Seafarers International Union of North America

Infobox Union
name= SIU
country= United States
affiliation= AFL-CIO
members= 35,498 (2005)
full_name= Seafarers International Union
native_name=


founded= October 14, 1938
current=
head=
dissolved_date=
dissolved_state=
merged_into=
office= Camp Springs, Maryland
people= Michael Sacco, president
website= [http://www.seafarers.org/index.xml www.seafarers.org]
footnotes=
thumb|right|Seafarers International Union is the largest union in North America representing merchant mariners. [">cite web
title = SIU Profile
url = http://www.seafarers.org/about/index.xml
accessdate=March 16 | accessyear=2008] (CIO) and its communist faction."Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific," by Stephen Schwartz. Published 1986 by Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0887381219.]

Today the SIU represents mariners and boatmen who sail aboard U.S.-flagged vessels in deep sea, the Great Lakes, and inland waterways. Membership includes workers in the deck, steward, and engine departments. SIU members are represented aboard a wide variety of vessels, including: military support, commercial trade, tugboats, passenger ships, barges, and gaming vessels. Military support vessels operated by the U.S. Department of Defense's Military Sealift Command (MSC) provide a key source of jobs for seafarers. MSC operates some 110 noncombat ships that support U.S. forces around the world. [cite web
title = SIU - Military Sealift Command accepts USNS Richard E. Byrd
url = http://www.seafarers.org/HeardAtHQ/2008/Q1/byrd.xml
work = Seafarers International Union
accessdate=February 23 | accessyear=2008] .

SIU membership includes elilgiblity for access to heatlhcare, retirement, and educuation benefits. Educational facilities include the union's Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education at Piney Point, Maryland.

The training center started in Brooklyn, New York, and is named after a former SIU president, the late Paul Haul. The school opened in 1967 and has trained more than 100,000 mariners. ["Mariner Education and Workforce," Capitol Hill Hearing Testimony. Statement of Augustin Tellez, Executive Vice President, The Seafarers International Union, Atlantic, Gulf, Lakes, and Inland Waters District/NMU. CQ Congressional Testimony. October 17, 2007.]

Highly active in the political arena, the SIU states that its primary focus is to maintain safe working environments for men and women working aboard vessels, and to ensure very high standards of training among its membership.

History

The Seafarers International Union's founding on October 14, 1938, came during the turbulent times of the Great Depression, a worldwide economic slowdown, and the international rise of communism. SIU's roots, however, reach back to 1892, when delegates representing unions of the West Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes gathered at a seamen’s convention in Chicago. The convention eventually gave rise to a federation of maritime unions known as the International Seamen's Union (ISU) chartered by the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

SIU's origin is portrayed by the union as an outcome of the "wreckage" of ISU. [Bunker, 1983.] The breakup saw ISU membership plummet from more than 100,000 after World War I to less than 3,000 by the mid-1930s."Maritime unions merge," Journal of Commerce. June 5, 2001. The article notes how on-again, off-again merger talks dated back to the 1950s, while the rivalry between the two unions extended to the late 1930s. NMU affiliated with SIU in in 1999 and fully merged on March 16, 2001.] The revocation of ISU's charter and the loss of 30,000 seamen in July of 1937 to the Congress of Industrial Organizations' newly formed National Maritime Union (NMU) signaled ISU's death knell.

Leadership of AFL, one of the first federations of labor unions, understood that the ISU was near collapse. The AFL subsequently moved to replace it by issuing a charter to the Sailors Union of the Pacific (SUP) to organize the new Seafarers International Union. Harry Lundeberg, a SUP officer and seaman who was originally from Norway, became the Seafarers International Union's first president. The SUP remained autonmous for years within SIU.

The AFL's action to form the SIU not only countered the threat of loss of seafaring jobs to the NMU but also served as a political block against the increasing communist influence in the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations.. De La Pedraja Tomán, 1994, p. 536.] NMU, a product of the economic struggles and waterfront strikes of the times, became a longtime nemesis of SIU. The two unions fiercely competed for seafaring jobs until they merged in 2001.

The Seafarers International Union membership lagged behind that of the National Maritime Union during World War II. Then Paul Hall started organizing seamen on the East Coast and the Gulf. By 1948, the surge in new membership propelled Hall to the post of SIU vice president.De La Pedraja Tomán, 1994, p. 537.]

The 1950s saw further strengthening of the SIU with acquisition through mergers of two additional unions:
* The Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders, and Wipers of the Pacific Coast (MFOWW).
* National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards (NUMCS). This consolidation helped the SIU edge out the NMU whose earlier purging of communist members had left it weakened. Moreover, Lundeberg's death in 1957 ended a long-running power struggle between Lundeberg and Hall. Heir-apparent Hall subsequently was named SIU president and, later that year president of the AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department. ["Roberts' Dictionary of Industrial Relations," by Harold Selig Roberts. Published 1994 by BNA Books. ISBN 0871797771. The CIO originally split off from the AFL. The two federations merged in 1955. However, they failed to agree upon a new name so each federation was combined into the new moniker: AFL-CIO. The merger consolidated 130 international unions.]

When Hall took over the Maritime Trades Department, it was a struggling organization made up of only six small unions. He built it into an active and effective political force in the trade union movement. At his death, Maritime Trades Department comprised 43 national and international unions representing nearly 8 million American workers.

In 1967, Hall established the Seafarers Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship in Piney Point, Maryland, to give young people the chance for a career at sea. Since then, the school has become one of the finest maritime training schools in the country. Thousands of SIU members have advanced their skills at the school. Moreover, the Harry Lundeberg School has also presented opportunities for generations of young people from deprived backgrounds to gain employment.

After an eight month battle with cancer, Hall passed away in 1980.cite web | title = Paul Hall Remembered | url = http://www.seafarers.org/about/phrem.xml | work = seafarers.org | accessdate=March 16 | accessyear=2007]

Controversy

In 2005, SIU and the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education were sued for age discrimination by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the opinion on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, "throughout this appeal, and in the proceedings before the district court, the center and the union ... maintained that age-barriers to entry are a hallmark of apprenticeships and complained that the EEOC’s regulation effectively guts that employment practice by erasing its defining characteristic." [cite web
title = Appeals from the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, at Baltimore. Marvin J. Garbis, Senior District Judge. (CA-02-3192-MJG)
url = http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/032057.P.pdf
work = Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
accessdate=March 16 | accessyear=2008] .

In testimony before the Canadian Parliament in 1996, David Broadfoot of the Canadian Merchant Navy Association recalled that in 1946, "Our government imported a thug, a real heavy-duty gangster from Brooklyn (Hal C. Banks), to smash our union and bring in the Seafarers' International Union... which was no different from the Teamsters at its worst and no different from the longshoremen's association at its worst... They came on our ships with baseball bats and bicycle chains. That's how they introduced their union to Canada." [cite web
title = Tuesday June 18, 1996
url = http://www.parl.gc.ca/35/Archives/committees352/defa/evidence/06_96-06-18/defa06_blk101.html
work = http://www.parl.gc.ca
accessdate=March 16 | accessyear=2008]

Presidents

* Harry Lundeberg (1938-1957)
* Paul Hall (1957-1980)
* Frank Drozak (1980-1988)
* Michael Sacco (1988-current)

Affiliated unions

According to its 2005 report at [http://erds.dol-esa.gov/query/getOrgQry.do The Department of Labor] , total membership of all 13 affiliated unions [cite web
title = Seafarers International Union of North America, AFL-CIO, Affiliate Unions
url = http://www.seafarers.org/about/affiliates.xml
work = seafarers.org
accessdate=March 16 | accessyear=2007] is 35,498. Information for affiliated unions follows:

Recently terminated affiliate unions

* Seafarers' Professional Security Officers Association was terminated in 2004.cite web
title = Union Detail
url = http://erds.dol-esa.gov/query/
work = US Department of Labor, Employment Standards Administration
accessdate=March 16| accessyear=2007]
* Seafarers AFL-CIO Local Union 5 Chauffeurs and Industrial Workers was terminated in 2000.
* Seafarers AFL-CIO Local Union 300 United Industrial Workers - Midwest was terminated in 2000.
* Seafarers AFL-CIO Local Union Marine Staff Officers Pacific District was terminated in 2002.

ee also

*Harry Lundeberg
*Paul Hall
*Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education
*Michael Sacco
*Frank Drozak
*United States Merchant Marine

;Related organizations
*American Maritime Officers
*National Maritime Union
*Marine Engineers Benevolent Association
*Maritime Trades Department
*Sailors' Union of the Pacific

Notes

References

*cite web
url= http://www.seafarers.org/about/history.xml
title= A History of the SIU
accessdate=2008-03-20
last= Bunker
first= John
coauthors=
date= 1983
work= seafarers.org
publisher=Seafarers International Union
*cite book
author=De La Pedraja Tomán, René
title=A Historical Dictionary of the U. S. Merchant Marine and Shipping Industry: Since the Introduction of Steam
publisher=Greenwood Press
location=Westport, Connecticut
year=1994
pages=768
isbn=0-313-27225-5
oclc=
doi= |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=rQJcXRK0gkQC&pg=PA374&lpg=PA374&dq=%22Frank+Drozak%22&source=web&ots=ZyiweEEOKg&sig=Ccbh4Vhdw5jUDR98Kz8UW-ycjIM&hl=en#PPA536,M1
*cite book
author=Gall, Gilbert J.; Zieger, Robert H.
title=American Workers, American Unions: the Twentieth Century
publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press
location=Baltimore, Maryland
year=2002
pages=
isbn=080187078X.
oclc=
doi=

External links

* [http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.asp?ID=D000000145 Election contributions at OpenSecrets]
* [http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.asp?strid=C00004325&cycle=2006 SIU 2006 PAC Summary Data]
* [http://www.marad.dot.gov/Headlines/speeches/SIU_convention.htm MARAD Administrator's Remarks at 2002 SIUNA Convention ]