Labor leaders nationwide support dockworkers arrested for rioting
CHARLESTON – From Boston to Barcelona, labor leaders are rallying to the defense of five Charleston dockworkers who face trial this fall on riot charges stemming from a confrontation with police early last year.
An estimated 4,000 people, many of them union members from other states, rallied at the S. C. State House this month, chanting, “Free the Charleston Five!” The cause has been taken up as well by other groups, from the S. C. Progressive Network to the Communist Party USA.
Labor trouble is rare in South Carolina, one of the nation’s least unionized states. Even rarer is its emergence as a national cause.
The AFL-CIO says on its Web site that the charges were trumped up to break the International Longshoremen’s Association in Charleston.
In labor’s eyes, the principal villain is S. C. Attorney General Charlie Condon. He upgraded the misdemeanor charges brought by Charleston police to felony counts that carry two to five years in prison.
“The Attorney General is planning to run for governor and he’s trying to make a name for himself,” said Donna Dewitt, president of the state AFL-CIO.
Condon, who earlier this year announced his candidacy for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, said he upgraded the charges “based on the facts of what happened.”
But what actually occurred 17 months ago in an industrial area north of downtown Charleston is hard to pin down.
The union had been holding demonstrations for more than a month to protest a Danish shipping line’s hiring of nonunion dockworkers to load its vessels.
Labor’s version is that riot police attacked peaceful picketers. But reporters at the scene described dockworkers pelting police with bricks and bottles.
Hoyt Wheeler, a University of South Carolina management professor who studies organized labor, said the AFL-CIO and its enemies within the state have each found a vehicle to further their agendas.
“In part, it reflects the new mood of the American labor movement,” said Wheeler. “There has been more interest in labor being more clearly a movement for human rights and dignity. That theme has always been there, but it’s been emphasized more since John Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO.”
Union membership nationally has been falling since the 1980s as manufacturing - labor’s traditional base - has been losing jobs. “Sweeney’s election as president was in part a reflection of a need to do some different things to respond to the loss of membership and the loss of power that went along with it,” Wheeler said.
He said the AFL-CIO is very sensitive to any situation where people engaged in labor activity are prosecuted. The labor federation is using the Charleston case to publicize what it sees as abuses of workers by anti-union employers and government officials, Wheeler said.
Ken Riley, president of the largest of Charleston’s three ILA locals, has traveled the world raising money for the five men’s legal expenses. So far, he said, he has collected $330,000, of which $100,000 came from union dockworkers in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
He addressed the International Dockworkers’ Council in Barcelona, Spain. He was in Boston last month and New Orleans this past week. Thursday, he spoke briefly to the National Baptist Convention USA in Charlotte about the importance of defending the accused men. Riley said Condon brought the charges to use as “a political soapbox. He wants to ride this into the next election.”
When the trial begins, perhaps in September, he said, “We expect to see protests in a lot of cities and ports around the world.”
Right-to-work states In an interview in his Charleston office this month, Riley said, “We have to heighten awareness that labor is under attack in South Carolina. We’re under attack all over the country, but not like we are here.”
The Carolinas have never been a labor stronghold. Union membership as a percentage of total workers was 3.6 percent in North Carolina last year and 4 percent in South Carolina. Nationally, it is 13.5 percent.
In addition, both Carolinas are right-to-work states, which means individuals can’t be forced to pay union dues or join a union, even if a majority of their co-workers vote to unionize.
At the State House rally, state Rep. Joe Neal, R-Richland, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, called South Carolina “the belly of the beast” in terms of anti-union feeling.
Condon, however, said “evidence speaks for itself” in the Charleston case.
“They’re the ones who are using mob violence and threats of violence,” he said. “What is going on here is a purposeful plan, union-backed, to use violence to cause us to not enforce state right-to-work laws.”
Condon said his actions were “entirely appropriate,” and that he would “make no apologies for having as part of my motivation the fact that I strongly dislike their tactics and intend to fight their tactics tooth and nail.”
What caused the violence? There’s no doubt there was violence the night of Jan.19,2000. But whose fault it was depends on who’s talking.
“We would not have had 130 guys there that night if they had not first amassed this huge show of force,” said the ILA’s Riley. “They were sent down there for a reason: to crush this demonstration.”
An estimated 600 law enforcement officers were stationed around the perimeter of the State Ports Authority’s Columbus Street Terminal for the arrival of a Nordana Line freighter. The longshoremen had vowed to picket every time one of the line’s ships came into port to be loaded or unloaded by nonunion workers.
With seniority and overtime, a union longshoreman in Charleston can make $100,000 a year. The ILA said it feared that if Nordana was able to hire nonunion labor, other companies would soon follow suit.
Following an incident in December, when two nonunion workers claimed to have been roughed up by union members, the Ports Authority police had requested help from Charleston and state authorities.
The State Law Enforcement Division and the state Highway Patrol increased their contingents after receiving intelligence that a large number of union members were coming from out of town to join the Charleston picketers, according to SLED Chief Robert Stewart.
“We elected to bring some extra people and have them in reserve in case they were needed,” Stewart said. “I don’t know that the intelligence turned out to be correct. But it was information we had to act on at the time.”
Riley said only local workers were there, and that he saw riot police engaged in a struggle with them. It was then, Riley said, that he received a hard blow on the head from a police baton.
Demonstrating or rioting? With blood running down his face, he left for the emergency room and didn’t return until after police had arrested eight men whom officers identified as having attacked them. They were charged with violating Charleston’s trespassing ordinance.
Later that day, Condon stepped in and upgraded the charges to rioting. He said he bypassed the local prosecutor, David Schwacke, because “You had a number of principles at stake. These mob violence intimidation tactics that have been successful in other states ought not be allowed to succeed in South Carolina.”
A magistrate threw out the charges after an assistant attorney general assigned to the case failed to present evidence to show that the men had participated in any violence. Condon then obtained indictments from a county grand jury against four of the men. A fifth, whose photo appeared on the front page of The Post and Courier newspaper, showing him swinging a metal pipe, was also indicted.
Schwacke, now in private practice, said last week that had the decision been left to him, “I might have been content to have left the charges where they were. The police had made that decision, and if anyone was assaulted, it was them.”
Riley said the union would not have complained if the original charges had been allowed to stand. “We’ve worked out those kinds of charges before; we’ve done community service,” he said.
Brett Bursey, director of the S. C. Progressive Network, said, “The guys were disorderly. They were charged with disorderly conduct. The question really isn’t that, but rather, was there a conspiracy to riot? Was there something that Charlie Condon needed to impanel a grand jury to hear?”
Racial implications Since being charged, the five men have been under house arrest.
“We cannot be outside of our homes before 7 a. m. and after 7 at night. We can only go to work or union meetings,” one of the men, Peter Washington, said in an interview with the People’s Weekly World, a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA. “If I have a 7 p. m. program at church, I can’t go. My son plays soccer and basketball. I can’t go. If they catch us out after 7 p. m. , they will lock us up until the trial.”
Four of the five men charged are black, as are all but two of the 800 members of the dockworkers’ local. Several speakers at the State House rally said the prosecutions were at least in part racially motivated.
“I wouldn’t totally dismiss race,” said Riley. “The fact that African Americans are making the kind of money and benefits that we make, we’ve had indications where that wasn’t too favorably looked upon. But I think in this particular struggle, most of the struggle has been on the union issue.”
Still, USC professor Wheeler said he thinks the racial angle will make the trial an embarrassment for Charleston, which markets itself as a tourist attraction.
“If you start arresting blacks in this state when they’re protesting something that has to do with their rights of any kind, that has nasty implications,” Wheeler said. “We do not have a blank slate in our history in South Carolina.”
Condon responded, “Of course they have a perfect right to peacefully protest. But that’s not what they were doing. They were rioting.”
He said the grand jury indictments are based on police investigations that led to identifying individuals who could be prosecuted.
“Whether they’re white, black, red, yellow or green, whoever riots, that’s against the law, and that’s why they’re being prosecuted,” Condon said.
