David Heindel

Background

About David Heindel

I have been the President of the Seafarers International Union; Atlantic, Gulf, Lakes and Inland Waters District/National Maritime Union, since February 2023. I began my career with the SIU in 1973, when I graduated from the program for entry-level mariners conducted at the union’s affiliated training facility in Piney Point, Maryland. I primarily sailed aboard deep-sea vessels as a member of the engine department, before coming ashore in 1980 to work as a patrolman in my native New Orleans. Among the other positions I have held with the union are patrolman at the SIU halls in Philadelphia and Baltimore, port agent at the Philadelphia hall, and assistant vice president of the SIU’s Gulf Coast Region. In 1997 I became Secretary-Treasurer of the SIU, a position he held until 2023. In August 2002, I was elected vice chairman of the International Transport Workers’ Federation’s (ITF’s) Seafarers’ Section. Since then, I extensively have worked – both domestically and as part of U.S. delegations in international forums – with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the International Labor Organization, and the International Maritime Organization on shipboard and port-security issues as well as the international project for a new Seafarers Identity Document. I helped protect mariners’ rights under the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (which took effect in July 2004) and helped secure a new agreement for tens of thousands of mariners worldwide under the ITF’s International Bargaining Forum. During the ITF Congress in August 2006, I was elected to a four-year term as first vice chair of the Seafarers' Section. At the ITF Congress in August 2010, I was elected chair of the ITF’s Seafarers’ Section, thereby becoming only the second American ever to hold that post. I was re-elected at the ITF Congress in August 2014 and 2018. In 2015, he was appointed to the U.S. Labor Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations and Trade Policy.