On 1 May 2008, 25,000 dockers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union
(ILWU), traditionally one of the most militant unions in the United States, shut down
every port from San Diego to Seattle to protest the occupation of Iraq. Promoted as a
“No Peace, No Work Holiday,” the union’s action defied the shipping bosses and
labor arbitrators who denounced it as an “illegal strike.” This was the first
successful political strike ever conducted by American workers against an imperialist
military adventure, and it sent a powerful message of international solidarity to all
those suffering under the jackboot of U.S. imperialism.
As we noted in a 19 April 2008 statement, “In resisting the imperialist
war-makers, the ILWU’s action points the way forward for the entire international labor
movement.” The ILWU ranks rebuffed attempts by their national leadership to derail
the action, which was counterposed to the labor bureaucracy’s dead–end strategy of
reliance on Democratic Party “friends of labor.” The May Day port shutdown
struck a blow at U.S. imperialism and established an important precedent for future
working-class political strikes. This is why all genuine socialists wholeheartedly
embraced the action, despite the patriotic drivel about the U.S. military spouted by the
ILWU tops.
While the strike was big news on the West Coast, the media outside the area all but
ignored it, as did the international press, out of fear that it might inspire similar
actions elsewhere. Much of the left also ignored, or downplayed the significance of, the
strike. Some no longer really consider the organized working class to be a potential agent
of social transformation. Others are hostile toward the initiator of the action, Jack
Heyman (a well-known labor militant and executive board member in ILWU Local 10), and/or
the Trotskyist political tradition he identifies with.
On 27 September 2008, the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) was honored to sponsor
Brother Heyman as a guest speaker at a public forum in Toronto. Before the presentation, a
short clip from the Labor Video Project was shown that vividly documented the May Day
action. With a couple of notable exceptions, the 50-odd people who attended the meeting
were extremely enthusiastic about the “illegal” anti-war strike and repeatedly
applauded Heyman throughout his remarks.
The exceptions were two representatives of the Trotskyist League (TL), Canadian
affiliate of the Spartacist League/U.S. (SL). The SL once had considerable influence in
the ILWU, but abandoned its trade-union work in the early 1980s. The first TLer to speak,
Arthur Llewellyn, conceded that the May Day strike “does point the way to the kind
of working–class action that needs to be mobilized,” and even ventured to
“salute the workers who withheld their labor during the port shutdown.” He
then spent the rest of his time denouncing Heyman and the other militants who organized
the strike, as well as leftists who supported them. Llewellyn charged: “The BT
provides a left cover for Heyman, who in turn covers for the ILWU tops, who in turn chain
the union to the Democratic Party.” The spontaneous laughter provoked by this and
similar idiotically sectarian comments became so loud that at one point the chairperson
had to request members of the audience to contain themselves.
A second TL speaker, Oliver Stephens, was indignant to find materials about the strike
written by the New York-based Internationalist Group (IG) on the IBT literature table:
“We’ve got the Internationalist Group literature there, we’ve got the
IBT there, we’ve got a nice big love-in trying to say something that isn’t true. That
unfortunately the action on May 1st was not one of conscious class
struggle—that’s just true. To lie about it is to prettify and to be able to make
little arrangements between groups and people that otherwise quite hate each other.”
This was seen by the audience for exactly what it was—an expression of petty
sectarianism. If the TL/SL does not consider a workers’ political strike against the
imperialist war machine to be a form of “conscious class struggle,” why should
they want to “salute” those who carried it out? Unlike the Spartacists, we
welcome the opportunity to work with other leftists when there is a principled political
basis for doing so. We are pleased that the IG enthusiastically supported the initiative
of the militants who organized the May Day action.
The shared recognition by the IBT and IG of the import of the ILWU May Day strike does
not change the fact that there are significant political differences between us. For
example, we consider that the SL’s turn away from trade–union work in the early
1980s was both an expression and an accelerant of a process of political degeneration that
was already far advanced. The IG, on the other hand, has a generally positive assessment
of the SL in that period. Sometimes agreement on one issue opens the door to substantive
discussion of differences; sometimes it does not.
During the round, Heyman brusquely dismissed the TL’s complaints as
“nonsense,” and noted that on May Day, SLers in San Francisco refused to join
a march of several thousand strike supporters. He pointed out that only a few years
earlier (in Workers Vanguard, 4 February 2005) the SL had issued a public
self-criticism for a similar refusal to participate in an April 1999 demonstration the day
the ILWU shut down the West Coast in solidarity with black political prisoner Mumia
Abu-Jamal. The TLers squirmed when Heyman went on to reveal that while all the best
militants in Local 10 had actively participated in building the May Day action, the SL’s
lone supporter “didn’t do a damn thing.”
One of the most important points that Heyman sought to drive home was that the May Day
anti-war strike did not “just happen.” It was the result of a lot of hard work
and cooperation by many different people with different views on a wide range of issues.
He was quite open about the limitations of the action, and particularly about the fact
that many of the participants have illusions that the Democratic Party under Barack Obama
can somehow turn U.S. imperialism into an instrument for social progress.
In response to a question from the floor about what he considered to be the most
important lesson from his decades as a union militant, Heyman pointed to the necessity to
forge a class-struggle leadership within the labor movement: “The lesson that I
learned is that you have to organize caucuses in the union based on a class-struggle
program to oust the trade–union bureaucracy, to remove them so that workers can
then fight against the employers that exploit them and the government that stands behind
those employers.” The idea of creating programmatically-based caucuses in the unions
is one that goes back to the early years of the Communist Party in the U.S. (see
“Early Communist Work in the Trade Unions,” reprinted in the IBT edition of
the Transitional Program).
Heyman returned to this vital question in his final summary, and concluded his remarks
with the observation that, “It would be better had there been a class-struggle
caucus that had been built in the ILWU,” but that it is necessary to address the
crisis of working-class leadership on a broader political basis: “A class-struggle
caucus does not exist in and of itself—it has to be directed by a revolutionary
party, and that is the key lesson that I impart to all of you tonight.”
The following is a slightly edited version of Jack Heyman’s talk. Bryan Palmer,
James P. Cannon’s biographer, introduced Heyman and outlined some of his history in the
union movement.
I do have a long history of promoting class-struggle politics working within the
trade-union movement. I actually began in the maritime industry in 1969 in the National
Maritime Union (NMU). At that time, I was part of a class-struggle caucus called the
Militant Solidarity Caucus that was initiated and supported by the Spartacist League,
which was then a revolutionary organization.
From the NMU I moved to the West Coast and became active in the ILWU, the longshore
union. The first important campaign that I was involved in out there was in 1984, around
the question of apartheid in South Africa. And from that struggle I learned a lot of my
politics and how to function as a revolutionary within the trade-union movement. I credit
a lot of what I learned—those lessons—to someone who’s here tonight, and I
want to acknowledge him: Howard Keylor. Will you stand up, Howard? Thank you. [applause]
Howard was able to raise a resolution within our local [ILWU Local 10—San
Francisco] that became the basis for an 11-day anti-apartheid cargo boycott—an
action that, in 1984, built or reignited the anti-apartheid movement in the United States.
That’s not my opinion—that’s what Nelson Mandela said when he was freed from prison
and he did a world tour. He came to the Oakland Coliseum, and the first thing he said was
that he credited the longshore union for reigniting the anti-apartheid movement in the
United States. The spark that struck off the anti-apartheid movement came from Howard
Keylor’s motion. Thank you, Howard. [applause]
So that 1984 strike against the ship that came in from South Africa, the Nedlloyd
Kimberley, was an exemplary action. But more than that, it emboldened workers and
showed them how they have power—not only in terms of a contract, but in terms of the
social reality in which we live. In the end, apartheid was brought down, and that
particular action played a key role in the United States.
I’m just giving you a little bit of background to lead up to how May Day 2008 was able
to be organized, because you need to know the background. A lot of people will say,
“ah, that’s the ILWU—they’re always doing actions.” That’s not the way
it happens; it’s got to be organized, and it’s got to be organized around a class
analysis—a program, a transitional program.
In 1997 and ’98 there was an important strike in Liverpool, England by the dockworkers.
That struggle brought out many of the best elements of the trade-union movement
internationally. The key thing about a longshore union is that it’s at the nexus of global
trade; and that’s the power that we have—to withhold our labor at that point of the
production process. And we did that for the Liverpool dockers, when the ship called the
Neptune Jade came into the port of Oakland. There was a community/labor picket
put up, longshoremen refused to cross that picket line and for four days that ship stood
idle. It scared the hell out of the capitalists. You could go to their various websites
(we also had a website up) and see that the number of hits went up exponentially as soon
as that action began. Because they recognize—the employers understand—that the
power of labor is there, on the docks. That was a good example of how workers can actually
solidarize and support each other’s struggles internationally. Unfortunately, the
Liverpool dockers eventually lost their struggle. But the lessons that we learned from
that have been sort of like a torch that’s been handed on.
So, a couple of years after that, black dockworkers in Charleston, South Carolina were
faced with a scab stevedoring company that came in to do their work (the union had a
contract with the shipping line, Nordana, for 25 years). South Carolina is a
“right-to-work” state, and it’s a bastion of reaction in the U.S. And yet, the
black workers uniting with white workers—the whites have the more privileged jobs
(doing the paperwork and checking off the cargo), while the blacks do the heavy physical
work of longshore. They united together and were able to wage a very significant campaign,
particularly for the southern United States. The dockers who were arrested in the struggle
were called the “Charleston Five.” The point is that the defense campaign for
them really got going because of the role that the West Coast longshore union [ILWU]
played. And I encourage people to get a copy of the flyer on the booktable—it’s
called, “On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston Five.” It
provides a well-researched and documented account of that struggle.
Basically, what we did in that struggle was we went to Charleston, because their own
labor bureaucracy in New York was not supporting their struggle and they were isolated. So
the ILWU’s San Francisco Local 10 sent two delegates to Charleston, and we were able to
tell them, “you’re not alone in this struggle. We stand with you.” We brought
news of their struggle back to the ILWU longshore caucus, which is a convention of all the
longshore locals up and down the West Coast. Our caucus voted to organize solidly behind
the Charleston dockers—and we brought their campaign to the entire organized labor
movement, not only in the United States, but internationally. And they won.
The lesson of that is that even in reactionary times when things look difficult in
terms of trying to fight employers and fight the government, it is possible to
win—but you’ve got to be willing to struggle. The Charleston longshoremen were
willing to make that stand. They together—black and white—fought on the picket
line against the cops (the South Carolina state riot police were called in at one point).
They challenged the system, and in the end, they won because we were able to build solid
support, not only in the United States, but internationally.
The way that worked was the same as for the Liverpool dockers’ struggle: the best
militants in the dockworkers’ movement came to the defense of the Liverpool dockers. I met
the head of the anarchist-oriented dockworkers’ union in Spain. And I said—it was an
email actually—“Julian, there’s an important struggle going on in Charleston,
and those ships that leave Charleston go to Valencia, Spain; they need your help.”
As soon as the next ship hit the dock in Valencia, longshore leaders went up the gangway,
they talked to the captain and they said, “this ship is not going to get unloaded.
None of your ships are going to get unloaded until you sign a contract with the longshore
union in Charleston.” And that was done within 48 hours. That’s the power of the
working class. [applause] That’s how solidarity works.
I think most of you know of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political prisoner, an innocent man
framed by the U.S. justice system for the killing of a police officer. In 1999, there was
going to be a big demonstration for him in San Francisco. Our local put forward a motion
at the caucus once again that we take action to defend Mumia Abu-Jamal and call for his
freedom. And that call resonated very strongly in my local in San Francisco and Oakland
because the majority of our local is African-American. We took it to the caucus, and the
caucus backed the action. On April 24th, 1999, all the ports on the West Coast
were shut down to demand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal. [applause]
Now that was the first time that we used the tactic of having a stop-work meeting for
an action. Contractually, we have the right to have a stop-work meeting one shift a month,
but up to that point there had never been a situation where every port on the West Coast
stopped work at the same time for a political cause—an important cause: to free
Mumia Abu-Jamal! And so that was an important step forward as well because it gave some
encouragement to workers once again that we do have power that we can exert and use it in
creative ways. This was one of those creative ways.
We led the march in San Francisco of 25,000 people and demanded freedom for Mumia
Abu-Jamal. There’s no question that the official leadership of that march organized under
the banner of calling for a new trial. Our slogan, which we chanted, was: “An Injury
to One is an Injury to All—Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” [applause] Whether
you had differences or not with the leadership of that march, it was important for every
leftist to be out there marching under their own banner.
A couple of years after that, as Bryan pointed out, we had a contract struggle. Now the
significance of the 2002 contract struggle was that it took place six months after
“9/11,” and so fear was pervasive within the trade-union movement. The
employers capitalized on that and they lobbied the White House for action against the
union. And so Donald Rumsfeld, who was then secretary of defense, and Tom Ridge, then
homeland security czar, phoned the leadership of the ILWU, and said that if you have any
actions on the docks during your contract negotiations (and they knew we have always done
that), if you have any actions that disrupt the flow of cargo, we will consider that a
national security risk and we will occupy the docks with federal troops.
That was in the wake of “9/11.” But we fought back. We were locked out by
the employers. Now mind you, the federal government threatened the union that if we slowed
down, or had any kind of job action, they were going to send in the troops. But the
employers’ association locked us out of every port on the West Coast and nothing happened
with that! For ten days every port on the West Coast was shut down and that was followed
immediately by the government invoking Taft-Hartley [a draconian anti-labor law] against
us—largely because of Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s lobbying of the Bush
administration.
The war on Iraq began just a few months after the contract was signed and there were
demonstrations on the docks in Oakland. I was Local 10’s business agent at the time and
our members honored the picket line. We stood on the side as the picketers were
demonstrating. The police came in with riot gear, which reminded me of what happened in
Charleston. But in this case they were loaded for bear and they had the green light
because of “9/11.” In fact, the head of the California Anti-Terrorism
Information Center said that anybody who demonstrates against the “war on
terror” could be considered a terrorist. So we were “terrorists” out
there on the docks! They shot “non-lethal” weapons at the demonstrators.
Scores were injured. They also aimed at longshoremen who were standing on the side, and a
number of our brothers were injured seriously—five were taken to the hospital. I was
trying to defend our brothers as the business agent and was pulled out of my car and
pummeled by five cops. The UN Human Rights Commission deemed that episode the most violent
police attack that had taken place since the start of the war.
That’s why when you see this video [on the May Day strike]—this came five years
after the start of the war in Iraq—it was a sort of sweet justice for us. We got
revenge; every port on the West Coast, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, was
shut down. Every port! And that sent the message to the employers that we do have
the power. It also sent a message to the rest of the trade-union movement that workers
have power to change things.
Now there were problems with the action itself. I should step back one second and say
that there was a “Stop the War” labor conference in October of 2007 that was
sponsored by Local 10. The main motion that came out of that conference at our union was
for the delegates who came from other unions nationally and internationally to go back and
raise a call for actions at the point of production wherever they worked. That was the
basis for us passing the motion to shut down all the ports on May Day. Now, was it flawed?
Yeah. But was it something that advanced the class struggle in the United States and
internationally? Definitely. In the United States we had never had a workers’ strike
against a war before. It hadn’t happened. While we called on workers around the world to
strike with us on May Day, it only actually occurred in one country, and that was in Iraq.
The dockworkers in Iraq struck in the face of military occupation! They risked a
lot—I mean they were putting their lives on the line, literally, in striking against
the war and the occupation.
So we went out and it would have been wonderful had other workers joined in with us,
but it didn’t happen. We turned over every stone to get the port truckers to join with us.
We had conference calls weekly with the port truckers. Most of them, many of them, are
immigrant workers. And we had conference calls with port truckers from Boston, New York,
Houston, Savannah, Charleston, LA—all over the country. And they promised—now
these are unorganized workers, they’re not in unions—that if we went out (because it
wasn’t certain that every longshore local, every port was going to be shut down), they
would go out with us.
The reality is that they didn’t come out with us. They’re not organized and it’s very
difficult to carry out any kind of a strike action if you’re not organized. That was
unfortunate because, had that happened, it would have been the first ever nationwide port
strike in the U.S., and it’s something we’ve got to work on. I think that it is possible,
particularly given the opportunities now where workers are saying, “what’s happening
to the economy?” Homes are being foreclosed, people being thrown out of work,
inflation is skyrocketing. The conditions are ripe for class-struggle politics in the
trade unions. They’re ripe for workers to take actions and the question of what kind of
system do we want to live under is being posed now in a way that it has not been for
decades.
One thing that is of interest about the debate at our caucus that resulted in the
action is that it was not the first time it had taken place. Delegates from Local 10, the
San Francisco local, had raised this sort of resolution since the beginning of the war. We
got a motion opposing the war passed at the convention in May 2003, but in the dockers’
section, the longshore section of the union, we’d proposed actually having actions in
opposition to the war and had been defeated every time. Every time that we raised it, it
was defeated. But we tried again, and this time it passed. The situation had changed. The
dynamics were different because workers had illusions that the Democrats, who had just
gained control of Congress in 2006, were going to end the war somehow. Yet Nancy Pelosi
and the rest of the Democrats continued to fund the war. That was part of what the
resolution said—that we have to take the struggle to a higher level; that the war is
a bipartisan war. Both big business parties are supporting it and yet we have the power to
bring it to an end if we on the docks, along with the rest of the working class, exert the
power that we have.
So what happened was the resolution was introduced and at first it was all sort of pro
forma. Two fairly militant guys from the San Francisco local got up and they supported the
motion. Then a few members of the largest local on the West Coast, Los Angeles, opposed
that resolution on the basis that we’re in very difficult negotiations with the employer
and now is not the time to take that kind of action. But then something very interesting,
and rather unusual, happened—a real surprise to everyone: one of the more
conservative guys, who happened to have been a Vietnam vet from the port of Seattle, stood
up and he said, “You know, this resolution speaks to the truth. We’ve been pounding
the pavement for the Democrats to get elected and the war is continuing. We have the power
to end the war. Let’s do what this resolution calls for, let’s shut down the whole West
Coast.”
That started a whole dynamic of one speaker after another getting up and saying,
“Yeah, we’ve got the power. Let’s shut it down.” It became clear after about a
half an hour that this sentiment was going to prevail and it scared the hell out of the
trade-union bureaucrats, who tried to undermine it from the very beginning. As you saw in
the video, the original resolution was for a 24-hour shutdown of the whole West Coast. The
leadership of the union asked if the makers of the resolution would be willing to amend it
to 8 hours, and that was done. It was amended to 8 hours with a stop-work meeting. So it
was contractual. It would have been legal, as it was in 1999 when we shut down all the
ports with a stop-work meeting for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
But the employers wouldn’t agree to it. They said no, and when you change the date of
your union meeting you have to have agreement from the employers, and they didn’t agree.
So we were faced with a predicament: we had industry arbitrators rule twice against us,
and the employers went to the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], went to the federal
government, and got secondary boycott charges against us through the Taft-Hartley Act.
Taft-Hartley! This was something that I don’t think we had really anticipated.
But we stood firm even with the threat of Taft-Hartley being used against us, because it
was evident that if we broke ranks—if we showed any kind of disunity—there
would be no negotiations at the table. The employers would simply impose their conditions.
It wasn’t clear up until the very last hour whether all the ports were going to shut down,
but it did happen: every port shut down. We all stood in solidarity together and sent a
message to the powers-that-be in the U.S., not only the White House and the government in
Washington, but also to the employers, that we want an end to the war in Iraq and
Afghanistan and to withdraw the troops immediately.
The union bureaucrats limited it to 8 hours, but their backs were to the
wall—they had to make sure that every port shut down; otherwise there would have
been no negotiations. But what they also did was undermine the intent of the resolution.
There was nothing in the resolution that said, “we support our troops,” and
all the social patriotism that came along with that. It basically said get them the hell
out the Middle East: Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there was quite a bit of to-do
about how we have to support the Democrats and Barack Obama, whose program is the same as
Bush’s, really—to gradually withdraw the troops from Iraq and send them over to
Afghanistan. So the bureaucrats played their role, but militants in the union did what we
had to do.
We were shutting down all the ports on the West Coast, and we had to get out and tell
the public what this strike was about. The word from the international was: “No
actions, don’t do any actions; no rallies, marches or anything like that.” And we in
the rank and file insurrected. In San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, ILWU members
participated in demonstrations against the war on that day. The international officers
were nowhere to be seen, as they haven’t been since the beginning of the war, despite the
2003 resolution that was passed in opposition to the war and for the immediate withdrawal
of troops. They had not spoken at one anti-war rally. So they were consistent.
One of the significant things about this strike was that it was the first time since
the 1978 miners’ strike where workers actually defied the government, defied the employers
and stayed out, because we knew that they were coming after us with secondary boycott
provisions of Taft-Hartley. But we held tight, we held strong and we let the employers
know that unless all charges were dropped against the union there would be no contract.
And so we organized the first strike ever held in the United States against a war.
The stunning thing about the whole debate in the union was the fact that it was not the
usual radical militants who carried the day; it was regular working-class guys, many of
whom had been to Vietnam, who had seen what an imperialist war is like, and they said,
“We’ve been lied to. People are dying over there for nothing.” In their own
words, they said, “We gotta get the troops out of there.” And that’s what I
think carried the day.
Now I don’t know if most of you know the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, but he made
one really important observation about the power of the working class when he came to the
U.S. in the 1960s and spoke at an anti-Vietnam War rally. He said that he would trade all
of the demonstrations against the war for one solid dockworkers’ strike. He knew that
under capitalism, workers’ action has the power to really change things. And I think that
was the lesson of this May Day action—that we have the power to change things.
I think times are ripe for developing class-struggle caucuses within the trade-union
movement and for raising militant demands as we did around the war. This is something that
is not pie-in-the-sky. The transit workers’ union in New York sent a delegate or two to
come to our conference in October 2007. They raised demands in their union. Their union is
very similar to the longshore union on the West Coast in some ways: it’s predominantly a
minority union, an African-American and Latino union, and it’s in a part of the country
where popular sentiment is against the war.
I believe that if there were class-struggle caucuses within unions around the country
like the New York transit workers, that we could begin to change what the trade-union
movement looks like today. We could fight for a new leadership, a class-struggle
leadership—a leadership that’s willing to fight for a workers’ party, not to
continue that same old game of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Republicans or the
Democrats. I think some of you were around during the Vietnam War and know that the
protests in 1968 weren’t at the Republican National Convention—they were at the
Democratic Convention. They were the ones in power. They were the ones that led the
imperialist slaughter in Vietnam. We don’t forget that. So I think the time is right to
build class-struggle caucuses in the unions and hopefully we can have more actions like we
did on May Day. Thank you very much.