Mr. Brian McWilliams,
President International Longshore & Warehouse Union
1188 Franklin St.
San Francisco, California 94109
Dear Brian:
I read with great enthusiam your President’s Report in the October issue of The Dispatcher, titled “Standing up to the WTO”. You are right on target in judging the WTO and it’s backers to be labor’s worst nightmare.
I do, however, feel that words will not be enough to get the message across to the wannabe “World Bosses”. In your article you encourage as many ILWU members as possible to attend the demonstrations in Seattle. What you left out of your article is a strong commitment by you, the International President, to facilitate making that goal attainable by declaring November 30, 1999, an ILWU 24-hour stop work day.
This is the position of Local 8, as adopted at our November 9th Stop Work Meeting and from what I hear “on the beach”, many other Longshore Division Locals feel the same way.
Brian, I know that taking action such as Local 8 has called for puts the International at risk. However, as you stated in your article, “This will be the only opportunity in our lifetimes to make such an important statement to the multinational captains of industry and finance.” For the ILWU to ask all Divisions to shut down in order to participate in the demonstrations would again place us in the leadership role in trade unionism. If you were to take the further step forward by encouraging your fellow International Presidents throughout the AFL-CIO to likewise call for a national day of protest, then maybe the WTO and the media would have to pay attention to labor and it’s legitimate issues.
I will close by again quoting from your October article: “WE MUST NOT STAND IDLY BY”.
In Solidarity,
International Longshore & Warehouse Union, Local 8
Mark Drieth, President
Jeff Smith, Vice President
