The dockworkers of the San Francisco Bay Area have a hard earned reputation for industrial militancy with a political edge that dates back to the city’s 1934 general strike. Over the ensuing decades dockers organised in Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have embodied something of a working class vanguard, with members blocking shipments to Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, boycotting trade with apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and mounting solidarity action with the locked-out Liverpool dockers in the mid-1990s.
ILWU Local 10 again proved the driving force behind the most significant action to date by trade unionists in the western world against the ongoing wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. On May Day 2008 the ports of San Francisco and Oakland, along with virtually all of the 28 other dock facilities from San Diego, California to Seattle, Washington, came to a halt for an eight-hour shift in a dramatic protest by some 25,000 ILWU members to highlight their union’s demand for the withdrawal of US troops from both countries.
The push for the May Day action began in earnest when the Longshore Caucus of the ILWU voted 97 to 3 at a February meeting to support a resolution for a work stoppage explicitly opposing the wars and calling for immediate troop withdrawal. The employers’ umbrella body, the Pacific Maritime Association, sought to prevent the action and twice obtained arbitrator’s rulings that the May Day stoppage breached the collective bargaining agreement on time off to attend union meetings. While the union’s full-time officials got increasingly cold feet and issued statements that the action was really to support “our troops” and no longer had official backing, there was no order to abandon the action and thousands of dockers did not report for work.
The ILWU action struck a resonant chord across the Bay Area with a downtown movie theatre, the Grand Lake, featuring this stirring tribute on its marquee in the week leading up to May Day:
“We salute the longshoremen’s May Day strike to protest the criminal occupation of Iraq.”
A May Day parade and anti-war rally in San Francisco featured speeches from actor and activist Danny Glover, anti-war campaigner Cindy Sheehan and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, as well as local trade unionists. Meanwhile, a number of token work stoppages and moments of silence took place in other US workplaces, from ports in New Jersey to post offices in several states, to coincide with the ILWU action.
But the most dramatic effect of the West Coast dockers’ walkout may have been in Iraq itself, as dockworkers at two southern port facilities, Umm Qasr and Khor al-Zubair, stopped work for an hour, citing the ILWU action as their inspiration.
The General Union of Port Workers in Iraq wrote to the ILWU:
“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.” In an interview with the US alternative news programme, Democracy Now!, ILWU Local 10 Executive Board member Jack Heyman said:
“This is the first work stoppage ever [in the US] where workers were withholding their labour and demanding an end to the war and the immediate withdrawal of the troops. Not only did we defy the arbitrator, but in a certain sense we defied our own union officials. The union officials did not want to have the actions we organised up and down the coast despite the arbitrator’s decision. Simply, we don’t take our orders from the arbitrator – we don’t take it from judges. The rank and file goes out and does what it has to do.”
Jack Heyman, along with three other ILWU representatives, will be in Britain in late June after receiving an invitation from the National Shop Stewards Network to attend its second conference.
Two of the ILWU members will be available to address union meetings between 25 and 30 June. Permanent Revolution is especially pleased and proud that ILWU reps will be part of our weekend of debate and discussion, joining the session on US labour and politics on Saturday 28 June.
