Seafarers International Union of North America

The Seafarers International Union or SIU is an organization of 12 autonomous labor unions

Trade union

A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...

of mariners, fishermen and boatmen working aboard vessels flagged in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

or Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. Michael Sacco

Michael Sacco

Michael Sacco is an American labor leader from Brooklyn, New York. He was appointed as the president of the Seafarers International Union of North America, AFL-CIO in June 1988 by the SIUNA Executive Board....

has been its president since 1988. The organization has an estimated 35,498 members and is the largest maritime labor organization in the United States. Organizers founded the union on October 14, 1938. The Seafarers International Union arose from a charter issued to the Sailors Union of the Pacific by the American Federation of Labor

American Federation of Labor

The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...

as a foil against loss of jobs to the Congress of Industrial Organizations

Congress of Industrial Organizations

The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...

(CIO) and its Communist Party-aligned faction.

Today the SIU represents mariners and boatmen who sail aboard U.S.-flagged vessels

Flag State

The flag state of a commercial vessel is the state under whose laws the vessel is registered or licensed.The flag state has the authority and responsibility to enforce regulations over vessels registered under its flag, including those relating to inspection, certification, and issuance of safety...

in deep sea, the Great Lakes

Great Lakes

The Great Lakes are a collection of freshwater lakes located in northeastern North America, on the Canada – United States border. Consisting of Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, they form the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth by total surface, coming in second by volume...

, and inland waterways. Membership includes workers in the deck

Deck department

The Deck Department is an organizational unit aboard naval and merchant ships. A Deck Officer is an officer serving in the deck department.-Merchant shipping:...

, steward, and engine departments. SIU members are represented aboard a wide variety of vessels, including: military support, commercial trade

Merchant vessel

A merchant vessel is a ship that transports cargo or passengers. The closely related term commercial vessel is defined by the United States Coast Guard as any vessel engaged in commercial trade or that carries passengers for hire...

, tugboat

Tugboat

A tugboat is a boat that maneuvers vessels by pushing or towing them. Tugs move vessels that either should not move themselves, such as ships in a crowded harbor or a narrow canal,or those that cannot move by themselves, such as barges, disabled ships, or oil platforms. Tugboats are powerful for...

s, passenger ship

Passenger ship

A passenger ship is a ship whose primary function is to carry passengers. The category does not include cargo vessels which have accommodations for limited numbers of passengers, such as the ubiquitous twelve-passenger freighters once common on the seas in which the transport of passengers is...

s, barge

Barge

A barge is a flat-bottomed boat, built mainly for river and canal transport of heavy goods. Some barges are not self-propelled and need to be towed by tugboats or pushed by towboats...

s, and gaming vessels. Military support vessels operated by the U.S. Department of Defense's Military Sealift Command

Military Sealift Command

The Military Sealift Command is a United States Navy organization that controls most of the replenishment and military transport ships of the Navy. It first came into existence on 9 July 1949 when the Military Sea Transportation Service became solely responsible for the Department of Defense's...

(MSC) provide a key source of jobs for seafarers. MSC operates some 110 noncombat ships that support U.S. forces around the world.

SIU membership includes eligibility for access to healthcare, retirement, and education benefits. Educational facilities include the union's Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education

Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education

The Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education is an educational facility in Piney Point, Maryland which is affiliated with the Seafarers International Union...

at Piney Point, Maryland.

The training center started in Brooklyn, New York, and is named after a former SIU president, the late Paul Hall. The school

Vocational school

A vocational school , providing vocational education, is a school in which students are taught the skills needed to perform a particular job...

opened in 1967 and has trained more than 100,000 mariners.

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

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, a worldwide economic slowdown, and the international rise of communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

. 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

International Seamen's Union

The International Seamen's Union was an American maritime trade union which operated from 1892 until 1937. In its last few years, the union effectively split into the National Maritime Union and Seafarer's International Union.-The early years:...

(ISU) chartered by the American Federation of Labor

American Federation of Labor

(AFL).

SIU's origin is portrayed by the union as an outcome of the "wreckage" of ISU. The breakup saw ISU membership plummet from more than 100,000 after World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

to less than 3,000 by the mid-1930s. The revocation of ISU's charter and the loss of 30,000 seamen in July 1937 to the Congress of Industrial Organizations

Congress of Industrial Organizations

' newly formed National Maritime Union

National Maritime Union

The National Maritime Union was an American labor union founded in May 1937. It affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in July 1937...

(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

Harry Lundeberg

Harrald Olaf Lundeberg was a merchant seaman and an American labor leader.-Biography:Lundeberg left his home in Oslo, Norway at age 14, joined the Seamen's Union of Australia in 1917 and transferred into the Sailors' Union of the Pacific in Seattle in 1923...

, a SUP officer and seaman who was originally from Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

, 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

Congress of Industrial Organizations

.
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

Paul Hall (labor leader)

Paul Hall was an American labor leader from Inglenook in Jefferson County, Alabama. He was a founding member and president of the Seafarers International Union from 1957 to 1980...

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.

The 1970s 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
Marine Firemen's Union
The Pacific Coast Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders and Wipers Association often referred to as the Marine Firemen's Union is an American labor union of mariners working aboard U.S. flag vessels...

(MFOWW).
National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards (NUMCS).

This consolidation helped the SIU edge out the NMU whose earlier purging of Communist Party members or those suspected of CP association 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.

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 died in 1980.

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

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is an independent federal law enforcement agency that enforces laws against workplace discrimination. The EEOC investigates discrimination complaints based on an individual's race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, perceived intelligence,...

. In the opinion on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals

United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is a federal court located in Richmond, Virginia, with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:*District of Maryland*Eastern District of North Carolina...

, "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.".
In 2006 the case remanded back to the Baltimore federal district court and that court ruled in faver of the EEOC and ordered back payments in the range of $2 million to over 180 plaintiffs and further ordered that they and all future applicants to the Paul
Hall maritime school be admitted regardless of age.

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

Hal C. Banks

Harold Chamberlain "Hal" Banks from Waterloo, Iowa was a controversial labour union leader in Canada...

), to smash our union and bring in the Seafarers' International Union... which was no different from the Teamster

Teamster

A teamster, in modern American English, is a truck driver. The trade union named after them is the International Brotherhood of Teamsters , one of the largest unions in the United States....

s 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."

Presidents

Harry Lundeberg
Harry Lundeberg
Harrald Olaf Lundeberg was a merchant seaman and an American labor leader.-Biography:Lundeberg left his home in Oslo, Norway at age 14, joined the Seamen's Union of Australia in 1917 and transferred into the Sailors' Union of the Pacific in Seattle in 1923...

(1938-1957)
Paul Hall
Paul Hall (labor leader)
Paul Hall was an American labor leader from Inglenook in Jefferson County, Alabama. He was a founding member and president of the Seafarers International Union from 1957 to 1980...

(1957-1980)
Frank Drozak
Frank Drozak
Frank Drozak was an American labor leader. He was president of the Seafarers International Union from 1980 until his death in 1988. Drozak was also president of The AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department.-See also:* Michael Sacco...

(1980-1988)
Michael Sacco
Michael Sacco
Michael Sacco is an American labor leader from Brooklyn, New York. He was appointed as the president of the Seafarers International Union of North America, AFL-CIO in June 1988 by the SIUNA Executive Board....

(1988-current)

Affiliated unions

According to its 2005 report at The Department of Labor, total membership of all 13 affiliated unions is 35,498. Information for affiliated unions follows:

Affiliated Union	Total Assets	Total Membership	Reference
SIUNA Affiliated Unions
Seafarers International Union of North America Atlantic, Gulf, Lakes & Inland Waters District/National Maritime Union (http://www.seafarers.org)	$19,868,333	11,714	2005 Report
American Maritime Officers American Maritime Officers American Maritime Officers is a national labor union affiliated with the Seafarers International Union of North America. With an active membership of approximately 4,000, AMO is the largest union of merchant marine officers in the U.S. and primarily represents licensed mariners working in the... (http://www.amo-union.org)	$15,228,913	3,921	2006 Report
Fishermen's Union of America Pacific & Caribbean	$10,525	45	2005 Report
Industrial, Professional, Technical Workers International Union	$416,930	1,064	2005 Report
Marine Firemen's Union Marine Firemen's Union The Pacific Coast Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders and Wipers Association often referred to as the Marine Firemen's Union is an American labor union of mariners working aboard U.S. flag vessels... (http://www.mfoww.org/)	$3,675,662	802	2005 Report
Sailors' Union of the Pacific Sailors' Union of the Pacific The Sailors' Union of the Pacific founded on March 6, 1885 in San Francisco, California is an American labor union of mariners, fishermen and boatmen working aboard U.S. flag vessels.... (http://www.sailors.org)	$2,811,294	736	2005 Report
Seafarers Entertainment and Allied Trades Union	$195,316	3,421	2005 Report
Seafarers International Union of Canada (http://www.seafarers.ca])	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown
Seafarers International Union of Puerto Rico, Caribbean and Latin America Seafarers International Union of Puerto Rico, Caribbean and Latin America The Seafarers International Union of Puerto Rico, Caribbean and Latin America is a labor union of mariners. SIUPRCLA is an affiliate union of Seafarers International Union....	$252,361	637	2005 Report
Seafarers Maritime Union	$1,200,432	110	2005 Report
Sugar Workers Union No. 1	$280,209	332	2005 Report
United Industrial, Service, Transportation, Professional and Government Workers of North America	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown

Recently terminated affiliate unions

Seafarers' Professional Security Officers Association was terminated in 2004.
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.

External links

Election contributions at OpenSecrets
SIU 2006 PAC Summary Data
MARAD Administrator's Remarks at 2002 SIUNA Convention
"The Seafarers
The Seafarers
The Seafarers is Stanley Kubrick's third film, a short for the Seafarers International Union, directed in June 1953.There are shots of ships, machinery, a canteen, and a union meeting. The film was shot in color, and was supervised by the staff of The Seafarers Log, the union magazine...

" (1953) documentary film by Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
A case study of Seatrain Shipbuilding & the Brooklyn Navy Yard

History

Controversy

Presidents

Affiliated unions

Recently terminated affiliate unions

See also

External links

Archives