

But Jack Block, a longshore foreman and Port of Seattle commissioner, admitted in a recent deposition that there are members of Local 98 who have sexist or discriminatory views.

"You asked me if I thought that we had a group of people who were opposed to women and made comments about women, and I answered yes," Block said. "It was a judgment on my part that, yes, we do have people that are racist. We do have people that are bigots."

Dockworkers tell their stories

Some allegations of harrowing harassment and intimidation emerge from the lawsuits and interviews with dockworkers.

-- Jennifer Murray, 26, of Auburn, a dockworker for Seattle Local 19, said a male co-worker rubbed his crotch against her buttocks three times while they lashed containers at Terminal 37 in July. She said she protested each time and finally hit him in the hand with a lashing bar. When she told her foreman, Sven Lerbrek, what happened, she said he told her: " `If you can't (expletive) handle it, what are you doing down here?' " She has not filed a suit.

Lerbrek denies Murray told him she had been harassed. But he acknowledges that a man injured his hand on the shift.

-- Foreman Albert Collins was working the early morning shift, when he approached Don Miniken, the former president of Local 98 and a longtime colleague who had presided over the foremen's union for 20 years.

Collins tried to banter with Miniken, but Miniken replied by calling him a racist name three times and complaining that African Americans were demanding and supposedly had the piers "wrapped up."

The comment devastated Collins.

"It made me feel like I wanted to give up," said Collins, who is not a party to any of the lawsuits. "It was a shock. You feel like you have been accepted, but then you realize all along, you weren't."

Miniken admits using the racial slur, but he said his comments were not directed at Collins. However, a witness, longshoreman Lloyd Holloman, confirmed Collins' version of the events.

"It was a sarcastic remark," Miniken said. "It wasn't directed at Al (Collins) or anyone else. It was unfortunate, but I didn't know anyone overheard it."

-- After she had first filed a discrimination grievance and a civil-rights complaint against Local 23, Tacoma Dockworker Kaye Thompson was repeatedly threatened with bodily injury and was the victim of hostile, demeaning accusations, she said in a statement to the Department of Labor. Someone dented her car, flattened her tires and crossed the brake hoses so she had no brakes on the truck she drove to work, she said.

Longshoremen called Thompson's daughter a "whore" and bragged that they had had sexual relations with her, she said. The retaliation got so bad that Thompson's attorney, Stephen Connor, threatened immediate legal action against Local 23, Local 98 and the maritime association.

"We cannot express strongly enough to you that not only has a hostile work environment been permitted to exist for Ms. Thompson and other women," Connor wrote, "but that an extremely dangerous atmosphere is now developing at the docks and work sites for Ms. Thompson because she has chosen to exercise her lawful rights."

-- Ruben T. Chavez, a longshoreman for Local 23, said six white men dragged him out of a truck and threw him to the pavement when he tried to seek advanced truck training. He lodged a grievance with the union and the maritime association, he said, but officials ignored the complaint. He said he still has not received advanced training.

Local 23 officials never heard about that complaint, according to Mason, the Tacoma local's president. "He may not have received the training, but a lot of people haven't received the training," Mason said. Chavez says a copy of his complaint is on record with the union.

-- In more than 10 years as a longshoreman, Tacoma dockworker Gail Ross said she's endured lewd comments and threats. They have ranged from male workers suggesting she would have to give them oral sex to being ridiculed in offensive language on the dock's communications radio while checking containers in Seattle.

Silence or retaliation

Despite persistent complaints of discrimination in the registering and promotion of longshoremen, neither union nor maritime officials in Seattle or Tacoma have adopted an affirmative action plan.

"All the lawsuits have to do with one key point: that the longshore officials and the (maritime association) believe they can do whatever they want," said Lynn Scott, a longshoreman in Tacoma and an African-American woman. "That's the way they've always operated. They feel that they don't have to take responsibility for their own actions."

Union and maritime-association officials, in general terms, deny there is a climate of harassment and intimidation. They declined to respond to specific instances because of the pending lawsuits.

Mason said he has not witnessed any threats or retaliation by a Local 23 official against a union member. The contract, he said, protects union members from retaliation.

The maritime association is concerned about the allegations of discrimination, Johnson said, but added, "I don't believe the issue is as great as what it appears to be."

Still, the maritime association has conducted diversity training, he said, and it has distributed to dockworkers information on sexual harassment and racial discrimination.

For decades, union and company power brokers have controlled the Seattle and Tacoma docks as personal fiefdoms, rewarding allies and family with promotions and steady work and punishing those who refuse to follow the unwritten code of rules, dockworkers say.

One of the unwritten rules of the waterfront is silence. Problems are resolved behind closed doors. No one speaks out for fear of retaliation, which could range from no work to physical harm, dockworkers say.

At a union meeting three years ago, Scott stood up and supported a proposal for Local 23 to adopt a lottery system to register women and minorities. Her action resulted in threats on her life, she said.

"I got up to the podium and asked what happens if there isn't one minority or female in the barrel (available to be chosen by lottery)?" Scott recalled. The union official said that would be too bad, according to Scott.

"I got back up to the podium and said: `If we do not take any women or minorities, I'll run an ad in the paper and tell them myself to sue us.' "

Later, a crane driver and Local 23 executive board member Dragon Butorac, approached one of Scott's female co-workers, Gail Ross, and according to Ross, handed her a bullet and asked, " `Why don't you give this to Lynn (Scott)?' "

Then he snatched the bullet back, said Ross.

"I was told not to go on logs," Scott said, referring to the loading of raw lumber onto ships, one of the more dangerous jobs.

"People approached me and said there were threats on my life. The day-side people stopped talking to me."

Butorac admits the incident took place but said Scott and Ross have blown it out of proportion.

Butorac said he gave Ross the end of a used bullet and said: "Here, give this to Lynn." Then, he said, he quickly grabbed it back and added: "We wouldn't want Lynn to take it seriously."

"It was just a joke," Butorac said. "If someone wants to take it out of context, that's their problem."

When African-American dockworker Tracy Montgomery of Tacoma brought his complaint about a racial slur and harassment to the attention of union officials, he said he became a target of intimidation and retaliation.

Montgomery said the intimidation got so bad that he filed for a restraining order in Pierce County Superior Court in 1993 against a union official he identifies in court papers as Lee Braach. Braach is a Local 23 longshoreman and member of the joint labor relations committee.

After he presented his discrimination complaint to the labor relations committee, Montgomery said Braach followed him several times during and after work.

One day, Braach followed him to a service station in Fife, Montgomery alleged. As soon as he got out of his car to put air in his tires, Braach parked behind him, climbed out, and told Montgomery that " `I don't want your kind working here,' " Montgomery said.

Montgomery, then 20, says the union official "called me a troublemaker and a (racial slur)."

"I told him to stop harassing me and to leave me alone or I'll call the police," Montgomery recalled telling Braach.

Braach says the allegations are "completely false and totally outlandish."

One day after work, Montgomery found his tires slashed. On another day, his car windows were smashed. On the day he discovered the broken windows, Montgomery said, Braach was standing nearby with his arms crossed and said, " `You're having car problems, huh?' "

Braach said he was never in the vicinity.

Jobs are risky, hard to get

The waterfront always has been considered a rough and sometimes dangerous place to work, where semiskilled workers can earn the same money as lawyers and doctors.

In eight hours, longshoremen can strip a ship the size of an aircraft carrier and then reload it in a furious orchestration of men and machinery. Local 23 dockworkers demonstrated that one Friday night, when they unloaded and loaded 800 highway trailers and 100 vehicles lashed to three decks of a ship bound for Anchorage.

Special trucks, known as "hustlers," roared on and off the ship, pulling highway trailers as fast as the nerves and skill of the drivers allowed.

Lashers unchained the trailers and vehicles - dodging the speeding hustlers - and then regrouped to begin lashing the new trailers as the drivers backed them into tight spots.

In longshoreman parlance, this is known as a "highball operation."

Local 23's Mason, 43, a third-generation longshoreman, stood inside the cavernous hull and pointed to the hustler drivers, also known as "hot dogs."

Most of the drivers are second- and third-generation longshoremen, proud inheritors of a long tradition of fathers passing their skills to the next generation, he said. This is true in Mason's family. He and his brother, Devin, a crane driver, started working on the docks when they were teenagers. Their father is a longshore clerk.

"They passed on a work ethic. It creates pressure. You have to be as good as your brother or father." That work ethic, he said, is responsible for turning Tacoma dockworkers into the most productive on the West Coast.

Dissident dockworkers' lawsuits are attacking Local 23's tradition of nepotism, saying the system has resulted in a handful of families exerting a heavy influence over union matters. Local 23 is dominated by a group of families such as the Masons, dockworkers say.

Mason said the days of nepotism are over for Local 23: "It's not acceptable. Even if there is no discrimination, it has the possibility. We have moved away from that."

One of the places dockworkers say was rife with favoritism and nepotism was the dispatching system.

A longshoreman's financial fate is determined by people who run the dispatch hall. That, in turn, is partly controlled by the maritime association.

"There's discrimination at every level of the waterfront, including dispatching," said Dallas DeLay, a registered member of Local 19, who is white and who has held several committee and executive positions. "To me, that's the most offensive."

Dispatchers in Tacoma used longshoremen called "casuals" to build or remodel their homes for free in exchange for getting them additional hours needed to qualify as registered union members, according to a lawsuit filed by 42 casual longshoremen. If they refused or asked for payment, the extra hours disappeared, the suit said.

As a result of the lawsuit, Local 23 has changed its dispatching system. The lawsuit was settled out of court Nov. 11, and neither Local 23 nor the maritime association admitted any wrongdoing. The union no longer relies on what was known as "dispatcher discretion," which allowed dispatchers to select one person over another for specific tasks. Now, dispatching is based on an earnings-and-rotation system. The one with the lowest earnings gets first crack at a job.

In 1993, a longshore official who had investigated the discrimination complaints in the Northwest ports issued a warning to fellow officers. It was recorded in the minutes of an executive board meeting:

"Somebody is eventually going to take his grievance to court," said Richard Cavalli, an executive vice president for the International Longshoremen's Union. "And we won't be the ones who win."

Inquiry or inquisition?

Linda Nyland had signed the Tacoma dispatch pad as a lasher and was waiting inside the break room with the other lashers when the foreman approached her.

The boss, now deceased, stood two inches from her face, she said, and started screaming at her. She could feel his spit on her face.

"He was stating in front of everybody that women do not belong on the waterfront," she said. "And that if I mess up, he was going to be on my ass and he was going to make sure he was going to get me. He told me to continue to look over my shoulder because he would be breathing down my neck. And I got on the ship, and I worked, and he was there, standing watching me all night long. Every time I turned around he was there.

"I was one of the last people to walk off the ship that day. I was such a nervous wreck. By the time I got to my car, I was crying so hard. I couldn't believe how anybody could humiliate another person just because I was a woman - not because I wasn't doing my job. I was doing my job very good."

Nyland is one of four female dockworkers of Local 23 suing the Tacoma union for sexual discrimination and harassment. She first complained in December 1994 to the Tacoma Longshore Joint Port Labor Relations Committee, a panel of 11 white men, including Johnson, of the maritime association, and Mason.

During that hearing, Nyland questioned why the committee allowed one of its members, John Dover, whom she accused of sexually harassing her, to remain on the board while she outlined her complaints.

She told the committee that she had been the subject of sexual harassment and discrimination - nearly all of the sexual harassment coming from her supervisors.

"Their desire to bully and humiliate me is an abuse of their power," she said. "And their behavior has been rude, degrading and unrelenting. Verbal harassment has been the most common, but I have been the victim of physical abuse such as grabbing and touching."

When the committee pressed her for names and details, she walked over to the table and pointed her finger at Dover, one of the Local 23 union officials appointed to the joint labor committee.

"I walked away from the dog house (a dock shelter) a little bit and bent over to pick something up. Mr. Dover came by, grabbed me by the hips, pulled me up to his groin area," she said. "And he said `this is what you get for bending over.'

"There was also another time. . . . I was near the end of my shift and he came over and walked by me and grabbed me around the waist and swung me around, and he said that he wished that he didn't have to go to work."

Dover denied the allegations, saying he had no recollection of the incidents. He said sexual harassment is something that "I have not got any pattern of doing."

But then Nyland asked if Dover would remain on the board while she voiced her complaints.

Johnson said yes and added: " `Are you opposed to him being here?' "

Nyland said she was.

The committee ignored her objections and later ruled that her complaint had no merit, because the alleged incidents had happened more than six months before.

Mason declined to discuss Nyland's case, citing litigation, but he contends that the labor relations committee always acted conscientiously and objectively and "struggles hard to do the right thing."

Johnson disputes claims that the grievance system is unfair.

"There have been instances where people have brought (discrimination) grievances before the committee and their grievances have been sustained," Johnson said, adding that some are frustrated because the committee did not support their claims. "Maybe the grievance didn't have merit."

But in her statement to the Department of Labor, Nyland said her attempt to explain her experiences to the committee was unsettling.

"This whole experience was more like an inquisition than a chance for me to present a problem to a body which could take action to cure it," she said.

----------------- Jobs on the docks -----------------

Competition to become one of approximately 1,000 union-registered longshoremen in Seattle and Tacoma is fierce and can take years, if not decades. There are four levels of seniority.

-- "A" registered longshoremen earn more than $70,000 a year, have the most seniority and are guaranteed steady work. They get full medical and pension benefits and have union voting rights. To advance to crane driver, clerk or foreman - jobs that pay well over $100,000 a year - a longshoreman must be "A" registered.

-- "B" registered longshoremen have the second most seniority on the waterfront and get medical and pension benefits. They have no union voting rights and are not guaranteed steady work but usually can get 40 hours of work a week. They make in the neighborhood of $65,000 a year.

-- "Identified casuals" have accumulated 200 hours of dock work and are dispatched when the workload demands more people. Union and Pacific Maritime Association officials keep a list of 150 "I.D. casuals" for each port in Seattle and Tacoma. I.D. casuals are not covered by the union contract, earn less money and are not guaranteed work.

-- "Casuals" are at the bottom of the heap and are dispatched from the state Job Service Center sporadically. To become a casual, one must get on a list at the Job Service Center.

--------------------------- Three years, eight lawsuits ---------------------------

These are the lawsuits that have been filed against locals of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and the Pacific Maritime Association since 1994:

-- Feb. 26, 1997: Two Tacoma women dockworkers filed suit against longshore Local 23, the maritime association, the International Longshoremen's Union and 12 shipping and stevedoring companies, alleging sexual discrimination and harassment and a hostile working environment. The women are seeking class-action status.

-- Dec. 18, 1996: Twelve African-American and Hispanic dockworkers filed a suit in U.S. District Court in Tacoma that alleges union and employers denied them promotion because of their race or ethnicity. The plaintiffs, who also allege they have been subjected to a hostile work environment, filed the lawsuit against Local 23 and Local 19 of the International Longshoremen's Union and the Pacific Maritime Association.

-- May 21, 1996: Four Tacoma women dockworkers filed suit against longshore Local 23 and the maritime association in federal court, alleging sexual discrimination and harassment and a hostile working environment. Initial attempts to settle - directed by the judge - have been unsuccessful. Trial is set for Sept. 8.

-- March 27, 1996: A female longshoreman from Seattle filed a sex-discrimination suit against longshore Local 98, claiming she was denied a promotion to foreman because of her sex. Attempts to settle the case by both parties have been unsuccessful and the case is headed for trial on April 7.

-- March 15, 1996: Five longshoremen alleged in federal court that they were denied a promotion to foreman by Local 98, the longshore foremen's union, and by the maritime association because of their age, race, religion or national origin. A tentative settlement was reached with the maritime association. But the plaintiffs sought to include some retaliation charges against the union. The federal judge refused to add retaliation charges and the plaintiffs transferred their case against the union to King County Superior Court. That case is still pending. Trial is scheduled for Feb. 23, 1998.

-- Oct. 12, 1995: Nine longshoremen, ages 42 to 67, filed an age-discrimination suit against the international union, Local 23 and the maritime association. Three plaintiffs have since dropped out and attempts - directed by the court - to settle have been unsuccessful. Trial is May 27.

-- July 21, 1995: Forty-two "casual" longshoremen (those not fully registered with the union) filed a federal class-action suit against Local 23 and the maritime association, alleging that favoritism, nepotism, sexism and racism are pervasive in the dispatch system, which determines who gets work at the Port of Tacoma. The parties settled the case Nov. 11, 1996. Local 23 and the maritime association admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to change the dispatch system and promised to promote 20 more casuals to registered status over the next two years.

-- Aug. 23, 1994: A former president of longshore Local 19 filed a federal suit against his local, the international union and the maritime association, alleging breach of contract and civil claims of assault and racial discrimination.

A federal judge dismissed claims against the international union and maritime association, ruling that the assault was an internal union matter. However, claims against Local 19 are still pending, and a federal judge allowed the plaintiff to appeal the initial ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A decision is expected soon.