With continuously tense talks having finally broken down completely, President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act on October 8 for the first time in 31 years. West Coast ports are open again. The Pacific Maritime Association (PMA)'s abrupt lockout of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) workers at 29 West Coast ports is, for at least 80 days, over. Only one question remains.

Why?

The surface basis of the labor dispute has been endlessly reported: the two sides have been unable to agree on how new technology will be incorporated into coveted, high-paying cargo-tracking jobs on the waterfront, and particularly on whether those jobs must all be union jobs.

But according to most economists, that's what makes no sense. Compared to the scale of damage to the American economy caused by the PMA's lockout, the financial difference represented by the two sides is minimal. The estimated cost of whether new jobs would all be union or non-union is only about $20 million a year for shippers--relative peanuts, representing perhaps 300 or so jobs in total.

Moreover, the ILWU has already agreed that it will accept new technology so long as remaining cargo-tracking jobs remain unionized, and has agreed to mediation on the issue. And just ahead of Bush's referral of the dispute for a court injunction, the ILWU offered to go back to work under a 30-day extension of their expired contract. That offer was turned down.

But why can't the two sides even sit down at the table together?

The ILWU charges that the reason is much broader: that after decades of having to honor hard-fought union victories, the PMA is out to break the union. Further, union leaders and members have every belief that the Bush Administration intends to help--in fact, has already done so by invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act, organized labor's single most loathed law.

"The problem isn't the beginning of Taft-Hartley," says Vance Lelli, a spokesman for ILWU Local 23 and president of the Pierce County Central Labor Council. "It's what [the Bush Administration] can invoke at the end of it--the forced contracts, the concessions."

Both the Bush Administration and the Pacific Maritime Association vehemently deny an orchestrated attempt to destroy the ILWU and the unionization of West Coast ports, and evidence for the ILWU's union-busting claims is largely circumstantial. It starts with the notion, fought for since the Oakland General Strike of 1934, of total solidarity and total unionization among the West Coast's 10,500 waterfront workers. Any crack in that solidarity--an injury to one--is seen as a potentially devastating loss of union control.

But at a less theoretical level, the ILWU sees its union-busting case is self-evident, starting with the PMA itself--particularly the man running it, Joseph Miniace. "He's a union-buster," says Tacoma's Lelli, who watched from across town as Charles Hurwitz dismantled Kaiser Aluminum three years ago after similar lockout tactics against steelworkers. "This isn't [Miniace's] first and won't be his last. It's the only reason he was hired...he had no experience in shipping. He had one set of experiences, and he's using it."

Miniace arrived to run the PMA in the mid-'90s with a resume of successfully attacking unions during confrontations in the nursing and airline industries. He first came to national labor attention at the PMA by adopting a new tactic of repeated multimillion dollar lawsuits against the ILWU and its members for losses from job actions--including Oakland dockworkers who refused, along with workers in a half-dozen other countries, to cross 1997 picket lines to unload the cargo of the Neptune Jade in support of a British labor conflict, and after a 1995 coastwide dock protest to support two Seattle ILWU members the union contended were unfairly disciplined. The ILWU charged at the time that the lawsuits were designed to bankrupt, and thus break, the union.

The ILWU now says negotiations since May have been in the same spirit and part of the same long-term strategy. Local members also charge that recent efforts at the Port of Seattle and other West Coast ports to shift responsibility for work contracts from publicly run ports to private employers is also part of a long-term deunionization effort on the waterfront. And speculation was common last spring that with PMA irritation over what it characterized as union work slowdowns during previous contract talks in 1996 and 1999, shippers would launch a lockout should talks extend past the June 30 contract expiration this year.

To nobody's surprise, they did. "They've been playing these games since May, give and take back and give and take back," complains Lelli. "That's all they're gonna do for the [next] 80 days. At the end of the 80 days they'll have all their Christmas stuff in, all their New Year's stuff in. It's a perfect time to lock us out for a few months and see how we hold up. That's where Miniace's going. That's what he does."

Last week, the Washington State Labor Council sent out another alert. While the 80-day clock ticks and negotiations remain stalemated, the AFL-CIO charges the PMA intends to file suit and press for criminal charges in an effort to both jail ILWU leaders and bankrupt the union. So much for cooling off.

For ILWU activists, this month's lockout, when it came, was a setup, and so is President Bush's return to work order. Taft-Hartley came just in time to avoid major damage to holiday retail distribution, and the 80-day period expires on January 8--after election season, and when retail shipping is near its annual lowest.

At that point, history suggests further conflict is all but inevitable. Taft-Hartley has been invoked by the President for each of the 11 coastwide port shutdowns since the law was passed in 1947, including twice during the only time in the ILWU's history that it has struck--a bitter eight-month shutdown in 1971-72. Of the 11 times Taft-Hartley has resulted in an 80-day cooling off periods, the work stoppage promptly resumed afterward eight times. And the ILWU has charged for months that the Bush Administration members have personally threatened the union with federal intervention on behalf of shippers, and even that the White House is training Navy personnel to fill in at shut down ports.

In the end, the charge of union-busting comes down to aggressive and intransigent negotiating by a trade association dominated by big shipping companies, and the figure of Miniace. "They don't care about the economic damage to people...Miniace's got a pot of gold at the end of this task and he doesn't care about anything else--not Alaska or Hawaii or the nation's economy," says Lelli.

"How can one man blockade the West Coast, and how can the government come down on his side at the end? This is unbridled corporate capitalism at its finest, and we have to put an end to it." And Lelli sees that struggle as looking grim. "This guy was a union-buster twice...We may not win this thing. We may be changed forever. But it's gonna be a war between now and then."