Socialist Action /November 2002
What Battle Plan for Dockers?
By CHARLES WALKER
On July 3, 1989, the Margaret Thatcher government privatized Britain's
60 seaports, ending five decades of nationalization. In quick order, the
new owners, private shipping firms, took on the dockworkers' unions. After
two years of court and picket line battles, all ports but Liverpool, were
no longer unionized.
On Sept. 28, 1995, the Liverpool dockers were provoked into a strike
"against brutal speedup and deteriorating working conditions,"
according to labor writer David Bacon.1 The 500 dockworkers were "promptly
fired and replaced. ... Once their strike started, dockers from Liverpool
fanned out to ports around the world. First setting up picket lines in Philadelphia
wharves, they won the support of East Coast dockworkers. Their message then
met a sympathetic response in San Francisco, where longshoremen have a long
tradition of stopping work in support of workers in other countries."
2
Despite the international support, in January 1998, after more than two
years, the Liverpool dockers lost. At the time the dockers said in a prepared
statement3 that they needed "a far more positive support role from
our own union leadership in calling for an increase in both the national
support through the TGWU [Transport and General Workers Union] industrial
branches and international support via the ITF [International Transport
Workers Union]."
Both the TGWU and the ITF, they said,had joined the company "in
stating that the dispute was over." Further, the Labour government
headed by Tony Blair failed to intervene on their behalf, despite the fact
that it had a "14% share holding" in the union-busting company.
Mike Carden, a dockworker who also was a member of the TGWU executive
council, told Bacon after the strike that the union "made it perfectly
clear throughout the struggle that they had no intention of facilitating
practical support for the Liverpool dockworkers. That had international
ramifications with the International Transport Workers federation and other
trade unions.
"Because our strike had been declared illegal [a secondary strike],
and they therefore said they couldn't get involved. That was the most damaging
thing that hung over our heads throughout the dispute."
Bacon asked Carden to explain relations between the Labour Party, the
union, and the employers. "Well, my personal opinion, based on over
20 years of experience both in the Labour Party and in the Transport and
General Workers Union, is that they've abrogated any responsibility. The
unions have bought right into the Labour government's policies of partnership
with employers, of giving to industry everything they demand.
"The unions could have put pressure on the Labour government. I
still think they've got a tremendous influence to wield, when you look at
the membership in some UK industries. But they chose not to do that, because
of their views about the working class, and how they see their own role
as leaders of unions.
"To them, their role of representing workers is exactly the same
as the perception of the Labour government, which is partnership. Conflict
doesn't exist. At the end of the day the employer is always right. Representing
employers' needs seems to be the priority, not the representation of the
working class."
The Liverpool strike, as well as the earlier two-year British dockworkers'
national strike, brings to mind the Austin, Minn., meatpackers' strike led
by Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), which
began in August 1985 and ended in June 1986.
The P-9 strike was notable for the high level of militant activity by
both the ranks and the local's leaders and the widespread solidarity that
extended to communities well beyond Minnesota. Unfortunately, it was also
notable for its betrayal by the union's international leadership, supported
by the AFL-CIO; and the attacks by politicians, who ordered the National
Guard to herd scabs through the plant's picket-lines, all of which decisively
turned the balance of forces against the strikers.
Both strikes were attempts to wrestle with the powerful forces of industrial
rationalization and competition that have swept the industrial world since
the early 1970s, with the completion of the re-rebuilding of the war-damaged
economies of Europe and Japan. These are the same very powerful elemental
forces of contemporary capitalism that confront the West Coast dockworkers
and their union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
The dock bosses aren't out to chisel a few bucks from the dockworkers'
wages. They are out to enlarge their control over the job, control they
lost as a result of the historic 1934 dockworkers strike and the San Francisco
general strike that sealed the victory.
The Pacific Maritime Association (a consortium of 76 shipping and terminal
firms) frequently speaks of the higher productivity achieved at overseas
ports; and they undoubtedly have pondered the lessons of British capital's
rout of the British dockworkers.
The ILWU said on Sept. 26 that the government pledged not to place the
dockworkers under the more restrictive Railway Act. However, the Los
Angeles Times (Oct. 16) reports that the government "is being urged
by a group of rail, truck, and shipping companies to consider a form of
the Railway Labor Act of the 1920s, which imposes compulsory arbitration
on labor disputes that endanger the national economy."
The Times report speaks darkly of possible congressional legislation
"to loosen the shackles that both sides have placed on the docks."
In 1971, the ILWU struck for 100 days, went back to work under a Taft-Hartley
injunction, and then resumed its strike for another month when it won a
contract. Just as the contract beef was settled, President Nixon signed
legislation passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress to end the strike and
force the dockworkers back on the job for 18 months. Only the fact that
a new contract was agreed to almost simultaneously with Nixon's signing
the back-to-work legislation kept the law from being imposed.
President Bush and Congress retain the authority used by Nixon and Congress
under the Taft-Hartley Act to again pass oppressive legislation forcing
the dockworkers back to work for a prolonged period. If the union refuses
to buckle under and decides it must strike to fight off a government-backed
assault-not just on the ILWU's present level of on-the-job power but also
on its very right to strike-then what must it do or not to do to escape
the fate of the British dockworkers union?
Will the Democratic Party be more supportive of the ILWU than the Blair-led
Labour Party was of the Liverpool dockworkers? Weeks ago Democratic Party
office holders up and down the coast said they backed the ILWU. At a Seattle
rally, Sen. Daschle urged the dockworkers to "fight, fight, fight!"
Two prominent exceptions were Sen. Dianne Feinstein and California Gov.
Gray Davis. Feinstein called on President Bush to impose Taft-Hartley, if
the docks were not reopened within a week; and Davis simpered that he was
opposed both to a lockout and a slowdown.
It's one thing for Democrats to tell the ILWU to "fight, fight,
fight" when they have been locked out; but its entirely another thing,
when dockworkers strike and strike and strike and refuse to return to their
jobs, even if the government orders them to return. Not to heed a government
order would make the dockworkers "lawbreakers," giving Democratic
Party politicos more than enough cover to withdraw their verbal support.
The ILWU dockworkers have said many times in recent weeks that dockworkers
around the world would refuse to unload ships from the U.S. loaded by strikebreakers.
That solidarity is not without precedent; the Liverpool strikers got some
solidarity along those lines. But in military terms that help was comparable
to harassing sorties that had no apparent impact on the front-line battle.
Clearly, the U.S. dockworkers would require far more solidarity aid from
overseas to really hurt a wealthier American opponent, inspired by the British
owners' victory over the British dockworkers.
The British dockworkers strike did not spread to other sectors of the
nation's industry. As the dockworkers said, their union and the ITF- which
claims to represent a membership of nearly 5 million workers in 594 transport
unions in 136 countries-didn't even try to arouse other British workers
and their unions to take industrial action to back them up.
How much help can U.S. dockworkers realistically expect from the AFL-CIO?
In 1989, the year that British dockworkers found themselves "denationalized,"
the U.S. government took on and decisively whipped the air controllers union.
Only one major union, the Machinists, called for organized labor to stand
with the air controllers. The call was ignored.
Even if today's AFL-CIO officialdom didn't completely ignore a grave
threat to the ILWU's present strength or even its existence, what is there
in the record to suggest that the ILWU can count on the federation's leadership
to risk its many-sided relationships with corporate America and its political
accomplices? Sweeney's speeches extol union partnerships with corporate
America, dead-ringers for the partnerships that the British dockworkers
said were embraced by their union and the Blair government.
Just asking these questions suggests that the ILWU dockworkers cannot
reply on the British battle plan, which included depending on politicians
in bed with the bosses and a union officialdom infatuated with the false
notion that a partnership with corporations is realistic and the answer
to privatization, rationalization, and surging levels of world-wide corporate
competition.
What battle plan, then, should the ILWU dockworkers adopt? That's hard
to say in detail. But surely, the ILWU's early militant history that allowed
it to win out over dock bosses and government intervention, troops, cops,
and scabs during the depths of the Great Depression is worth a second look.
1 David Bacon, Longshore Workers Chase Scab British Cargo
Out to Sea
2 David Bacon, Liverpool Dockers, zmag.org./feb 99
3 www.urban75.com/Action/dockers
Socialist Action /November 2002 |