Striking Liverpool dockworkers are using the Internet to enlist support from labour organizations across the world. The 340 dockers have set up a World Wide Web site setting out their grievances and inviting donations and messages of support.

The dockworkers have been in unoffical dispute with the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board since they were sacked last September for refusing to cross a picket line set up by colleagues protesting over planned job cuts.

International publicity through the Internet and other means has already produced results. Sympathisers from Australia and the USA have joined the sacked employees on picket lines and dockers in New Jersey prevented the loading of a container ship bound for Merseyside. The last act caused the ship's owner Atlantic Container Lines to threaten to take its business elsewhere if the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board did not settle the dispute.

The dockers' Web site was set up using the donated space on the "Labournet" service of the Association of Progressive Communications (a non-profit making body). The site carries regular updates of the dispute's progress and the "dockworkers' charter" which calls for the reinstatement of the strikers and a commitment by the harbour board not to use causal labour. Messages of solidarity are listed from labour organizations in Finland, Japan, Norway and the US. Mike Carden, a dockworkers' spokesperson, said the Internet had been "phenomenal for getting our message across".

The Mersey dockworkers' Web site can be found at http://www.labournet.org.uk