By Steve Stallone

            Longshoremen, dockers, stevedores and wharfies from 16 countries around the world gathered in Long Beach, California at an ILWU International Dockworkers Solidarity Conference July 30-August 2 to discuss their common problems, exchange information and share experiences. They concluded the meeting by passing resolutions pledging mutual solidarity and all out support for the Charleston Five (see text of resolutions on page 7).

            ILWU International President Jim Spinosa opened the conference with a keynote address outlining the concerns that prompted the call for the meeting and setting the tone of the discussions to follow over the course of the next few days. After reviewing the some of the recent struggles and issues dockers throughout the world have been dealing with, Spinosa laid out his vision for the conference.

            “We’ve all been fighting hard, but now we have to fight smarter. We’ve got to fight with the combined experience and wisdom of all our struggles,” he said. “Today the same carrier and stevedoring companies are our employers. They are organized. Our strategy must be to organize also. We need to share information, resources and solidarity. Each of us has an experience others can learn from, and each of us can learn something from others. I have a lot of faith in our collective wisdom.”

            Spinosa then invited all the delegations to give a brief introductory presentation on their unions, ports and current problems. What followed was a string of fascinating tales of longshore work in many lands as well as horror stories of privatization and union busting.

            Paddy Crumlin, the new National Secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and leader of the 11-member Australian delegation, retold the story of the government/corporate conspiracy to bust his union three years ago with a lockout of his members and the use of scabs to work the ships. The major factor in making the government back down and the company, Patrick Stevedoring, come back to the negotiating table, he said, was the refusal of ILWU longshore workers in Southern California to work the first—and last—scab-loaded ship to arrive in the U.S., the Columbus Canada.

            Mario Teixiera, president of the Brazilian dockworkers union, explained how the main struggle for his members over the last several years has been trying to keep union control of the dispatch hall in the face of continuous employer attacks and legislation designed to take it away. Jorge Silva Beron, president of the Chilean port workers told how most of his union’s gains were lost under the dictatorship of General Pinochet in the 1970s and how they were just now starting to regain the basic rights of forming a union and using it to distribute the work among its members.

            Tony Nelson of the Liverpool dockers spoke of how 80 percent of the dockers are still unemployed since they were sacked back in 1995, and how they are now building a new union and community job training center in Liverpool. “For godsake, don’t let Liverpool happen again,” he urged the delegates.

            Marco Pietrasanta of the dockworkers union in Genoa, Italy talked of the privatization and casualization that has been going on in his country. He said the unions are being destroyed port by port in Italy and they need a real international network to help them. Akinobu Ito, General Secretary of the All Japan Dockworkers’ Union, informed the delegates of the deregulation that has been going on in his country. Foreign terminal operators have been coming to Japan and trying to set up their own docks and the union is fighting to have their members continue to do the work.

            Terry Ryan, Assistant General Secretary of the New Zealand Waterfront Workers Union, said that after 10 years of repressive legislation his country has a new government that is giving them a chance to make some progress. New legislation recently passed making it illegal to replace strikers with scabs. Still, they are having problems with their work going to companies that use non-union labor.

            Luis Negreiros of the Peruvian dockers union spoke of how his union lost most of its legal protections during the 11 years of the corrupt Fujimora regime. They now have labor people in the new Congress proposing laws to get back some of the workers’ rights. Miguel Rodriguez of the Spanish dockers union spoke of the ongoing casualization problems his union is facing.

            Bjorn Borg, president of the Swedish Dockworkers Union, told the delegates that the biggest problem facing his members is the European Union Port Directive, a new proposal in front of the European Union to bring free market practices to ports. These would include allowing any company to bid on dock work and employ whatever labor it wishes, ignoring the union dockworkers’ contracts and guaranteed wages and conditions. The unions in various European countries are trying to work together through the International Dockers Council (IDC) and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) to fight this initiative.

            “To be a successful union in our business you have to be an internationalist,” Borg said.

            The next day the conference began its discussions in earnest with the first focus being government intervention into labor disputes. ILWU Vice President Bob McEllrath introduced the topic, laying out how historically governments have sided with steamship companies, and more recently with shippers, against dock workers, a trend even more pronounced as world trade increases and becomes ever more essential to the global economy.

            “Governments are coming after us. For many the first step is privatization of the docks. The next step is to neuter us with coercion and government legislation,” McEllrath said. “We can see the trend and we can understand the forces of change. The question is, what do we do about it?”

            McEllrath then introduced the MUA’s Crumlin to speak in detail about how the Australian government conspired with the stevedoring company to move against his union and ILA Local 1422 President Ken Riley to describe the coordinated action of the state of South Carolina and business interests that set the stage for anti-labor activities and led to the arrest and prosecution of the Charleston Five.

            Crumlin described how the right wing government of Prime Minister John Howard went about systematically dismantling worker protection laws in preparation for a showdown with the MUA. They outlawed secondary boycotts and made it legal for companies to make individual agreements with workers outside of the collectively bargained contract. Once the laws were in place they made their move against labor’s stronghold.

            “They figured that if they could take out the MUA, the rest of the unions would fall,” Crumlin said.

            Riley explained how the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce is writing its own bills and supporting anti-worker bills in the state legislature. These include supporting an anti-living wage bill that prohibits state and local governments from passing a minimum wage higher than the federal one; supporting another bill that excludes any union representation on the state’s Port Authority Board; opposing another giving unemployment benefits for workers fired for political or religious discrimination; and opposing another workers compensation bill that would expand the state definition of occupational diseases to include all federally defined diseases.

            “Everything that has to do with workers rights and labor rights in South Carolina our state Chamber of Commerce opposes,” Riley said.

            Riley said the state moved against his local because they were getting active in local politics, successfully electing a Democratic candidate for governor and being leaders in the struggle against the flying of the Confederate flag on the state capitol.

            “We came under attack for being in the forefront,” Riley said. “The prosecution of the Charleston Five is the state’s opportunity to get back at our union.”

            Riley said it was the state’s Port Authority that called for the government intervention into the dispute with the shipping line and that the Attorney General responded to that request immediately.

            “They were the ones to conspire and instigate the clash,” he said.

            After Riley’s presentation various delegates took the microphone to describe the government intervention problems they are experiencing. Kees Marges, the ITF Dockers Section Secretary spoke of the European Union Port Directive, informing the delegates that the ITF is aggressively lobbying against it and is planning a European-wide strike should it be implemented.

            “If it is successfully imposed, much of it will be introduced in other ports around the world,” Marges warned.

            He also said the ITF has alerted all its affiliates about the Charleston Five situation and that it will support an International Day of Action on the first day of their trial.

            Brazil’s Teixiera spoke in detail about his government’s attempt to eliminate the dispatch hall and the struggles and strikes, especially in Santos, the country’s largest port, to keep union control of hiring. Brazil’s new Constitution gives employers the right to hire anyone they want and they have won a lawsuit granting them that, although it has not yet been fully implemented.

            “The goal of the system is to weaken unions,” Teixiera said.

            New Zealand’s Ryan told the delegates that when port reform was first implemented in 1998 it took away the union hiring hall and the union lost half its workforce, leaving many of the docks with casual labor. When the conservative Torry party took over the government later, things got even worse.

            “They introduced the Employment Act and tried to take the word ‘union’ right out of the country,” he said.

            Spinosa took the floor to make the point that the ILWU is not without its problems and its employers’ program is to seek government intervention into the collective bargaining negotiations.

            “They want to put us under the Railway Labor Act so that we can’t strike,” Spinosa said.

            The ILWU’s upcoming contract negotiations will be tough this time around, Spinosa said. “Don’t anticipate a strike, but we may need your help,” he added. “We may be calling on your friendship and loyalty in case we get into trouble.”

            The next day ILWU legal counsel Rob Remar made a presentation on the legal restrictions related to international solidarity actions. That was followed by a lively and informative discussion among the delegates about their experiences in working with and around their own national laws while continuing to take effective solidarity actions in support of their fellow dock workers in different countries.

            The ITF’s Marges made the point that unions must be aware of their national laws when asking for support, and that those concerns are different in different countries. The MUA’s Crumlin told stories about how his union used the laws to go on the offensive during the War on the Waterfront in 1998. Liverpool’s Nelson spoke about how he handed out leaflets at the New York dock to ILA longshore workers when a scab ship came to port and the workers refused to unload the ship. The employers sued them, but the court ruled that Nelson had a right to leaflet and that the ILA workers had a First Amendment right to not cross his picket line.

            Jose Luis Llorca of the Spanish dock workers union recounted how they convinced Nordana Lines, the company that used scab labor in Charleston, to return to the negotiating table and make a deal to work again with Ken Riley’s local. And ILWU Local 13’s Dave Arian made the point that it was community organizing work that mobilized the action against the Australian scab ship.

            ILWU Coast Committeeman Joe Wenzl introduced the next topic of discussion—technology and port privatization. He said that while unions survived and prospered in the container revolution, they still need to be vigilant and resourceful when facing the new technologies being introduced on the docks to protect themselves.

            “The phrase ‘labor-saving devices’ really means, in most cases, labor replacement devices. The employers ‘save’ and make money, and the labor that is lost is ours,” Wenzl said. “The ILWU does not reject modernization and technological advancement. But our jurisdiction of work under the collective bargaining agreements is not for sale.”

            Wenzl said longshore unions need to understand how the new technologies will affect their current and future workforces and be involved in those decisions.

            “Our unions must demand to be at the table in dealing with the impacts of technological implementation and port modernization,” he said. “No one knows our industry better than we do, the waterfront workers who actually do this work.”

            Wenzl’s presentation was followed by a brief discussion by the delegates on the difficulties they have encountered with new technologies on their docks.

            Jeff Vigna, chair of the ILWU Longshore Division’s Safety Committee, introduced the topic of worker safety on the job. He referred the delegates to the ILWU longshore safety code, more than 100 pages of protections the union has negotiated, and handed out copies to all the delegates. Vigna then focused mostly on vertical tandem lifts, the controversial practice of lifting multiple containers using interlocking cones. The ILWU continues to oppose the practice, claiming it has not been proven to be safe.

            Pat Riley, Business Agent and Secretary-Treasurer of ILA Local 273 in St. John’s, Canada, said his local had stopped all tandem lifts in his port.

            The Swedish Dockworkers Union’s Borg told the delegates that vertical tandem lifts are unheard of in his country, where they have an agreement with the employers that no machinery can be used without the union’s say so.

            After various delegates spoke on safety issues, Brad Dunn, an MUA shop steward, made the most important point of the discussion.

            “We have an obligation to ourselves,” he said. “We have to police the regulations we have. They aren’t any good if we don’t follow them.”

            Dunn went on to talk about how some guys from his union were working through their breaks so they could go home early. The employer contended that the practice showed they didn’t really need their breaks and tried to take them away.

            “The boss is laughing at us,” he said.

            During the discussion on health and safety the Southern California Pensioners Club—its president George Kuvakas Sr., and members Al Perisho and Hugh Hunter—presented two Automated External Defibrillator machines to Locals 13, 63 and 94 as a token of the pensioners’ appreciation for all the financial and moral support they have received from the active workforce. Forty-three members of the three locals and the Pensioners Club have completed the American Red Cross training on these life-saving machines in the hope that they can avert unnecessary tragedies at meetings and in the workplace.

            The final topic of discussion was on port privatization and the casualization of dockworkers. The delegates exchanged stories about how this has been happening to various degrees in their ports and what they have been doing to combat it.

            New Zealand’s Ryan, where the practice has been devastating his union, called casualization “a creeping cancer” and “a poverty trap.” He said his union is now organizing the growing number of casuals.

            Brazil’s Teixiera spoke of how port privatization began in his country in 1993 and how his union has been fighting a constant battle to keep its jurisdiction ever since. Spain’s Rodriguez warned that the European Union Port Directive could quickly bring the scourge of privatization and casualization to the entire continent.