Fw: [Lis-LEAF] ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

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" Donald James,

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Fw: [Lis-LEAF] ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1

Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 08:41:04 -0500

 

 

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M. Maddox

To:

undisclosed-recipients:

Friday, March 14, 2008 7:33 PM

[Lis-LEAF] ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/01/18482849.php

*ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq,

Afghanistan*

by Internationalist Group ( internationalistgroup [at] msn.com

<internationalistgroup )

/Saturday Mar 1st, 2008 4:13 PM /

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. This is the first time in decades

that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action

against a U.S. war. 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. 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!

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's 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: internationalistgroup. Visit us on

the Internet at: www.internationalist.org

http://www.internationalist.org/