What The Longshoreman's Work Slowdown Can Teach Us About Leadership

Unless you’ve been hiding out in a cave I’m sure you’ve heard about the longshoremen’s work slowdown at 29 west coast ports. It’s slowing down and some would say crippling the movement of an unbelievable amount of meat, flowers, food and other products that aren’t moving through the supply chain, as we business dweebs call it, at the usual rate.

The longshoremen are still coming to work but they’re doing everything more slowly. They have supporters and detractors. I’m not weighing in on the rightness or wrongness of the longshoremen’s beef in this column, because my point has nothing to do with who’s right and who’s wrong.

For one thing, I’m stunned that in this high-tech age where you can almost lull yourself into believing that the only things zipping around the country and the world anymore are electrons and packets of data, the longshoremen have reminded us how wrong that viewpoint is.

Real stuff moves around, and people don’t get fed without it, and medicine doesn’t get to hospitals and so on. In the affluent USA we can forget that there are places on earth where the simple movement of stuff that people need is a life-and-death affair.

We have to learn something from this sad dispute, and what we have to learn is a lesson about culture and community at work. Before you scoff and make sucking noises and tell me what a rube I am, I will tell that one of my very first assignments as a 23-year-old baby manager was to ward off unionization in a huge distribution center.

We had heard that there was going to be a union election because the required percentage of our employees had filled out the little “I want a union” cards and submitted them. We started to talk to the employees in a way we should have been doing all along.

We opened up the energy and the whole union discussion faded away. In the election the company won the election with 97% of the vote. That was a wake-up call. It’s so easy to create a Human Workplace, but it’s also easy to forget how critically important the human piece of the employment equation is.

I’m not anti-union, but I don’t put unions or their leaders on a pedestal either. I am super-skeptical of unions and their leaders, just the way I am with any Godzilla-type organization.

I don’t think that the best way out of a thorny and acrimonious dispute is ever an antagonistic stance. I say that with equal force to union leaders and the corporate leaders they’re locked in negotiation with. We are adults, and adults talk things out.

They don’t slow their work down to half-speed to prove a point. Corporate negotiators who let the contract talks get so out of hand — and who let the longshoremen work for years without a contract, let me add – share equal responsibility for this mess.

What we can learn from the longshoremen is that trust is 100% of the deal in a labor dispute, and everybody is responsible for building that.  Both the lock-up around contract terms and the slowdown itself are fear-based. If you care about trust, you talk about it.

You don’t stop talking. Why do we preach that to our seven-year-olds and ignore the same advice ourselves? You don’t get to the brink without someone on each side of the negotiating table saying “Go ahead. Show us how badass you are.” That’s childish. After talks break down people wring their hands and say “We did our best.” Give me an actual break. Anyone who grew up on planet earth can see right through that weenie defense.

We think of a negotiation as the movement of particles, but it’s a wave, and the wave doesn’t start on the day the negotiating teams sit down to hash things out. There are currents and old resentments that don’t get aired, because we think we have to stay tough and stay silent.

We think we have only our might — the company’s might or the union’s might — to use as bargaining chips. Forty-five-year-old people in suits turn into eight-year-old children. Go ahead and tell me business is not primal. Excuse me. I’ve seen way too many boardroom Great Ape battles to take that lie seriously.

Grow up, union babies and grow up, corporate babies. Talk things out like grownups do when they are at their best. Talk about everything you’ve never talked about before. Take responsibility for your part in keeping food off tables, because nobody is buying the argument that only the other side is at fault.

There is room for personal growth for every single person involved on both sides of the table. When you get past this emergency figure out how to keep talking about fear and trust every day and airing your issues and getting pas them. We expect that much of our kids. Are we going to set a lower bar for ourselves?