ILWU: Fight Racist Noose Provocations at L.A. Ports!

LOS ANGELES—In a deadly, racist threat to black dock workers, hangman’s nooses were discovered on five separate occasions at waterfront marine terminals in the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports in October and November. Nooses were reportedly dangled from port vehicles by individuals from the foremen’s Local 94 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), by an ILWU Local 13 member and by someone from another union on the docks, while another worker displayed a noose on his T-shirt. Make no mistake about it: the noose is a call to race terror, invoking the lynch mobs that brutally murdered thousands of black people in the century after the Civil War. Today, the racist death penalty in this country is the lynch rope made legal. The multiracial ILWU, a bastion of labor power, must mobilize in action to defend its black members. This is an elementary step for the union to fight for the unity and integrity of its entire membership.

The outrage and protests over Jim Crow justice in Jena, Louisiana, where six black high school students are being persecuted for sitting under a “white tree” and defending themselves against racist provocations, have been answered with a nationwide epidemic of racist provocations in which lynch-rope nooses are being hung at workplaces, schools and homes to terrorize black people. On the waterfront, it is the bosses at the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) who stand to gain from the fostering of poisonous racial and ethnic divisions within the workforce, especially with the union heading into negotiations for a new contract as its current contract with the PMA is set to expire in mid 2008. A struggle by the ILWU against the racist provocations, drawing in the other multiracial unions of the area, would send a message to the racists to crawl back into their holes and would make clear that such provocations will not be tolerated by the union. It would also galvanize the ILWU and be a show of union strength.

The heavily Latino ILWU membership in the L.A. ports, which are the largest in the U.S., has a vital stake in fighting back against these racist threats. As demonstrated by the “war on terror,” the forces of capitalist reaction in the U.S. take aim at blacks and foreign-born workers alike, while seeking to foment anti-immigrant chauvinism among black people and anti-black racism among the immigrant-derived population so that the filthy rich capitalists can safely get their profits to the bank. During the September 2006 L.A. Labor Day march and picnic, a dozen Minutemen and Save Our State racist vigilantes carrying anti-immigrant signs provocatively tried to make their way into the picnic. The bigots were thwarted by members of immigrant rights groups and individual trade unionists, including some from the ILWU.

Aside from issuing some perfunctory statements, including one by the ILWU International Executive Board declaring “injustice, hatred, and discrimination…will not be tolerated,” the union misleaders have refused to mobilize their members in action to halt the racist provocations. The January 2008 ILWU Dispatcher grossly alibis those responsible for the racist provocations, writing that “nobody knows exactly why the incidents happened or what was intended.” The ILWU bureaucrats are partnering with the racist PMA bosses in the “Joint Coast Labor Relations Committee,” which ruled that the contract prohibits the display of nooses on the docks. Longshoremen told WV salesmen that ILWU bureaucrats have encouraged them to file grievances with the PMA to get the bosses to discipline the workers involved in hanging the nooses. Granting the racist bosses the authority to deal with racist workers is suicidal and will only serve to strengthen the PMA’s whip hand. As a Spartacist League spokesman explained at the Los Angeles December 8 Holiday Appeal benefit for class-war prisoners, “The PMA will only intervene to the extent it can weaken the union. It is the power of the union that must be brought to bear against these racist provocations. The union must clean its own house!” The class-collaborationist program of the pro-capitalist labor tops ties working people to the class enemy, especially through support to the capitalist Democratic Party, and preaches the lie that the workers and bosses share common interests.

The desire to fight back against the racist filth is evident among the ranks of the ILWU. WV salesmen have talked with longshore workers who said that the union should have acted immediately after the nooses first appeared. But with the union bureaucrats doing nothing, the L.A. branch of the ILWU’s African American Longshore Coalition (AALC) and port security guard Eddie Jones and his L.A. Civil Rights Association have put themselves forward as defenders of black longshore workers.

Some 100 people, including ILWU members, were mobilized on December 7 by the L.A. Civil Rights Association and the AALC to protest in front of the PMA offices, demanding that the PMA stop the race-terror provocations. The L.A. branch of the AALC has been distributing a petition calling on the PMA to take “ACTION to stop the ‘Hate Crimes’ and ‘Racial Terrorism’” on the docks, calling on the PMA to discipline union workers. The AALC has also threatened to file “hate crime” charges with the police, giving a pretext for the notoriously racist L.A. cops to muck around in the union in the name of “fighting racism.” In fact, some in the AALC have a history of suing the union over discrimination.

We oppose suing the unions on principle. The capitalist state, which consists at its core of the cops, military, courts and prisons, exists to defend the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Opening up the unions to government intervention allows the bosses to gain control over the unions in order to weaken them. A stark example is the government’s decision, approved by a U.S. district judge in November, to take over the elections of ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco. This decision was the fruit of complaints by Local 10 members who ran to the Department of Labor to complain about having been disqualified from running for union office in prior elections (see “Government Hands Off ILWU Local 10!” WV No. 903, 23 November 2007).

Prominent at the December 7 protest were Jones and other black security guards at the ports, many of them members of the ILWU. Black security guards observed and reported some of the noose incidents, and many of them are rightly revolted and outraged over the presence of nooses on the docks. Nonetheless, security guards, whether black or white, are auxiliaries to the cops and serve to protect the property of the bosses. Port security guards were doing their job when they crossed ILWU picket lines during the PMA lockout in 2002. More recently, in August port security guards and cops in Sacramento were responsible for an attack on two black longshoremen from San Francisco ILWU Local 10 because they called their union rep after refusing to submit to a search of their vehicle (see “ILWU Rally: ‘Drop the Bogus Charges Now!’” WV No. 900, 12 October 2007). We say: Cops, security guards out of the unions!

The racial oppression of black people has been built into the foundations of American capitalism from the very origins of the U.S., when black enslavement was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. With the rise of Jim Crow segregation came its enforcement through racist terror, exemplified by the murderous lynch mob. Today, the threat of lynch-rope terror supplements the daily terror of the capitalist state, from its marauding cops in the ghettos to the incarceration of over two million people, nearly half of them black, to the pinnacle of the capitalist state’s apparatus of repression, the death penalty. The recent proliferation of nooses confirms what we have always said about the racist death penalty in America: it is a barbaric legacy of black chattel slavery.

Our struggle for black liberation is based on the program of revolutionary integrationism. While combatting every manifestation of racist oppression, fighting in particular to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement, we underline that full equality for the black masses requires that the working class rip the economy out of the hands of the racist capitalist rulers and reorganize it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to eliminate the material roots of black oppression through the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivized economy with quality jobs, housing, health care and education for all. For black liberation through socialist revolution!

We fight for a new, class-struggle labor leadership guided by the understanding that the interests of workers and of the capitalists are irreconcilably counterposed. This means politically combatting the existing pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats, those like the ILWU tops who would leave the struggle to defend black ILWU members to the PMA bosses and others. It means fighting to mobilize the ILWU to organize the largely immigrant port truckers, natural and indispensable allies of longshoremen. It means combatting the ILWU tops’ criminal support to the government’s maritime security measures and reactionary “war on terror,” a war on immigrants, black people and labor. The labor movement has every interest in fighting against the racist rulers’ anti-immigrant witchhunt and demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

The struggle for a fighting labor movement is integrally tied to the struggle to forge a multiracial, revolutionary workers party that fights for the overthrow of the capitalist order through socialist revolution. As stated in the preamble to the program of the Labor Black Leagues, which are fraternally allied to the Spartacist League: “We fight to win the entire working class, including white workers as well as the growing number of Latino and other immigrants, to the fight for black liberation, strategic to the American revolution.”