The ILWU has responded to these developments in several ways: first, by mobilizing community campaigns to keep the business open, as happened at Miles Laboratories in Berkeley, California; second – when Closure or relocation can’t be stopped – by negotiating the best possible protections, severance payments, and re-training benefits for the displaced workers; third, by strengthening alliances with other unions for collective bargaining, as at the 1992 Summit Hospital strike in Oakland, California, when the ILWU x-ray and laboratory technicians joined with the nurses and other health care workers to successfully protect the right to honor each other’s picket lines; and fourth by stepping up the union’s efforts to organize the unorganized.
