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Longshore Union Strikes Against War
On Thursday, May Day, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union will declare an eight-hour strike to protest the war in Iraq. Since the ILWU controls every port along the U.S. Pacific Coast, including Seattle and Tacoma, this strike demonstrates the collective power of workers willing to use it.
The ILWU is demanding "an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East." Although the majority of Americans repeatedly have expressed their desire to end the war, President Bush has not obliged us, so it drags on. Because our leaders refuse to listen, ILWU members are taking the next logical step for workers: Strike.
For those unfamiliar, the ILWU is perhaps the most militant and politicized worker organization in the nation. It operates in one of the most important sectors of the world economy -- marine transport -- and, thus, is in a strategic location to put peace above profits.
Forged in the fires of 1930s worker struggles to gain basic rights, the ILWU was born in 1934 when longshoremen (there were no women in the industry then, though there are now) performed the incredibly hard, dangerous and important work of loading and unloading ships. To improve their wages and wrest some control over their lives, men all along the coast struck -- and in a few instances died -- to gain union recognition.
The ILWU is highly democratic. A caucus of more than 100 longshore workers representing every union local establishes policies for the Longshore Division. It was this caucus that voted to declare the May Day strike.
Dockworkers, including those in the ILWU, have a proud tradition of political action. For example, in the 1980s the ILWU respected the strike of British dockworkers by refusing to unload a ship worked by scab labor. Just last week, union longshoremen in South Africa refused to unload a Chinese vessel carrying military supplies destined for autocratic Zimbabwe -- a tremendous example of solidarity.
That the ILWU chose International Workers' Day to declare this strike suggests its political commitment and internationalism. Around the world, workers honor labor by taking a holiday. What few Americans know is that the tradition of a May Day strike originated not in the Soviet Union in the 1950s but the United States of the 1880s.
These days, such examples of worker power are increasingly rare in the U.S. The tragedy is that, historically, labor activism gave us the 40-hour workweek (and the weekend) and helped humanize the exploitative excesses of unregulated capitalism. As income inequality continues to grow in the United States, it is wise to remember how, in the past, strong unions created a larger middle class as well as a more democratic and egalitarian nation.
The ILWU strike also reminds us that unions still have an important role in public discussions beyond the workplace. As a democratic institution, the ILWU is precisely the sort of "civic society" that the Bush administration has been trying to create in Iraq. On May 1, dockworkers will speak loud and clear -- end the endless war in Iraq. Other American workers who want to support our troops by bringing them home can make their voices heard by joining with the brave men and women of the ILWU and taking the day off.
Peter Cole is an associate professor of history at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Ill. His book "Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia" was published by the University of Illinois Press.
©1996-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
16 Comments so far
Show AllLets hope the east coast and gulf coast dockworkers join them.
andersdl,
Yes, and let's hope working men and women all across the nation in every type of industry supports them by not working tomorrow, on May 1st. The movement will build. Each one of us has a personal responsibility to oppose this false war. I know many folks are struggling financially, but better to lose a day's pay then to continue supporting crimes against humanity in Iraq. Otherwise, it's tacit approval of the status quo. I'll be in San Francisco tomorrow!
Take it to the streets..It's all We the People have left. It's the ONLY course of action that will make a difference. We have the numbers.
Or, declare a "hartal" and stay home, as Mahatma Gandhi did in India back in the '20s of the last century. Let the whole country come to a stop because few or no people are working.
Paul,
Yes indeed. I've said similar things on other posts as well, since Common Dreams started the comments section. The main thing IS passive resistance to these war criminals, whether by staying home, fraternizing with like-minded people or rallying like we're doing tomorrow. The imprtant thing is to take part. The military and the government belongs to the citizens of the United States, not the Bush/Cheney Crime Family.
I'm with you, brother. Peace and Harmony.
Harry Bridges would have been proud if only the ILWU had protested the war with earlier strikes when it became obvious that the war was criminal and was going to drag on forever. Today, it seems a little late in the game. I guess it's better than nothing.
Wow. Lets not work for one day. That's powerful. Such self sacrifice is truly overwhelming. How bout we not work for a year?
Any takers? Guess not, and does anybody know why? Ever try to buy weed with no money? When was the last time you said "I think I'll take that hemp sundress...and I'm not going to pay you."?
Maybe we can just refuse to work forever. That'll show them. The criminal US Govt wont get the tax income from seven stoned idealists.
Then when we get hungry and our Bro's get a little tired of providing us with free beans and rice, and they get tired of stepping over our slumbering bodies on the living room of THEIR floor, we can go on public assistance--
from the very Govt we hated.
Imagine that. The hated becomes our Sugar Daddie after all.
Any takers?
We hope to see everyone from CD at the corner of Mason and Beach Streets at 10:30 a.m. later today in S.F.
Be there or be square!!!!
Yeah, The ILWU members are certainly shirkers when it comes to political action. They refused to load cargo destined for Vietnam in the 60s, and then refused to ship goods to South Africa during the apartheid protests. Guess we should all put them down for only taking a one day loss in pay for what has apparently been declared an illegal action by the shippers association [The ILWU is the only union in the country that has the right to stage job actions embedded in their union contracts].
I am sure that Continually Amused is going without, on a daily and ongoing basis, in protest of the abuses of our government in Iraq and elsewhere. We've all seen the hunger strikers and anti war protesters who refuse to take no for an answer. I think most of them are dressed in bright pink...
Of course, the bumper sticker and tee shirt count as 'political action', don't they? Boy, those Longshoremen sure are a bunch of pikers...
I see as usual that the strike is not making he national news. All Dock workers nationwide should shut down. Fox News will blame it on West Coast Liberals.
"So?"
Well, Mr. Vice President, the longshoremen have arrived with your answer.
Stock market
A new book written by a leading globalist luminary provides a blueprint for how 6,000 elitists plan to completely end national sovereignty, impose a system of global governance, and how they will deal with an international network of people that resist their agenda.
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making is a manifesto for how the elite plan to shape the course of the planet and impose a new world order while combating the inevitable "global network of antiglobalists" who will rise up against it.
The author of the book, David J. Rothkopf, is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has previously served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during the administration of Bill Clinton before he became managing director of Kissinger and Associates in January 1996.
A Salon.com review alarmingly details the brazen premise of Rothkopf's book - a global elite now run the planet and have usurped the power of national governments while ensuring laws constrained by borders are all but obsolete.
"Each one of them is one in a million. They number six thousand on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time," states the promo for the book.
The threadbare notion that Rothkopf's book is a critical and impartial investigation of the global elite can be rejected out of hand just by looking at the author's biography - in reality he is a cherished insider.
Throughout the book Rothkopf fawns over the global elite of which he too is a member. The Salon review notes his "palpable thrill" at "recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant," in the globalist enclave of Davos, Switzerland and his obsession with listing every banal "achievement" of each elitist he speaks with.
According to the article, the kind of elitist celebrated in Rothkopf's book "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."
Rothkopf himself concurs that laws and regulations defined by borders and nation states are obsolete and need to be replaced not by a global government but by "global governance". The fact that the ultimate goals of the two - the total elimination of national sovereignty - are essentially identical is not lost on globalists who know that a more subtle imposition of centralized control needs to be enacted in order to con the serfs into sacrificing their identity. A sharply defined "world government" is too visceral a concept and would attract fierce opposition, therefore a method of forcing countries to adopt harmonized policies of "global governance" is the new approach that globalists have embarked on.
Rothkopf ominously expresses the plan to mandate the "Registration and management of Internet domain names (via a collection of organizations)" under a global umbrella, which the informed will recognize as a bastardized version of Internet 2, where individuals require government permits to operate a website under tight regulation.
The article concedes that, "Rational as it may sound to set up such systems, they just aren't directly answerable to the populace at large — they're undemocratic," which Rothkopf admits will give rise to rebellions and pave the way for more people like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who he labels as being part of "the global network of antiglobalists," and a man who has "made political theater out of taunting and thwarting the global elite."
Rothkopf's answer to the inevitable antagonism that will be directed towards the globalists as their agenda unfolds is to hoodwink the commoners into thinking they have influence in the new world order that is being built around them - a method otherwise known as the Delphi Technique, which is universally recognized as an underhanded and unethical ploy of achieving consensus through deception.
According to Rothkopf the, "Superclass ought to be smart enough to foresee any such crisis and head it off by doing more to make the currently disenfranchised feel like "stakeholders" in the new global order."
The fact that the same elitists Rothkopf affords such sycophantic adulation are also personally responsible for the policies that result in the slaughter of untold millions and the misery of countless others across the globe matters little to Rothkopf, who also has no qualms about including Osama Bin Laden in a group of 6,000 "global elite" who now control the world and "whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments."
Superclass maintains that the elite, who mainly comprise "older males of European descent who graduated from prestigious Western colleges," are "an improvement on those of the past," but this rings hollow when we consider the state of the planet that they have crafted.
A million-plus dead Iraqis since 2003, a global economy in chaos and individual freedom under attack in every corner of the world suggests the much-vaunted global elite - worshipped in Rothkopf's book as saviors of the Earth - are more accurately parasites and a cancer upon humanity.
Watch Rothkopf give a lecture on the power of the global elite. He identifies Bohemian Grove as a key meeting venue for the globalists. Decide for yourself whether he is a fawning sycophant or an objective critic.
Rothkopf's approach is to blame the world's problems on free-market capitalism and and imply that global elitists are a new phenomenon and therefore part of the solution, when in reality the elite created monopoly capitalism and have been a hidden-hand manipulating world events and offering solutions to problems they created for centuries.
The last time this was attempted in California, the strikers and protesters were greeted by police with teargas and guns that shot wooden chunks (about the size of a doorknob). Many people were badly injured.
Let's hope this is a peaceful event.
sdw917,
I was in San Francisco today. It was a peaceful event, and very productive. Thanks to all who participated in anyway they could.
Solidarity, brothers and sisters!
As an AFSCME member hungry to see Labor rise up against this criminal occupation, brought to us by the Worst Administration EVER. I think of yesterday as ILWU's Ground Zero of serious anti-war actions by Labor of this century; and I was thrilled to participate.
I am so proud of ILWU for doing this and I hope other unions will step up to the plate to either organize more anti-war actions or to join in. I believe direct actions, especially shutdowns, should occur at least every month to bring attention to the 12-billion-a-month bill for these continued futile occupations, which have only succeeded in breeding terror and a massive humaninatarian crisis.
And speaking of futile, that would be this presidency. But that's putting it politely.
In Solidarity to End the Occupation!
MoJo,
You're onto something good, and thank you very much for participating. We need more active folks like yourself.
This, the most corrupt, anti-American administration in US History, has focused on several things since 2001. Fear, intimidation, perpetual violence AKA "war", and the dismantling of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Republicans have a fascist mindset, but it was the Democrats who enabled Bush and Cheney to commit these acts and always whinning about "not having enough votes." You "can only cry wolf" for so long before the people wake up and see the big lie.
Again, many more of these labor actions need to happen, and a peaceful resistance similar to the longshoremans' actions need to occur within our military by those who haven't drank the coward-in-chief's Kool-Aid mix.
In Solidarity to End The Occupation!