Reprinted from the January 24, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. May be reprinted or reposted with PWW credit.
Following a prolonged debate in the ranks of its international executive board over the question of certifying the election of Brian McWilliams as International President, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union last month voted to certify the election results and move on.
The 12 to eight vote of the executive board allows the union to solidify its ranks and prepare to take on the global campaign of the international shipping cartel aimed at privatizing all longshore work at the expense of union wages and conditions.
The most dramatic of these attacks was the lockout of some 500 Liverpool dockworkers two years ago. But since then the campaign, often backed with brutal force has spread to several countries.
Recently, the Maritime Unions of Australia have been targeted by their government and employers for a union- busting plot that involved sending several hundred Australian soldiers to oil-rich Dubai in the Middle East to be trained to take over longshore work as part of a plan to force a strike and break the unions.
Brazilian longshoremen in the port of Santos had their jobs privatized and were met by federal troops on the docks when they tried to picket the ships.
A few months ago Japanese dockworkers were the object of a squeeze play when the U.S. Maritime Commission threatened to bar Japanese ships from U.S. ports unless Japanese dockworkers agreed to give up their right to refuse work on Sundays and other conditions in their contracts. The support of the ILWU and the strong stand of the Japanese unions defeated this move.
The attacks on the ILWU have been growing over the past two years since the waterfront employers, acting through the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), elected a new leadership with Joseph Miniaci as president.
In his year-end report for 1996, Miniaci wrote, "1996 has been a year of significant transitions for PMA, for its member companies, and in the way labor agreements are negotiated and implemented. Transition always entails change, and intends to be the catalyst for change in the way we do business within the PMA, as an association, and the way we do business with the union."
Under Miniaci, the PMA has turned what used to be a stable, orderly system of resolving grievances into a constant series of legal battles with the objective of bankrupting the union.
"We're getting sued every time we turn around," said an ILWU official in southern California recently. In early 1997 the PMA filed an unfair labor charge with the NLRB after the southern California dockers struck for four days in solidarity with striking ILWU harbor pilots.
More recently, the PMA has brought court action against the ILWU and other organizations in Oakland involved in the refusal to unload scab cargo from a ship that had loaded that cargo in Liverpool, England. The PMA is even going after individuals who are not ILWU members but participated in the picketing of the scab cargo.
The PMA strategy is seen as a two-pronged attack: First, to "soften up" the ILWU before the negotiations for a contract come up in the spring of 1999 and, at the same time, to be part of the global strategy of international conglomerates and right-wing governments to privatize all waterfront work and break the unions in the process.
The slogan of the ILWU since its founding is more vital today than ever, "An injury to one, is an injury to all," and it is a slogan that applies as well for the AFL-CIO in its relations to workers and unions around the globe.
