Congress of the United States
House of Representatives

October 10, 1997

Mr. Brian McWilliams
President, ILWU
1188 Franklin Street
San Francisco, CA 94109

Mr. Robert Irminger
Committee for Victory to the Liverpool Dockers
P.O. Box 40458
San Francisco, CA 94140

Mr. Lawrence Thibeaux
President, Local 10, ILWU
400 North Point
San Francisco, CA 94133

Dear Friends:

I applaud the Committee for Victory to the Liverpool Dockers, and other solidarity organizations, for their successful protest action along the West Coast in support of the Liverpool dockworkers. I support the position of the rank and file of ILWU Locals 10, 34 and 91 who understood the volatile and corrosive character of a decision to cross the picket line set up in support of theLiverpool dockworkers. This is in the finest tradition of the unions support for the rights of labor and the advancement of progressive causes.

I am confident that the union, the Committee and other organizations will be able to defeat the effort to break labor solidarity that is being undertaken by the companies bringing actions against them. These actions have placed a square focus on the new economic battle lines in which global corporate alliances seek to use their transnational economic and political power to divide and defeat organized labor and collective bargaining.

Progressive labor and political leadership must be mindful of this new challenge and we must insist that the expansion and integration of capital met in turn with a consolidated and international labor solidarity that can ensure the preservation of the rights of labor that have been won by the blood and toil of generations of labor before us.

In the House we are attempting to ensure that fast track trade consideration and other efforts to globalize trade do not sacrifice the speech and organizing rights of U.S. residents while at the same time expanding the rights of labor in other countries.

In solidarity,

Ronald V. Dellums

Member of Congress