Proposal for WA ferry engineers, oilers falls short of pay parity

Illegal to strike

The federal law that protects a worker’s right to strike at private companies doesn’t extend into the public sector. States get to decide independently. In Washington, state law does not grant or permit public employees the ability to strike or refuse to perform their duties. 

Other progressive states, like Oregon and California, do not prohibit work stoppages by unionized public employees, except for those essential to public health and safety, such as police officers and firefighters. 

Despite state law, some public-sector workers in Washington, like teachers, do sometimes strike. And school districts have gone to the courts seeking an injunction to force them back into the classroom with varying degrees of success. 

But over the years, Washington legislators have taken the additional step of explicitly making it unlawful for three groups of public workers to strike — state four-year university faculty in 2002, community college faculty in 1987 and state ferry workers in 1983. 

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Liz Ford, an assistant professor at the Seattle University School of Law, said the strike prohibition laws were meant to head off disruptions to public services. 

“While the state has given public-sector employees the right to bargain collectively,” Ford said, “they have not agreed that they can stop providing services to the taxpaying public.”

Ford, who also sits on the state’s Public Employment Relations Commission, agreed that not being able to strike leaves workers with little leverage during contract negotiations. Workers could theoretically be fired or disciplined for striking. 

Ferry crews were not always public employees. In 1951, when the state purchased the Black Ball Line, launching WSF and a publicly run ferry system, with the fleet came a group of already unionized workers. (The state legislature would not grant other state employees full collective bargaining rights until 2002.)

Three decades after the founding of WSF, a strike shut down the system and left ferries tied up at the docks for nearly two weeks. Ford said that strike stopped all transportation across the water, creating the political will to change state law and prevent ferry workers from striking again. 

Politicians responded by taking away the ferry workers’ collective bargaining rights for wages and benefits. The law, SB3359, also made it illegal to strike and imposed fines, not to exceed $2,500 a day, if employees walked off the job. 

“It’s not just not protected,” Ford said, “it’s unlawful.”

State lawmakers have since increased the penalties for striking ferry workers or unions to $10,000 a day.

Doug Lorig, an agent with the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific, which represents quartermasters, ticket-takers and terminal employees, said ferry workers rarely even discuss holding a strike.

“We can’t even push the notion of a strike, that could get us in legal trouble,” Lorig said. 

Mike Yestramski, president of the Washington Federation of State Employees, said the lack of a protected right to strike would not stop the WFSE from considering or holding a strike.

WSFE members last mounted a strike in 2001, the year before the Legislature granted public employees full bargaining rights. WFSE recently launched a strike fund for the first time, which Yestramski said would be used mostly for court costs.

This new fund also gives the union more leverage, he added, because it lets employers know that in the case of a strike, there are resources for members to depend on. 

“The strike itself,” he said, “isn’t actually as powerful as the threat.”