against the war! For more coverage on this see the Anti-War section on the
LabourNet UK site, see:
http://www.labourne
cheers
Dave Parks
For Workers Strikes Against the War!
ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq,
Afghanistan
In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut
down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war
and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S.
troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO
president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath
reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, "One of the
resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to
stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their
opposition to the war in Iraq."
This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided
to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly
important that this mobilization of labor's power is to take place on
May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the
U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not
only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation
of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to
shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from
the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically
important Persian/Arab Gulf.
The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops
invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike
against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the
streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the
war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism -
Democrats and Republicans - and none of the capitalist candidates will
stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine
is by mobilizing the power of a greater force - that of the
international working class.
The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to
stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor
organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The
ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and
it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever
support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts,
sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies,
teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the
bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted
for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength
of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!
Now is the time for bold class action. Opposition to the war is even
greater in the U.S. working class than in the population as a whole,
more than two-thirds of which wants to stop the war but is stymied by
the capitalist political system. In his letter to Sweeney, the ILWU
president asked "if other AFL-CIO affiliates are planning to
participate in similar events." Labor militants should make sure the
answer to that question is a resounding "yes!"
There should be no illusions that this will be easy. No doubt the
Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses will try to get the courts
to rule the stop-work action illegal. The ILWU leadership could get
cold feet, since this motion was passed because of overwhelming
support from the delegates despite attempts to stop it or, failing
that, to water it down or limit the action. And the U.S. government
could try to ban it on the grounds of "national security," just as
Bush & Co. slapped a Taft-Hartley injunction on the docks during
contract negotiations in the fall of 2002, saying that any work
stoppage was a threat to the "war effort," and threatened to occupy
the ports with troops!
The answer to every attempt to sabotage or undercut this first labor
action against this war, and against Washington's broader "war on
terror" which is intended to terrorize the world into submission must
be to redouble efforts to bring out workers' power independent of the
capitalist parties and politicians. If the ILWU work stoppage is
successful, it will only be a small, but very important, beginning
that must be generalized and deepened. It will take
industrial-strength labor action to defeat the imperialist war abroad
and the bosses' war on immigrants, oppressed minorities, poor and
working people "at home."
ILWU in the Forefront of Labor Action Against the War
Workers strike action against imperialist war isn't new - it just
hasn't happened here for a long, long time. During World War I there
were huge mass strikes in Germany against the battlefield carnage,
culminating in the downfall of the kaiser in November 1918. A year
earlier in Russia, working-class opposition to the war led to the
overthrow of the tsar and the October Revolution led by Lenin and
Trotsky's Bolsheviks. The Internationalist Group and League for the
Fourth International call today for transport workers to "hot cargo"
(refuse to handle) war shipments. In the early 1920s, Communist-led
French dock workers did exactly that, boycotting ships carrying war
materiel to suppress a colonial rebellion in the Rif region of
Morocco, as they also did during France's war in Indochina in the 1950s.
In the U.S., the ILWU struck in 1948 amid Cold War hysteria and in
defiance of the "slave labor" Taft-Hartley Act to defend its union
hiring hall against the bosses and government screaming about "reds"
in the union leadership. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyite
witch-hunting, the ILWU called a four-day general strike in Hawaii of
sugar, pineapple and dock workers over the jailing of seven union
members for being communists. During the Vietnam War, socialist
historian Isaac Deutscher said that he would trade all the peace
marches for a single dock strike. The ILWU was the first U.S. union to
oppose the Vietnam war, but during war and especially during the 1971
strike union leader Harry Bridges refused to stop the movement of
military cargo. (Ship owners made use of this by falsely labeling
cargo as "military" to evade picket lines and undermine the strike.)
This betrayal went hand in hand with a "mechanization and
modernization" contract that slashed union jobs.
As the U.S.-led imperialist invasion of Iraq was looming, in January
2003 train drivers in Scotland refused to move a freight train
carrying munitions to a NATO military base. The next month, Italian
railroad unionists and antiwar activists blocked NATO war trains by
occupying the rails. In the United States, ILWU dock workers were a
target of "anti-terrorist" government repression, as police fired
supposedly "less than lethal" munitions point blank at an antiwar
protest on the Oakland, California docks, injuring six longshore
workers and arresting 25 people (who eventually won their legal case
against the police). And every year since the war started, the San
Francisco/Oakland ILWU Local 10 has voted for motions for labor action
against the war. Usually they were voted down at caucuses and
conventions of the ILWU, but not this time.
Last May, Local 10 longshoremen and Local 34 ships clerks refused to
cross picket lines set up by the Oakland Teachers Association and
antiwar activists, defying arbitrators' orders by refusing to work
ships of the notorious antiunion outfit, Stevedoring Services of
America (see "Oakland Dock Workers Honor Picket, Shut Down War Cargo
Shipper," The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). In the aftermath of
that action, the union issued a call for a Labor Conference to Stop
the War that would "plan workplace rallies, labor mobilizations in the
streets and strike action against the war." The Call to Action stated:
"ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called 'war on
terror' is really a war on working people and democratic rights.
Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed
motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need
to use labor's muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the
streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate
and total withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq."
As the conference date approached, the union was the target of several
police attacks, including a vicious cop assault on two black dock
workers from San Francisco working in the port of Sacramento. Some 250
demonstrators from every ILWU local in Northern California rallied in
their defense outside the courthouse. Their trial to be set march 18
at a hearing will encounter even larger demonstrations.
The Internationalist Group and its union supporters helped build and
attended the October 20 conference, along with some 150 labor and
socialist activists from the Bay Area, elsewhere in California and
across the country. At the meeting, a particular focus was resistance
to the Transportation Workers Identification Card (TWIC), which
threatens minority workers and the union hiring hall, and which the
Democratic Party in particular has been pushing in order to carry out
a purge of dock workers in the name of the "war on terror." Not long
after that conference, a federal judge ordered Local 10 elections
canceled and replaced by a Labor Department-run vote, on the eve of
2008 contract bargaining. Federal agents even invaded the union hall
to enforce their order. This action is a threat to the independence of
all unions.
This set the stage for the recent longshore-warehouse caucus, which
voted a motion for a 24-hour "No Peace, No Work Holiday" against the
war. The resolution was introduced in Local 10 by Jack Heyman, who
also presented the motion for the 24 April 1999 coast-wide port
shutdown demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black
Panther and renowned radical journalist who has been on Pennsylvania'
death row for the last quarter century. Although the union tops
maneuvered to prevent Heyman from being elected as a delegate to the
Coast Caucus, the motion passed in Local 10. At the Caucus, the
delegate from Local 34 referred to the October Labor Conference to
Stop the War as the origin of the motion.
At the close of the Caucus on February 8, there was a vigorous debate
on the resolution. The union tops tried to stop it, to no avail. They
kept asking, "are you sure you want to do this action." The delegates
overwhelmingly said "yes." Even conservative trade unionists,
including veterans of the Vietnam War, were getting up saying the
government is lying to us, we've had it with this war, we've got to
put a stop to it now. So instead the bureaucrats tried to gut the
motion, which was cut down from 24 hours to 8, and changed into a
"stop-work" meeting (covered by a contract clause) instead of a
straight-out shutdown, thinking that this would lessen opposition from
the employers. In the end there was a voice vote and only three
delegates out of 100 voted against.
The efforts to undercut the motion continue, as is to be expected from
a leadership which, like the rest of the pro-capitalist labor
bureaucracy, seeks "labor peace" with the bosses. In his letter to
Sweeney, ILWU International president tried to present the action as
an effort to "express support for the troops by bringing them home
safely," although the motion voted by the delegates says nothing of
the sort. Playing the "support our troops" game is an effort to swear
loyalty to the broader aims of U.S. imperialism. It aids the
warmongers, when what's needed is independent working-class action
against the system that produces endless imperialist war. Yet despite
the efforts to water it down and distort it, the May 1 action voted
for by the ILWU delegates is a call to use labor's muscle to put an
end to the war.
Mobilize Labor's Power to Defeat the Bosses' War!
For the West Coast dock workers union to shut down the ports against
the war means a big step forward in the class struggle. The
Internationalist Group has uniquely fought for workers strikes against
the war, when all the popular-front "peace" coalitions dismissed this
and even some shamefaced ex-Trotskyists refused to call for it, saying
it had "no resonance" among the workers (see our October 20007 Special
Supplement to The Internationalist, "Why We Fight For Workers Strikes
Against the War [and the Opportunists Don't]"). With signs, banners
and propaganda we have sought to drive home the central lesson that it
is necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses' war
"at home" by mobilizing the power of the workers movement independent
of and against the capitalist parties.
That means fighting the war mobilization down the line. First and
foremost, this means actively joining the struggle for immigrant
rights as the government turns undocumented working people into "the
enemy within." Class-conscious workers should demand full citizenship
rights for all immigrants. Last year, San Francisco Local 10 voted to
stop work and join marches for immigrant rights on May 1, but this was
opposed by the employers PMA and sabotaged at the last minute by the
union tops. Shamefully, Local 13 in Los Angeles, a majority Mexican
American port, made no protest when police attacked immigrant rights
protesters that same day. Today, as the ICE immigration police stage
Gestapo-style raids across the country, organized labor should take
the lead in organizing rapid response networks to come into the
streets to block the raids. Despite the campaign by the capitalist
media and politicians to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, there is
widespread disgust among American working people toward the jackbooted
storm troopers who are terrorizing immigrant communities.
At the same time, the unions should use the power to put a halt to the
attacks on civil liberties which are part of the home front of the
imperialist war. Driver's licenses with biometric data, TWIC
identification cards with "background checks," warrantless spying and
phone tapping, setting up special military tribunals for "trials" in
which defendants are denied the right of habeas corpus, to know the
"evidence" or even the charges against them - all these are part of a
drive that is in high gear pushing the United States toward a
full-fledged police state. There have been scores, perhaps hundreds of
resolutions by unions and city, county and state labor bodies against
the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, showing that labor activists are well aware of
the danger. But just as is the case with the countless union antiwar
resolutions, there has been no labor action. It is commonplace in the
labor movement to bemoan the lack of real action when Reagan broke the
1981 PATCO air traffic controllers' strike, paving the way for massive
union-busting, takeaways and racist attacks all down the line. Let's
not let the labor bureaucrats bury the vital struggles of today.
Now is the time to turn words into deeds, to speak to the capitalist
rulers in the only language they understand. The imperialist war
parties must be defeated by a class mobilization of the working people
at the head of all the oppressed. The ILWU motion to stop work on May
Day to put a stop to the war can provide working people everywhere
with the opening to turn from impotent protest to a struggle for
power. For that the key is to build a class-struggle workers party
fighting for a workers government, for socialist revolution here and
around the world, that will put an end once and for all to the system
of endless war, poverty and racism.
Write to the Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station,
New York, NY 10008. E-mail: internationalistgro
the Internet at: www.internationalis
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