By Mumia Abu-Jamal from death row
WAR
on the waterfront
In times of war, even one so nebulous as the "War On
Terrorism," there are wars within wars. Wars not merely fought
abroad, but little, internal wars of interests battling for
dominance.
With the elevation of George W. Bush to the nation's highest
office by the Supreme Court, business interests know they have
"their guy" in the White House, and they are now trying to
change the rules of the game, using government muscle and
federal power to threaten labor into compliance with their
bosses' interests. This can be seen clearest in the struggle
between the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA--the waterfront
employers) and the International Longshore and Ware house Union
(ILWU--the unionized workers).
The PMA allowed the labor contract to expire on July 1 and
has issued harsh demands to the unions that would seriously
undermine long-standing and hard-fought labor rights. The PMA
wants to introduce new technology into the shipping industry,
which the ILWU has agreed to; but the PMA wants to use these
technologies to circumvent the time-honored union hiring hall,
a move that cuts into pivotal union power.
The union hiring hall didn't always exist; it came into
being as a result of long, hard, deadly struggles, organized
not by union leaders, but by everyday rank-and-file ILWU
members, who pushed the Great Maritime Strike of 1934 into
labor history.
Historian Howard Zinn writes that "[L]ongshoremen on the
West Coast, in a rank-and-file insurrection ... held a
convention, demanded the abolition of the shape-up (a kind of
early-morning slave market where work gangs were chosen for the
day), and went out on strike. Two thousand miles of coastline
were quickly tied up. The teamsters cooperated, refusing to
truck cargo to the piers, and maritime workers joined the
strike. When the police moved in to open the piers, the
strikers resisted en masse, and two were killed by police
gunfire. A mass funeral procession for the strikers brought
together tens of thousands of supporters. And then a general
strike was called in San Francisco, with 130,000 workers out,
the city immobilized." (See Zinn, "A People's History of the
United States," pp. 386-7.)
While union organizers recall it was six strikers killed by
cops, the point remains that the hiring hall wasn't a gift
bestowed by the bosses, but a right won by blood and death. The
PMA wants to computerize it away, to distant points like Utah,
Arizona, and even overseas!
Another tool of the wealthy owners has been the corporate
press, which has falsely portrayed the longshoremen as if they
were pro baseball players, making over $100,000 a year, when,
in fact, their average wage is closer to half that. While the
ILWU quite rightly takes pride in the fact that it has fought
for decent wages for its members--over 70 percent of whom are
African American or Latino in the San Francisco/Oakland
ports--the PMA's tactic is designed to stir up labor envy in
the midst of a falling and faltering economy.
Into this simmering labor conflict now comes
"Unconstitutional Tom" Ridge, the stone-faced Homeland Security
Czar, and guess on whose side? Czar Ridge placed a
less-than-veiled threatening call to Jim Spinosa, ILWU
president. The message? A breakdown in talks (not to mention a
strike!) threatens "national security." Why isn't it ever that
when a worker, or even thousands of workers, faces job loss,
that isn't a "national security" threat? Why isn't job security
"national security"? How is it in the "interests" of a nation
to abolish a hard-fought right that labor won through terrible
battle?
Despite the whines of the wealthy and the bloats of the
corporate press, the ILWU has every right to hold firm in the
face of this state-managerial assault on their glorious
traditions.
The radical writer Randolph Bourne once observed, "War is
the health of the state." By this, he meant that governments
accrue tremendous powers during war, and rarely, if ever,
return power to the people.
The ILWU should fight, and fight hard, in its noble
tradition, against this new-age "shape-up" scheme pushed at
them by management, and threatened by the Bush regime. The
ILWU, with the aid and assistance of sister unions, can once
again teach an historic lesson, that "Labor security is
national security."
Reprinted from the Sept. 12, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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