Government Hands Off ILWU Local 10!

Earlier this month, a U.S. district judge ordered that the capitalist government run the elections in the San Francisco Bay Area International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10. This ruling was the fruit of complaints by two Local 10 members who ran to the Department of Labor to seek redress for having been disqualified from running for union office in the two prior elections. In doing so, they opened the door for the bosses’ government to stick its nose into internal Local 10 affairs. Under the pretext of “democratic elections,” the Feds will try to cripple Local 10’s ability to defend its members. A WV salesman reported that longshoremen understand that the Feds are coming after the union because its contract is up next year.

Indeed, the timing of this ruling was no accident. The Local 10 elections occur just before the opening of negotiations for the 2008 contract between the ILWU and the employers’ Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). The capitalist state, acting in the interests of the shipping bosses and the ruling class as a whole, wants to bring the strategically powerful ILWU to heel, as the West Coast ports are vital chokepoints for the booming trade with China, Japan and the entire Pacific Rim. The government’s vendetta against the ILWU carries over from the last contract battle in 2002. At the time, “Homeland Security” chief Tom Ridge phoned the ILWU International president to warn that a strike could “threaten national security.” The Bush administration threatened to send the military to operate the ports. After the PMA locked out the ILWU from all 29 West Coast ports for ten days, President Bush invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act to force ILWU members back to work.

Now the government is bringing its anti-terror laws directly to the waterfront unions, moving to begin making workers enroll in the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, with its criminal background checks, at the Port of Oakland this month. Enrollment has already begun in some East and Gulf Coast ports. The bosses’ state increasingly invades the workplace in the name of “security”—especially as part of the reactionary “war on terror”—just as it invades the unions in the name of “democracy.” What “port security” really means was shown at the Port of Sacramento in August when two black Local 10 longshoremen were pulled from their car, beaten by police and thrown in jail when returning to work after lunch (see WV No. 900, 12 October). All labor must demand: Drop the charges against Jason Ruffin and Aaron Harrison now!

The capitalist state—the courts, the cops, the military—is run in the interests of America’s Wall Street rulers by their dual parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein was among the first to demand that Bush invoke Taft-Hartley in 2002, and Democratic Party politicians are some of the loudest calling for strengthening “port security.” It is an indictment of the ILWU tops that they advocate support to “friends” in the Democratic Party and back government “port security” measures.

The anger of Local 10 members at the government’s takeover of their union elections should be directed into a fight for the political independence of the working class from the exploiters, their political parties and the capitalist state. That means a struggle to build a workers party that fights for a workers government. For the unions to become battalions in the struggle against the capitalist profit system, they must break the political chains that tie them to the class enemy. Government, courts out of the unions!