Putting together this month's update on the Neptune Jade made me think about the similarities of that situation and the plight of the Liverpool dockers.
The dockers were fired for honoring a picket line put up by some of their mates in a dispute with their employer about overtime. The Committee for Victory to the Liverpool Dockers put up a picket line when the Neptune Jade loaded with cargo at a British port administered by the same company that fired the Liverpool dockers, sailed into Oakland. Local 10 and 34 members didn't cross the line. Now the picketers and the longshore workers and clerks are under legal attack.
In both the Liverpool and the Neptune Jade cases it is the picket line - the weapon of worker Solidarity - that is under attack.
Some workers don't understand the importance and power of the picket line, but the bosses do. That's why they have laws that restrict picketing.
In the Neptune Jade case the employers want to make the picketers pick up the tab for their losses during the action. And by doing so they also mean to intimidate anyone from engaging in such actions again.
Because the PMA, in a previous case, could not recover monetary damages incurred in a job action from the union, it is instead seeking a permanent injunction to keep Local 10 and 34 members from refusing to cross a picket line at that berth again.
But picketing and honoring a picket line is not a crime one gets court orders to stop or makes individuals pay for.
Defense attorneys have filed motions to throw out both the case against the picketers and the case against Locals 10 and 34 based on a law to stop harassment suits aimed at intimidating people from exercising their Constitutional right to free speech.
But there is more than just U.S. Constitutional fights at issue here. There's the international workers' right to withhold their labor, to picket and to express solidarity by honoring a picket line.
The ILWU officially recognized and codified that right when the union's 1953 Convention adopted "The Ten Guiding Principles of the ILWU." Among them was this admonition: "Every picket line must be respected as though it were our own."
The kind of solidarity the picket line represents, the flexing of collective muscle it demonstrates and the profound recognition and understanding of our power - especially to ourselves - it can bring, makes it a potent weapon.
So although the shipping industry executives promote deregulation and privatization, although they want Big Government out of their business, they also want the courts and legislation to outlaw any effective opposition from those off whom they make their money.
This is the international workers' struggle. Like the Liverpool dockers, our picket lines are always under attack and we can all be fired and replaced by scabs - unless solidarity holds.
