“We did it, we shut down the Coast,” union speakers told the cheering crowd kicking off a rally at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco after a march from the hall of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 along the Embarcadero. All 29 West Coast ports were closed May 1 as a result of the action by the ILWU ranks to demand a stop to the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. Longshoreman Jack Heyman, a member of the Local 10 executive board, recalled a local radio announcer who used to say, “if you don’t like the news, then go out and make your own.” “Today we’ve not only made news, we’ve made history,” Heyman told the crowd of dock workers and supporters. They had indeed. On the fifth anniversary of President George Bush’s ill-fated “mission accomplished” speech, workers used their industrial power against the war.
The ILWU’s historic May Day walkout is the first time ever that an American union has struck against a U.S. war. Everywhere on the docks, the giant container cranes had their booms raised, showing they were not working, as if saluting the longshore workers’ action. It was a dramatic show of strength that the ruling class can’t ignore or dismiss. The union ranks defied the rulings of an arbitrator, who twice ordered them to go to work. They overcame the capitulations of the ILWU leadership, which didn’t want the work stoppage in the first place, tried to water it down and cowered before the threats of legal action while waving the flag. The employers’ Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) declared the May 1 port shutdown an “illegal strike.” But after all the huffing and puffing from the bosses’ mouthpieces, the dock workers pointed the way to defeating the imperialist war by mobilizing working-class power.
In the end, it was more than a work stoppage. The dock workers’ May Day strike against the war was a first step, a show of what it will take to bring down the warmongers in Washington. Their “symbolic” action was felt all the way to Iraq, where dock workers in two ports stopped work in solidarity with the ILWU. A May Day message from the General Union of Port Workers in Iraq to the “brothers and sisters of the ILWU” stated:
“The courageous decision you made to carry out a strike on May Day to protest against the war and occupation of Iraq advances our struggle against occupation to bring a better future for us and for the rest of the world as well.... We in Iraq are looking up to you and support you until the victory over the US administration’s barbarism is achieved.”
The sight of Iraqi and American workers joining hands in common action is a powerful show of what could come. These are not empty words on paper. Iraqi and American dock workers have just shown the world: this is what proletarian international solidarity looks like. Having demonstrated this, we must now generalize it and deepen it.
Importantly, the dock workers’ May Day action was not restricted to narrow “labor” issues. The attractive poster for the longshore union action produced by the Inkworks Press Collective for the Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee linked the struggle to “Defend Worker Rights! Defend Immigrant Rights!” At the ILWU rally in Justin Herman Plaza, speakers called on demonstrators to attend immigrant rights marches later in the day, while speakers from the union addressed immigrants’ rallies on both sides of the Bay. The port shutdown was not simply a West Coast event. Postal workers in San Francisco, New York City and Greensboro, North Carolina held moments of silence. The Vermont and South Carolina state AFL-CIO federations passed motions of solidarity, urging workers to undertake antiwar action on May Day. Chapters of the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York called events in solidarity with the ILWU action on eleven campuses of this largest urban public university in the U.S.
Nor was the ILWU’s appeal nationally limited. The union received messages of support from around the globe: from the Doro-Chiba rail workers in Japan; Australian dock workers; the International Transport Workers Federation; Liverpool and Brent trades union councils, UNITE and the National Shop Stewards Network in Britain; Conlutas and Intersindical labor federations in Brazil, and the SEPE teachers union in the state of Rio de Janeiro, among others. On May Day in Rome, Italy, stickers were distributed by a group of American antiwar activists with the message: “We ♥ ILWU.” And above all, there were the powerful messages and courageous work stoppages by dock workers in Iraq.
The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International have fought for years for transportation workers to “hot cargo” war materiel and for workers strikes against the war. We encouraged and publicized the ILWU union’s decision to act as soon as it was announced, so that it wouldn’t be buried by bureaucratic inaction or outright sabotage. The West Coast longshore workers’ action dramatically demonstrated that workers action against imperialist war is possible, and we are proud to have contributed to bringing this about. West Coast dock workers decided to “stop work to stop the war.” Now unions everywhere should be mobilized to follow the ILWU’s lead in fighting use labor’s muscle to defeat the bosses’ war.
This requires not only industrial action but a political offensive against the Democrats and Republicans, the partner parties of American imperialism. The bourgeois and petty-bourgeois “alternatives,” such as the Greens and Peace and Freedom that sprout in the lush flora and fauna of California politics, only serve to restrict opposition to the confines of bourgeois electoral politics. A revolutionary workers party would seek to mobilize the working class independent of and against all the capitalist parties, advancing class-struggle actions such as the ILWU’s antiwar port shutdown, and leading them toward a struggle for working-class power. Against the star-spangled rhetoric of the “peace is patriotic” crowd, such a party would fight for international socialist revolution.
“No Peace, No Work” May Day
ILWU contingent in San Francisco May Day march in conjunction with West Coast port shutdown against war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. (Internationalist photo)
The decision to make May 1 a “No Peace, No Work Holiday” was taken at the February 8 conclusion of the ILWU’s Longshore Coast Caucus, the highest decision-making body of the waterfront division, made up of delegates elected by the rank and file. The motion for union action against the war, authored by Heyman of Local 10, was passed overwhelmingly, by a vote of 97 to 3. Key to the lop-sided vote was the support of Vietnam veterans, some of them politically conservative, who said that the war had to be stopped, whatever it took. There was a lot of anger at the Democrats, who won control of both Houses of Congress in the November 2006 mid-term elections on the strength of an antiwar vote. But once in control of the purse-strings, the Democrats kept on voting hundreds of billions of dollars for the Pentagon war effort.
In the run-up to May Day, the maritime employers tried to use the threat of legal action to intimidate the dock work workers. In late March, they got an arbitrator to rule that the action could not be a regular monthly “stop work” meeting. On April 8, the union leadership withdrew its request for time off, but plans for the work stoppage continued. The PMA requested an injunction, but a judge threw it out. On the eve of the action, the maritime bosses tried again: “A day earlier, an independent arbitrator sided with waterfront terminal operators and other employers who suspected a job action was in the works, and ruled that halting work would be a contract violation. The ILWU was not dissuaded” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle (2 May).
A day before, Steve Getzug, a spokesman for the West Coast shippers declared, “We’re anticipating that May 1 is a regular work day.” The terminal operators’ anticipation was wrong. “The directive [to report to work as usual], however, was apparently ignored by the union's rank and file,” reported the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Up and down the Coast, the workers were no-shows. “Port in San Diego shut down as dock workers go on one-day strike to protest the war in Iraq,” read a Reuters dispatch. “There were locked gates and few trucks at the Port of Seattle on Thursday despite an arbitrator's order telling dockworkers not to take the day off for May Day protests,” broadcast KIRO-TV. Fox-TV in Los Angeles showed images of idle ports from Tacoma to L.A. In article titled, “Dockworkers take May Day off, idling all West Coast ports,” the Los Angeles Times (2 May) quoted a history professor saying: “This union looks at itself as the vanguard of the working class on the West Coast.”
The media reported that the stop-work action by the 25,000 ILWU dock workers was solid everywhere. More than 10,000 containers a day and other cargo would normally be handled by 6,000 longshoremen. “There’s no work happening so that means there’s no cargo being unloaded and certainly being loaded either,” lamented Getzug of the PMA. During the 2002 lockout by the maritime bosses, it was estimated that economic losses around the country were a billion dollars a day. At the Los Angeles-Long Beach ports, “America’s trade gateway to Asia,” handling 40 percent of all imports coming into the U.S., the Long Beach Press-Telegram (2 May) reported that “operations at most shipping hubs were at a standstill most of the day.” A spokesman for the Southern California Maritime Exchange said 18 ships were scheduled to arrive May 1, and another 12 were already berthed. Holding a ship idle in port for a day costs around $100,000.
All quiet on the docks. One of several ships berthed at port of Oakland during May Day port shutdown. (Internationalist photo)
In the San Francisco Bay Area, all 34 cranes in the port of Oakland were shut down, most of them with their booms up. Port authorities tried to minimize the impact, saying there was only one ship in port, but we observed at least four berthed at the docks and from the Bay Bridge you could spot several others in the harbor. Stevedoring Services of America (SSA) tried to run a skeleton crew, evidently to show it wasn’t affected by the union action. But ILWU members rushed to the terminal early in the morning and shut down the scab operation before it started.
Bay Area Direct Action Against the War set up picket lines with some 60 protesters at the two entrances to the Santa Fe-Burlington Northern rail yards. At 7th Street, a couple dozen members of United Transportation Union Local 239 didn’t cross, some deciding to show up late for work while others left for the day. At the entrance off Middle Harbor Road, truckers lined up, many refusing to cross the line. Most were Latino independent “owner”-operators, who get barely $80 a box, hardly enough to cover the skyrocketing cost of fuel. They were uniformly supportive of the picketers. A Teamster driver told The Internationalist, “All power to them, they’re really doing it. Somebody needs to stop the war.” He recalled the struggle by janitors at Century City in Los Angeles a decade and a half ago, which eventually led to their unionization.
At the Local 10 union hall across the Bay in San Francisco, members were gathering for the march along the Embarcadero. The turnout exceeded all expectations. The ILWU contingent included many who had never demonstrated before. As a couple hundred union members filed out of the hall, there were a thousand people waiting for them in the street. The march stepped off with the Local 10 Drill Team in the lead doing their precision routines. A band struck up Solidarity Forever. There were banners from the Oakland Education Association (OEA), UTU Local 1741 and other unions. Anarchist, syndicalist and socialist groups participated. There were students who walked out from S.F. State University. It was very S.F.: in front of the ILWU’s May Day 2008 banner marched a group of unionized dancers (SEIU Local 790) from the Lusty Lady strip club in North Beach with signs proclaiming “Exotic Dancers Solidarity with ILWU.”
The rally was held in Justin Herman Plaza, near where two longshoremen were killed by cops on “Bloody Thursday,” 5 July 1934, setting off the San Francisco general strike. The crowd was most animated when actor Danny Glover read from Martin Luther King’s speech against the Vietnam War calling for a “radical revolution in values” and restructuring of the U.S. economy. A powerful message was played from Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row in Pennsylvania for over a quarter century, who saluted the ILWU action (see accompanying box). Jamal cited the words an earlier class-war prisoner, Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs: “It is the master class that declares war, it is the subject class that fights the battles.”
Class Struggle vs. Popular Front
Truckers lined up outside SF-BN rail yards at Oakland refused to cross picket line, solidarizing with antiwar protesters. (Internationalist photo)
If the port shutdown and march showed the power of the S.F. labor movement, the rally showed many of its weaknesses. While disappointment with the Democrats fueled the vote for the antiwar stop-work action, the unions are still chained to the capitalist parties, particularly through the labor bureaucracy. Among the speakers were former Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, now running for the Green Party nomination for president, who praised the longshore workers for “drawing a line in the sand” while appealing to “my former colleagues” in Congress to stop the “Bush-Pelosi war”; by Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, who is running for Congress in S.F. as an independent against Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi; and by an aide to Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, hailed for casting the lone vote against the declaration of war on Afghanistan (although two weeks later she voted for the war budget).
A number of union speakers made “butter not guns” appeals, linking budget cuts in education and social services to the war. Yet a real fight against the war on Iraq and Afghanistan is not about budget cuts. It’s about U.S. torture and state terrorism, about colonial occupation and U.S. imperialist domination of the world. Fighting against attacks on education and other social services, or demanding health care for all, is certainly in order, as part of a broader class struggle. But to pose opposition to the war as if it is a matter of spending priorities is saying that the speakers only want to change policies, or at most “reform” the economy. It is an appeal to the Democrats to shape up and oppose Bush, which is what the popular-front antiwar movement is all about. Taken together with calls to “support the troops by bringing them home safely,” this amounts to a loyalty oath, when what’s needed is sharp class struggle to defeat the U.S. imperialist war and bring down the capitalist system that produces war after war.
The “social-patriotic” appeal was explicit in a letter read to the crowd from ILWU president Bob McEllrath saying that “Longshore workers are standing-down on the job and standing up for America. We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.” Saying, “Big foreign corporations that
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<p>It's a problem with stealth rallies--nobody but you knows you're having one.<br>
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A splinter group from Save Our State calling themselves No More Invasion tried to protest on Saturday outside of L.A. High School, but they decided not to tell anybody. So nobody noticed, except the cops.<br>
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They announced the event for next week to throw off counterprotestors. Prolly a good choice in that neighborhood. But they had to give up on the media and anyone from the school or the neighborhood being there in order to keep immigrant-supporters away. So about 20 minutemen hung around the school looking pretty lonely, taking pix of themselves.<br>
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Poor minutemen, all alone. It's no fun at school when no one will play with you, is it?</p>
<p><img border="0" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/bdaz01/JamielShaw/DSC05922.jpg" width="440" height="330">
