Over 110 rank and file ILWU members spent five days in Honolulu last October 15 to 19, 2007, attending the union's intensive leadership training institute. They learned how to build a stronger union on the job and in the community.

This year's program focused on the skills these member/leaders would need to build stronger and more effective union organizations at their workplace, and the skills they would need to reach out to community groups and other organizations to gain support on worker issues.

These skills would be needed in 2008 when many of the ILWU's larger hotels and the entire longshore division will be negotiating new collective bargaining agreements with their employers.

This training program, known as the ILWU Labor Institute, is held once every three years. Some of the best instructors from labor education centers across the United States are recruited to teach the 35 workshops offered at the institute.

The union's communication director, Mel Chang, has been putting these institutes together for the past 20 years, beginning with the first institute held in 1987 at the YWCA Camp Kokokahi on Kaneohe Bay on Oahu. That first institute could accommodate only 45 participants who slept 12 to a cabin on bunk beds and shared communal showers.

Today, the institutes are attended by as many as 150 people and are held at the ILWU's building on Atkinson Drive in Honolulu. Gone are the cabins and bunk beds--participants stay at the Ala Moana Hotel across the street.

Building Union Power 
The themes of the first two days of the institute were “power on the job” and “power in the community.” Participants had the opportunity to attend workshops and hear presentations by Robert Schwartz, Mark Brenner, and Stephanie Luce. Schwartz is an attorney and author of many labor books, including Strikes, Picketing and Inside Campaigns: A Legal Guide for Unions. Brenner is the director of Labor Notes, the organization which published “A Troublemaker's Handbook 2 - How to fight back where you work -- and Win.” Luce teaches in the Labor Relations and Research Center of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is author of “Fighting for a Living Wage and co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy.”

On Tuesday afternoon, institute participants showed their support for the workers of the Pacific Beach Hotel by joining a mass demonstration and picket of the hotel property in Waikiki. Over 400 workers of that hotel voted to join the ILWU and have been struggling to win a fair union contract for over two years.

Workshops on Wednesday and Thursday ran for 6 hours and covered safety and health, labor law, grievance handling, leadership, communications, and how to research your employer. Institute participants also learned more about the struggle for justice at the Pacific Beach Hotel

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Institute participants wrote over 400 letters to HTH Corporation, urging the company to rehire all their workers at the Pacific Beach Hotel and agree to a fair union contract. They also wrote letters to newspaper and television stations to provide more media coverage of this important issue dealing with workers' rights.