The ILWU and TWIC

(Letters)

30 May 2010

To the editor:

The front-page article “Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!” in Workers Vanguard No. 958 (7 May) rightly exposes how the misleaders of the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) collaborated with the capitalist state in the implementation of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program. According to Homeland Security statistics, a whopping 35,000 maritime transportation workers have been disqualified under TWIC (and thus forced from their jobs), in addition to the unknown tens of thousands who dropped out of the workforce in order to avoid the risk of prosecution or deportation under TWIC “anti-terror” repression. Meanwhile, TWIC’s immigration and criminal background checks have been imposed on twice the number originally projected by the government—a total of over 1.5 million workers.

While the front-page article pointed out that the ILWU bureaucracy called for “fair” implementation of the TWIC program, it’s worth noting that some two months after the government’s national compliance date of 15 April 2009 for TWIC cards, an ILWU Longshore Division Caucus meeting voted “to seek the abandonment of the TWIC program altogether” (Dispatcher, July/August 2009). At the same time, the union’s pro-capitalist bureaucracy made it clear it had no intention of challenging the racist rulers’ prerogative to wield their state power against the working class in the name of national security. So the Caucus cited as the reason for after-the-fact opposition to TWIC that “it does not actually improve port security” (see “Protest Conviction of Aaron Harrison! ‘War on Terror’ Frame-Up of Black Longshoreman,” WV No. 949, 1 January).

As Workers Vanguard advocates, for the unions to become instruments of defense of the multiracial working class against the exploiting capitalist bosses and their government requires a political fight for a new leadership based on a class-struggle program whose purpose is to fight for a workers party and a workers government.

J.K.