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	Workers Vanguard No. 926	5 December 2008

All Out to Defend Harrison and Ruffin!

“War on Terror” Assault on Black Longshoremen

Two black longshoremen, Jason Ruffin and Aaron Harrison, from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the Bay Area, are scheduled to stand trial on December 15 on frame-up charges of “resisting arrest.” In August 2007, Ruffin and Harrison were returning to work at the Sacramento port after lunch when they were stopped by security guards who demanded to search their car, citing the maritime security regulations that are part of the government’s “war on terror.” While the two ILWU members were calling their Local 10 business agent for advice, the guards called in the notoriously racist West Sacramento police. Harrison and Ruffin were dragged from their car, assaulted, maced, handcuffed and thrown in jail on charges of trespassing and resisting arrest. The trespassing charge has been dropped, but for over a year the state has continued to press its vindictive prosecution of the two longshore workers whose only “crime” was trying to return to work and appealing to their union for help in doing so!

These charges are a deadly statement of the threat to all of labor from the “anti-terror” laws, which have been used to build up the repressive powers of the state, its cops, courts, military and security guard auxiliaries. This is not the first time that the ILWU has been lined up in the sights of the racist “war on terror,” the pretext for the bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. During the union’s 2002 contract battle, the head of the Department of Homeland Security warned the ILWU International president that a strike would be treated as a threat to “national security.” Today, the implementation of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC), which includes criminal background checks, is vastly increasing the government’s ability to police the workforce on the docks. By April, no access will be allowed to West Coast ports for longshoremen without TWIC cards. The defense of Harrison and Ruffin is vital to the defense of the ILWU as a whole and of all those targeted by the “war on terror.” All out to defend Harrison and Ruffin on December 15!

The Bay Area Labor Black League for Social Defense, which is fraternally allied with the Spartacist League, mobilized for an ILWU rally in defense of Harrison and Ruffin outside their October 6 court hearing in Woodland, California, with a small contingent that included workers from transit, rail and public employees in the Bay Area. The 100 people at the rally included members of ILWU Locals 10 and 34 from the Bay Area, Sacramento’s Local 17, the executive secretary of the Sacramento Central Labor Council, as well as a contingent of workers from the nearby Davis campus of the University of California who have been locked in a contract battle with the administration. Other local community activists addressed the racist treatment that the West Sacramento cops daily mete out to black and Latino youth as well as their attack on DQ University (an American Indian university) in the area. A solidarity message by black death row political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, in defense of Harrison and Ruffin was also played at the rally.

A representative of the LBL spoke at the rally, underlining the urgency of labor fighting against the “war on terror”:

“The LBL has actively defended longshoremen Jason Ruffin and Aaron Harrison since their arrest. They are today facing prosecution under the port security laws that are part of the bipartisan ‘war on terrorism.’ Yet many trade-union officials, including ILWU, ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association] and Teamsters, have wrongly supported the beefed-up port security measures. At home, ‘war on terror’ means attacks on immigrants, blacks, trade unions, and the working class as a whole. The LBL stands for defending all victims of the so-called ‘war on terror’ and calls on the union movement to organize the unorganized, like the port truckers, and fight for citizenship rights for all immigrants. Down with the I.C.E. raids!

“The so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is embraced by the Democrats and the Republicans alike, just as Obama and McCain embrace the plundering of the working class to bail out Wall Street capitalism on its death bed, and Cynthia McKinney’s party of the little bourgeoisie is just as dedicated as the two parties of the big bourgeoisie to saving this brutal system of racist exploitation. This is all the more reason why working people need a party that fights for their class interests—a workers party that fights for a workers government. Those who labor must rule!

“In the fight to free class-war political prisoner and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who we all heard here today, with his powerful speech, Local 10 has joined ranks with the PDC [Partisan Defense Committee] and trade unionists around the world to bring the social power of labor to free this innocent man. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Drop the charges against Jason Ruffin and Aaron Harrison!”

Clarence Thomas, a member of the Local 10 executive board, pointed to the ILWU May 1 port shutdown against the occupation of Iraq as an example of taking “action at the point of production” to “stop the attacks on the working class.” This action was a powerful display of the union’s muscle. But it was gutted of any political opposition to the U.S. imperialist rulers and their dirty wars and occupations by the red-white-and-blue American chauvinism of the ILWU bureaucracy. The occupation of Afghanistan was disappeared and the May Day statement by the union’s International president, Robert McEllrath, promoted longshoremen as the best “loyal to America” patriots as against “big foreign corporations that control global shipping.” This was coupled with promoting Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama as the next Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism.

A “2008 Presidential Questionnaire” by the ILWU tops, directed to Obama and other Democrats, pledged the union’s service in the “war on terror,” declaring that the “ILWU workforce should be utilized as the first line of defense against maritime terrorist activities, and recognized as a natural ally by law enforcement.” This suicidal identification of the union with the strikebreaking forces of the bosses’ state was echoed at the October 6 rally for Harrison and Ruffin by the business agent of ILWU Local 17, who portrayed the West Sacramento cops as “workers coming out and harassing and beating up other workers.”

The cops are not workers in uniform. They are the armed thugs of the capitalist state whose purpose is the violent suppression of working-class struggle. Security guards, like those who targeted Harrison and Ruffin, are the cops’ private auxiliaries, yet in the Bay Area, L.A. and some other West Coast ports, they are members of the ILWU! Police and security guards out of the unions!

The ILWU tops’ promotion of the union as “a natural ally” in the government’s “war on terror” has been brought home in their demands for more vigorous screening of the largely immigrant, non-union port truckers. This is not only an attack on these workers but undermines the very existence of the ILWU itself. A member of ILWU Local 10, Barbara Franck, who left work to join the picket lines of port truckers in Oakland last May and argued unsuccessfully for the union to pull out all of its members in solidarity, underlined the importance of fighting to organize these workers in a letter printed in the July-August issue of the union’s newspaper, the Dispatcher: “The ILWU now stands isolated as one of the few union links in the massive flow of commodities across the Pacific and inland.... Winning ILWU-scale wages, benefits and union organization and rights for the existing trucker workforce would be a big step forward for the working class as a whole and would strengthen our union by providing us with a powerful ally in our struggles against the shippers and stevedoring companies. For a waterfront that is 100% union!”

In 2002, Local 10 endorsed an Oakland protest initiated by the LBL and the Partisan Defense Committee in defense of immigrants and in opposition to the U.S. rulers’ anti-terror laws. Black longshoremen from Local 10 were at the core of that 300-strong protest on February 9, 2002. As the LBL and PDC wrote in the call for that protest (“Down With the Anti-Immigrant Witchhunt!” WV No. 773, 25 January 2002):

“To fight for its interests the working class must stand independent of all agencies and parties of the class enemy. The trade-union misleaders who have shackled labor’s power to support for the Democrats now offer to help implement ‘security’ on the docks and elsewhere....

“There must be a political struggle within the trade unions, the only significant racially integrated institutions in segregation America, to break from the Democrats and build a class-struggle leadership which will champion the cause of black freedom and the defense of immigrant rights. The working class needs its own party—one that fights for a workers government. Those who labor must rule!”