Excerpts from The Columbian:

More than 20 union dockworkers gathered outside the Port of Vancouver’s administrative offices early Wednesday morning to protest what they view as an unfair decision by the port to get police involved in an incident that occurred last week.

At issue was the port’s decision June 28 to ask Vancouver police to cite four members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for trespassing in a secure marine-terminal area on the west side of United Grain Corp.’s facility. But the union says a larger issue is the port’s decision to maintain neutrality in the bitter labor dispute rather than offering support to locked-out workers.

But Cager Clabaugh, president of ILWU Local 4, said Wednesday the Port of Vancouver should instead take the side of American workers who’ve been frozen out of their jobs by a foreign-owned company that benefits from the port’s publicly-funded expansion efforts.

Clabaugh said the port should take the side of Longshore members, American workers who’ve agreed, when asked by the port, to vocally support its taxpayer-funded projects. “We want our port to expand,” Clabaugh said. But the port’s decision to involve the police last week, and to maintain an impartial stance in the dispute, shows that “as soon as they get what they need, they just cut us loose,” he said.

Read the full article at The Columbian