click image for higher qualityPicketing longshore workers face felony charges, jail
For defending their jobs, five longshore workers-members of ILA Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina-face possible imprisonment on federal criminal charges. They and some 150 co-workers planned to picket a ship in their port that was using a non-union longshore crew when the state responded with a massive contingent of law enforcement officers and an altercation ensued. The five have been indicted for inciting and planning to riot, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. They could face trial as early as this January.
The AFL-CIO has initiated a national campaign for their defense and the predominantly African American local they come out of, and the ILWU is already taking a leading role in it. “This is a very compelling case, one that brings together all the issues, voice at work and the right to organize, issues of racial justice and issues of democracy,” Bill Fletcher, special assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and coordinator of the national campaign, told The Dispatcher.
The trouble began Oct.1,1999 when Nordana Lines notified Local 1422 it was ending its 23-year relationship with the union and would begin using non-union labor to work its ships. The local responded with picket lines. After peaceful pickets were relatively successful in delaying two Nordana ships, the state of South Carolina-which prides itself on being right-to-work state and advertises itself to investors as having the lowest rate of unionization in the country-decided it was going to break the longshore union’s power.
To protect the “right” of some 20 scabs to work the Nordana ship, Skodsborg, Jan.20, the state sent in some 600 police in riot gear. Some rode on horses and others drove armored vehicles. Helicopters circled overhead and police patrol boats cruised the waterside of the terminal.
“You would think there was going to be a terrorist attack on the State of South Carolina,” Ken Riley, president of Local 1422, said of the police presence.
The police marshalled at the terminal and, for extra provocation, in front of the union’s hall about 150 yards away. The longshore workers stayed away from the terminal, letting the police stay out in the rain and cold by themselves and waste lots of taxpayer money. After the police began to leave late in the evening, the workers reassembled at the hall. The police returned and the union members went out to the terminal to exercise their legal right to picket.
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ILA Local 1422 President Ken Riley addressed the longshore Local 10’s membership meeting Oct.19 and updated members on the Charleston 5. He thanked the local for the fact that the first unionists to come to Charleston docks to offer assistance and solidarity after the arrests of his members were Local 10 President Lawrence Thibeaux and Local 10 Executive Board member Jack Heyman. The ILWU Longshore Division has already contributed more than $100,000 to the Charleston 5 defense fund.
According to Riley, the police initiated the clash, pushing back the group of pickets. Trying to calm the situation, Riley and other union officers created a buffer between the police and the pickets. At that point one of the cops ran out of formation and clubbed Riley on the head. Then a fight began.
When it was over the police arrested nine longshore workers on charges of misdemeanor trespassing. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, but state Attorney General Charlie Condon went to the Grand Jury and sought and obtained the federal indictments on federal charges against five Local 1422 members. Condon has made it clear he intends to prosecute the workers vigorously and has said his plan for them includes “jail, jail and more jail.”
At the same time Nordana and the WSI, the non-union stevedoring company that supplied the scab workers, sued Local 1422 and Ken Riley and Local 1771, the Charleston checkers and clerks local, and its president John Alvones for $1.5 million in alleged financial losses.
Nordana came back to the negotiating table last April and in three days the company and the union came to an agreement both sides could live with. Nordana said high costs pushed it to abandon the union, so the two sides sat down with the ILA contract to see if they could find a solution. The contract includes a provision called the “small boat agreement” for container ships with a capacity of 500 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent ). Under that section working a “small boat” requires the same wages, but some reduced manning and only a four-hour guarantee as opposed to the regular eight hours. It turned out that all along Nordana’s ships had fallen into that category.
Having reached an agreement with the local, Nordana dropped out of the civil lawsuit and urged WSI to do the same. But WSI pressed on, filing for a summary judgment, claiming the union was clearly at fault and the company had obviously suffered damages, so there was no need for a court hearing. But WSI lost that motion.
The company then amended its complaint to add the names of 27 longshore workers to the list of defendants liable for its losses. It got the names by asking people under oath in depositions to identify all the workers they recognized from pictures of the Jan.20 incident. The judge allowed the amendment, but warned WSI that if any of its actions turn out to be frivolous, the union would have the right to sue the company in return. The local immediately responded by filing unfair labor practice charges against WSI with the National Labor Relations Board for retaliating against the workers for exercising their legally protected right to picket.
Local 1422 met with WSI to discuss an out of court settlement Oct.27, but the company wouldn’t make any reasonable compromise. Riley said the local was willing to settle the lawsuit for some nominal amount without admitting any guilt because of what it could cost in legal fees to vindicate themselves.
“We have more serious charges to concentrate on,” he said, referring to the criminal indictments. “We need to focus on these other guys who stand a chance of going to prison. If these guys are convicted based on being identified through photos, by just having been there, the next time there’s a struggle and we have to go to a picket line, workers will be reluctant to picket.”
Currently the local’s attorneys figure the criminal case will not go to court until January 2001. In the meantime the Charleston 5 are still under a strict curfew that requires them to stay home between 7 p. m. and 7 a. m. if they are not working or at a union meeting and travel restrictions that don’t allow them to leave the state.
The AFL-CIO is mounting a national campaign in defense of the Charleston 5. The campaign will seek the acquittal of the Charleston 5 and the dropping of the WSI civil lawsuit, while building a strong case for workers’ rights and exposing the racist efforts of the state to limit Black power in South Carolina. The plans include setting up local defense committees in cities around the country and organizing national days of action.
The case merits such focus because the employers and the state violated many fundamental rights, Fletcher said. They attacked workers’ rights to collective action in many forms, and specifically African American workers rights to a decent living and full political participation.
“What you have in South Carolina is a situation where the police, under the apparent leadership of the Attorney General, are clamping down on workers’ rights to peacefully protest,” Fletcher said. “If they don’t have that right, then effectively workers there don’t have any kind of rights to organize, regardless of what’s on the books.”
Fletcher also said the racial component of the struggle, especially because it is happening in South Carolina, home of the Confederate flag controversy, makes it particularly important.
“Local 1422 is a largely African American local, a very important segment of the Charleston community,” he said. “It is significant that they are under attack because they are living proof that unionization is the best anti-poverty program ever created. You have workers with a decent standard of living precisely because they are unionized and organized. And I don’t think that fact escaped the attorney general or other anti-union forces in South Carolina.”
Riley also pointed out how important these union jobs are in the community. “These longshore jobs are the only jobs in South Carolina where a Black can really move up from below poverty to a middle class standard of living in a short time if he comes out and applies himself,” Riley said. “It’s the only job where young blacks who may have gotten themselves in serious trouble early on in life and paid their dues to society, can get a second chance. We have so many stories like that.”
The longshore workers’ commitment to the community extended to political action, and that brought down attacks on union members’ democratic rights, Riley said.
“Our problems began when we started getting involved in state politics,” he said. “We were trying to be like the ILWU, socially responsible to those around us. We can’t sit there and say ’We got ours, forget about everybody else. ’ So we wanted to start trying to put people in positions to change what’s going on in South Carolina.”
Labor helped elect the first Democratic governor in South Carolina in 12 years, who in turn nominated Riley to the State Port Authority. The South Carolina Manufacturing Alliance and the state Chamber of Commerce went berserk and managed to pressure the governor into withdrawing Riley’s nomination. Republican state legislators then introduced a bill-dubbed the Kenneth Riley Bill-prohibiting union members from serving on state boards and commissions. Its proponents touted it as a way to reduce union influence in state politics-in a state where only 3.8 percent of the workers are in unions. The bill passed the House, but was killed in the state Senate.
Riley came to the West Coast recently and reported the latest happenings to longshore Local 10’s members at their monthly stop-work meeting Oct.19. At that meeting the local passed a resolution committing itself to initiating an International Day of Solidarity with the Charleston Longshore Workers. The resolution demands that all the charges be dropped, calls on other longshore workers join in the solidarity actions and calls on the International Transport Workers Federation and the International Dockers Council to coordinate an International Day of Solidarity. “Local 10 is on target,” Riley said. “You don’t want to wait until the time comes to get everybody on board. It may not be a bad idea for them to get a whiff that something like this just may happen.”
