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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 30, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Solidarity with Liverpool dock workers

By Andy McInerney and Shelley Ettinger

On Jan. 20, at least 15 international dock workers' unions held solidarity demonstrations to support some 300 locked-out dockers in Liverpool, England.

Unions in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States organized mass meetings and strikes to show solidarity with the Liverpool dockers.

The Liverpool workers were fired for refusing to cross a picket line in September 1995. They accuse their boss, Mersey Docks and Harbor Co., of trying to break the union in order to bring back "casual" part-time workers and gut seniority.

In the United States, the West Coast's Longshore and Warehouse union-historically one of the most progressive and militant unions in the country-staged a one-day strike Jan. 20.

Workers shut down the docks at Tacoma and Seattle, Wash., and Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif. It was a splendid show of international solidarity.

The action pulled about 8,500 workers off the job. Ships that were scheduled to arrive on the 20^th had to reschedule.

Because Jan. 20 was Martin Luther King Day, it was a paid holiday for dockers. Most were scheduled to work anyway-for extra premium pay of double-time-and-a-half.

In refusing to load and unload ships, the longshore workers had to forego the extra pay. It was a worthy way to mark the day in honor of the civil-rights leader, who was assassinated while acting in solidarity with a union struggle in Memphis, Tenn.

About half of all foreign trade into and out of the United States passes through West Coast docks. The work stoppage affected about 50 ships in Long Beach alone, costing shipping lines tens of thousands of dollars.

"The Liverpool fight is part of a worldwide trend of port privatizations that has also happened in Mexico and New Zealand," said Longshore Local 10 President George Romero in San Francisco.

The more conservative East Coast longshore union also acted to "honor the request for a boycott" of vessels that call in Liverpool.

International actions

Solidarity came from around the world, too, according to an Internet report posted on the Labornews list.

Danish workers at the port of Arhus held a mass meeting and voted to stage a 24-hour sympathy strike.

Two dock unions in Canada held their first-ever joint meeting in Montreal Jan. 19 to support the Liverpool workers. It was conducted in French and English.

Belgian longshore workers protested at the British Embassy in Brussels. They were planning job actions for later in the week.

Swedish workers demonstrated at a dock office in Stockholm. A Swiss group occupied the Rhine Shipping Co.'s headquarters in Basel.

According to the Internet report, the Merseyside workers also received messages of solidarity from unions in Turkey, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Germany, China, Japan, India, and Russia.

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