Liverpool 2nd Anniversary Rally, 27 September 1997
Participants of this rally, dockers and families, friends and supporters of the Liverpool dockers!
First of all I would like to thank the organising committee, Merseyside Port Shop Stewards Committee, for my invitation to come here and take part in this march and rally to mark the second anniversary of the sacking of 500 good men here in Liverpool who did not do anything but exercise their fundamental trade union right to honour a picket line. Normally an anniversary means celebrating something, but this is different - we are all here not to celebrate but to show our solidarity with and declare our support for the Liverpool dockers and to demand their full reinstatement.
It was with great pride I received the invitation to come here and being given the opportunity to address you - but this is a pride that reflects on every dockworkers in Sweden who is supporting their colleagues in Liverpool and when I say every dockworker I mean it literally - I have hardly met anyone who is not in favour of solidarity and actions in support of the sacked dockers here in Liverpool. But when I meet people who are not working in the waterfront industry they often ask - "why do you care so much about 500 men in Liverpool, although they are colleagues of yours, being out of work when the unemployment figures in Sweden are reaching until now unknown figures?" and to explain that I have to give a short history lesson. History is always very helpful for understanding what is happening around you and in particular our history and not the tales about kings and nobles but the history of common people and working class people.
Our local trade union in the port of Stockholm was founded in 1895 - on the 23rd of May to be exact and what were the main issues being raised by the then just unionised dockers? They were Number 1, the right to organise in trade unions and having those trade unions recognised by the employers, the stevedoring companies. No. 2 was the right to negotiate for a collective bargaining contract stipulating wages and other matters such as insurance and safety regulations. No. 3 was the exclusive right for the unionised dockers to work in the port and No. 4 was a fair system of job distribution among the dockers to make sure that everyone would get a fair deal of the work and thus a fair pay.
In 1903-4 there was an almost one year long industrial conflict in the Port of Stockholm. All unionised labour was being excluded from work and scabs were brought in - history repeats itself doesn't it? After almost twelve months of conflict the dockers won the fight and all those rights - rights that we still have in my port and all other ports in Sweden. And those rights used to be there for the dockers here in the UK as well, formalised through the Dockworkers Act. Coming into the 1980s the dominant and brutal capital was gaining ground and its politicians - a Ronald Reagan in the US and Maggie Thatcher here in Britain played their roles and changed laws and rules on the labour market and thus the Dock Labour Scheme was abolished in 1989. And the final result of that and those neoliberal politics is the sacking of 500 well trained and reliable good men here in the Port of Liverpool whose only fault - and that is a fault only in the eyes of the managers of the MDHC - is that they are well organised through and working under a collective contract - not as casuals as in almost every other British port. And there we are - what has been lost here in Britain are those four fundamental rights that our forefathers were fighting so bitterly to gain.
So this is what I am trying to tell you: because of our own history, because of our knowledge of how vulnerable our own situation is - just a few paragraphs in Swedish labour law have to be changed and we could be in the same situation as our brethren here in Liverpool, because of the fact that dockworkers always have had to depend on international solidarity to protect their rights - remember that the ITF was founded by seafarers and dockworkers in 1896 and because of the fact that British dockworkers always responded when we asked for assistance, it was a matter of course for us to try to assist our Liverpool colleagues when they brought their situation to us. That is why we have been a part of this struggle for not 24 months, but for 22 months since we first learned about it in November 1995 when two of the stewards came to visit us in Sweden.
And this brings me to another theme if I may take your time for just a short while more. The Liverpool dockers have set an example for all of us how to organise a fight like this one. From the very beginning they didn't get any assistance from their own trade union the TGWU and thus not from the ITF. In the media there was an almost total blackout of what had happened in the Port of Liverpool in late September 1995. So very quickly they started to organise a national as well as an international campaign to seek support wherever possible. Through their effort we have today an, however informal, Dockers International Movement, and we have managed through that International Movement to organise three different days of action in support of the Liverpool dockers as well as many other supportive actions, but nothing of this would have come into reality if it wasn't for the visions, for the skill and the organising capacity of the Liverpool dockers and their shop stewards.
I also want to say that the whole situation would have been much worse, if not the whole battle being lost, if it were not for the Women of the Waterfront. The way you - and now I am addressing the members of the Women of the Waterfront - the way you have organised and what you have accomplished is so important and gives such an example for others that you all worth our admiration. The longest industrial dispute I have been a part of myself lasted for 7 weeks and already that was a serious strain on many marriages and relationships.
Many admirable and good things have happened during those 24 months that have passed. It has been a heroic struggle but the success we all look for - the full and unconditional reinstatement of the 500 sacked dockers - has not yet come into reality.
Therefore - on behalf of my organisation the Swedish Dockworkers Union, a free rank and file organisation made up of dockers for dockers - we call for all dockworkers' trade union organisations all around the world irrespective of their affiliation to take part in this significant fight for workers rights.
We call for the TGWU and the ITF to come out of the shadows and for the leadership of those organisations to implement the decisions being taken within those organisations to give their full support to one of the foundations of those organisations - the Liverpool dockers.
We call for every other trade union, grassroots, and working class organisation to give the Liverpool dockers and their families all possible support.
We call for the British government to take their responsibility as being the most influential shareholder in the MDHC to intervene and make sure that this conflict will have the only fair solution, meaning the full reinstatement of the sacked dockers.
We demand of the MDHC to get rid of their scab labour and reinstate every sacked docker in the Port of Liverpool.
VICTORY TO THE LIVERPOOL DOCKERS
