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US West Coast action called to protest ''imperialist'' war in Iraq, Afghanistan

LOS ANGELES – 03/14/08 – The International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) has said the 40,000-plus members of its 60 locals in California, Washington and Oregon will walk off the job for eight hours on May 1 to protest the US-led war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The decision to go ahead with the walkout was communicated to the AFL-CIO and Change to Win – two national labor organizations representing most US union workers – in a letter from ILWU president, Robert McEllrath.

The ILWU, he said, would also be calling for a “wider international action” in support of the walkout.

Letters seeking support for the walkout were also sent to the London-headquartered International Transport Workers Federation and the International Dockworkers Council in Barcelona, Spain.

"We're writing to inform you of this action ... to honor labor history and express support for the troops by bringing them home safely," he wrote, adding that the ILWU action “will send a message to Washington."

Employers and port authorities at 29 sea ports from San Diego to Seattle have been notified with the work stoppage scheduled for the day shift. Ports in Hawaii and Canada will not be affected, McEllrath said.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – the two busiest container ports in the country – will be the most adversely impacted by the action. More than 20,000 ILWU members – some half of the organizations total membership – work ships calling at both ports.

Last month, the union’s International Executive Board recently endorsed Democrat Barack Obama, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq as one of the key factors in the union's decision to call for the work stoppage.

"If we can do something so dramatic as to shut down the ports on the West Coast, I think people will realize how important" opposition to the war is, said Jack Heyman, an executive board member of San Francisco's ILWU Local 10, and a prominent antiwar activist. In 2003, Heyman and about a dozen other war protesters were arrested outside Oakland shipping facilities.

Quoted by several Bay Area media outlets, Heyman said, "The ILWU has had a legacy of opposing US imperialist wars like the one in Iraq, while supporting struggles internationally like the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cuban revolution."

A number of organizations including The Internationalist Group-League for the Fourth International, a New York-based Marxist activist group, have voiced their support for the ILWU action.

According to a story on the front page of the organization’s website – www.internationalist.org, “This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a US war.”

The action, it continues, “should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally…and the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!”

ILWU spokesman Craig Merilees downplayed the action, telling the Oakland Tribune that, "It's been agreed that on the first of May, the union will exercise its right to hold a meeting on that day. On the day shift, local unions will have the opportunity, if they wish, to take some of that time to speak out against the war if they feel so inclined."

Last May, ILWU dockworkers at the Port of Oakland held a similar walkout, refusing to handle what they called “hot war cargo” consigned to US overseas military bases.

Announcement of the May 1 walkout comes just days before contract negotiations are scheduled to start between the dock worker’s union and the San Francisco-based Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents shipping companies and terminal operators with operations at US West Coast ports.

The longshoremen's six-year contract is set to expire June 30. Both the PMA and the ILWU agreed to start negotiations about two months earlier than the last time talks were held in an effort to avoid a repeat of 2002, when a lockout shut down all activity at ports along the entire US West Coast.

That action lasted for 10 days at a cost to the national economy of more than $1 billion a day and ended only after President George Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to end the work stoppage and force both management and the union to resume their stalled contract negotiations.

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