For the first time since the January 20 police riot against protesting Charleston dockworkers, ILA Local 1422 members picketed a scab Nordana ship, the M/V Stjernborg. This time, on February 24, they were joined on the picket line by representatives of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, its President Lawrence Thibeaux and Executive Board member Jack Heyman, at the Columbus Street Terminal. Confronted again by a massive display of police force, the picketers limited to 19 by a court injunction marched and chanted defiantly,“ILA!, ILA! ILA!” and “Ain’t no power like the power of the union, ’cause the power of the union won’t stop!”
The South Carolina States Port Authority had delayed the ship’s arrival for fear that union longshoremen and checkers would try to stop the scab loading operation by nonunion Winyah Stevedoring or it would interfere with the dock operations of other larger ships in port.
ILWU Local 10, along with the other ILWU locals in Northern California, the Liverpool dockers and the Coordinadora Dockworkers Union of Spain had responded to ILA Local 1422 president Kenneth Riley’s appeal for support. At a Local 1422 press conference the previous day President Thibeaux presented a check from Local 10 for $5,000 to the Dockworkers Defense Fund to assist in the legal battle of the Charleston longshoremen, clerks and maintenance workers. At the rally on the picket line Heyman was roundly applauded when he said that West Coast longshoremen stand solidly with the embattled Charleston longshoremen. These acts of solidarity clearly heartened the rank and file longshore workers.
The ILA had a signed collective bargaining agreement with Nordana, a Danish shipping line, until last year when the shipping line paid its unfunded liability in pension and welfare contributions, broke the contract and started using nonunion Winyah Stevedoring. In 1989, when a scab stevedoring outfit tried to start up in Wilmington, North Carolina just across the border it was met by hundreds of protesting longshoremen from South Atlantic ports. Unfortunately, scab operations have hit the ILA hard in the so-called “right-to-work” South. Reportedly, the port of New Orleans has 50% nonunion longshore operations, while Houston is 80% nonunion!
The increased globalization of the economy can be seen in the international amalgamation of shipowners (Maersk and Sealand, OOCL and APL) and the establishment of global shipping alliances. Waterfront unions located at the critical point of international transportation have been targeted by governments and employers as restraints against their policies of “free trade”.
The successful anti-union attacks on dockworkers in Britain, Australia, Mexico, Holland and Brazil have whetted their appetites for more. Now the waters are being tested in Charleston, South Carolina. Apparently, the ILA leadership has deemed this attack a “local” problem.
Longshore action on January 2 forced a Nordana ship to leave the port of Charleston with 25 boxes and heavy equipment still on the dock and unloaded by the scab Winyah Stevedoring company. When the M/V Skodsborg arrived on January 20, the state provocatively mobilized a massive display of police power – several hundred riot police (SWAT and SLED) and local police, tanks, armored cars, helicopters, concussion grenades, shotguns, dogs and tear gas – all in an effort to intimidate and repress longshore workers from demonstrating. Police sabre rattling had already begun before the midnight picketing when the longshore union was informed that police were amassing riot gear and clearing out the county and city jails. It didn’t stop the courageous longshoremen and clerks.
As hundreds of union picketers approached the phalanx of police in riot gear, one cop lunged forward with his club. A longshoreman pulled the cop’s club and both tumbled to the ground. Immediately a swarm of cops jumped and beat the beleaguered longshoreman. A melee ensued. Local union officials intervened to try to quell their members. When President Kenneth Riley, who had been facing the longshoremen with his back to the cops, turned to the police to ask their restraint, he was clubbed over the head. Seeing the blood streaming down the face of their president, Local 1422 members justifiably flew into a rage. One longshoreman confronted by a state trooper pointing the barrel of a shotgun at him, bared his chest and cried out “Pull the trigger, ’cause we ain’t gonna stop fightin’ for our jobs!” The trooper declined to fire rather than create a martyr for the struggle. Another picketer was struck by a police car careening into the demonstrators and landed on top of the vehicle. Ten were hospitalized.
Eight longshore workers were initially arrested for trespassing. The charges were later increased to “rioting and conspiracy”. The judge dismissed the charges once he realized that the first several minutes of the police video were suspiciously edited out. Four ILA men have now been indicted by anti-labor, anti-black and pro-cop South Carolina Attorney General Condon. The African American newspaper of Charleston in its February 23 issue ran a banner headline: “ILA, Cops Melee Planned By Cops?”, while the viciously anti-union Post and Courier (whose front page photo helped frame a longshoreman) pontificated in an editorial (January 21) “Labor violence on Charleston’s waterfront must not be rewarded.”
Unions internationally must come to the aid of our black and white brothers and sisters! They’re being railroaded by a racist, anti-union Attorney General with ambitions to run for governor on a “right-to-work” and “states rights” platform. Simultaneously, the longshore unions are under attack politically in the state legislature. Attempts are being made to tighten the “right-to-work” law to make it more difficult for unions to collect dues or fees and also ban union members from positions on the State Ports Authority Board.
A few days before the dock clash on January 20, forty members of ILA Local 1422 with their union banner travelled to Columbia to participate in a mass protest against the battle flag of the Confederacy, the symbol of slavery, being flown over the state capitol building. The port of Charleston is also a tourist mecca. It showcases beautiful palm tree-lined streets and magnificently restored colonial buildings, including its old slave market where the ancestors of today’s longshoremen were shamefully bought and sold like cattle. It took a civil war to end slavery. Then, in 1867, black dockworkers in Charleston formed the first labor organization of freed slaves, the Longshoremen’s Protective Union Association, and won a strike for higher wages.
The first shot in the Civil War was fired in Charleston at Fort Sumter, then under control of the Union army. Ironically, it is once again in the port of Charleston where the class war – to defend unions and the decent living standards and working conditions they provide – is being fought.
To help the Charleston longshoremen in their legal battle please send your contribution to:
Dockworkers Defense Fund c/o
Robert J. Ford, Treasurer of the Fund
910 Morrison Drive
Charleston, South Carolina 29403
