ILWU Ship Boycott: Token of Solidarity with Palestinians

OAKLAND—Outraged by the Israeli army’s May 31 massacre of nine volunteers aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship carrying aid to besieged Palestinians in Gaza, some 800 protesters converged at the Stevedoring Services of America (SSA) terminal here in the early morning of June 20. The purpose of the protest was to boycott a container ship of the Israeli-owned Zim lines, the Zim Shenzhen. Longshoremen of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 honored the picket line. In the end, the ship sat at berth for 12 hours before being unloaded.

Although the protest was largely symbolic, it was a genuine act of solidarity in defense of the Palestinians. In response, Israeli consular officials dispatched a delegation to a subsequent Local 10 exec board meeting to defend the attack on the “Freedom Flotilla.” This effort was rightly shot down, and the executive board reaffirmed its opposition to the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

The impetus for the Oakland picket, called by the Labor/Community Committee in Solidarity with the People of Palestine, was an appeal by Palestinian unions for labor solidarity actions following the murderous attack on the Mavi Marmara. Swedish dock workers had called for a week-long labor boycott from June 23-29 of all trade with Israel. During that week, they refused to handle ten cargo containers being shipped to or from Israel. Longshoremen at the Port of Cochin, India, refused to work cargo from a Zim ship that had been unloaded in Sri Lanka and then shipped to Cochin in a feeder vessel. The Oakland port protest, which was endorsed by the Oakland Education Association and publicized by the San Francisco and Alameda Labor Councils, followed an ILWU Local 10 executive board resolution “condemning this Israeli attack” and calling for “unions to protest by any action they choose to take.”

Supporters of the Spartacist League joined the Oakland picket as an expression of our commitment to the defense of the Palestinians against Zionist state terror, which is armed and bankrolled by U.S. imperialism. We are for time-delimited actions of labor solidarity like union boycotts called around concrete demands in defense of workers and the oppressed. We also support standing boycotts of military shipments to Israel, which would be a real blow against the Zionist butchers and, even more crucially, their bloody imperialist patrons. Our purpose in raising the call “Labor: Hot Cargo Military Goods to Israel!” as one of our signs expressed at the Oakland protest, is to strengthen the fighting power and class consciousness of the working class in solidarity with the exploited and oppressed of the world and in opposition to capitalist class rule here in the belly of the U.S. imperialist beast.

In the context of worldwide protest against Israel’s bloody assault on the flotilla of humanitarian aid to Gaza, a solid week-long, coastwide ILWU boycott of the Zim shipping conglomerate would have had tremendous impact. But this was not the purpose of the organizers of the Oakland protest, centrally the reformists of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and its ANSWER coalition and the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee (TWSC), mainly represented by ILWU Local 10 bureaucrats Jack Heyman and Clarence Thomas. Instead, they sought to give a labor veneer to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which appeals to the imperialists to act on behalf of the Palestinians through trade and other sanctions against Israel. As a July 9 LabourNet article by Greg Dropkin noted, Clarence Thomas “set out the current strategy” at the Oakland picket, arguing that “the thing that is going to make Israel and the United States both understand” that the blockade of Gaza can’t continue “is the whole question of commerce and trade.” Thomas went on to promote a three-pronged strategy of “Boycotts, Sanctions, and Divestment.”

As opposed to time-delimited labor boycotts, open-ended boycotts of states like Israel are not only ineffective but also could prove harmful to the working class in the boycotted countries. As the article on the BDS campaign (see page 16) by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain explains, such appeals for open-ended boycotts promote suicidal illusions in the “democratic” pretensions of the imperialist rulers. If successful, the campaign would actually be a blow against the only force that can be mobilized to smash the Zionist state from within: the Hebrew-speaking and Arab workers of Israel.

The motions passed by the San Francisco and Alameda Labor Councils publicizing the Oakland protest supported the call by the United Nations and Amnesty International for an “investigation” of the massacre on the Mavi Marmara. This is in line with the entire BDS campaign, which invokes the UN as an ally against the Zionist rulers. Whatever criticisms of Israeli policy are occasionally expressed in UN resolutions, opponents of Zionist terror must place no reliance on this imperialist den of thieves and their victims. The UN time and again has acted to deepen the oppression of the Palestinians. It presided over the 1947 partition of Palestine, and it was UN “peacekeepers” who disarmed PLO fighters in Lebanon in 1982, setting up the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by forces acting on behalf of the Israeli army.

The Ship That Hadn’t Come In

The majority of the protesters who came out for the 5:30 a.m. picket thought that they were there to stop the Israeli ship from being worked. In fact, the Zim Shenzhen was scheduled to arrive at the Oakland port at 2 p.m. according to information readily available on the Zim Web site, which lists the schedule of its ships months in advance. When it became clear after a couple of hours that there was no Israeli ship at the terminal, a fact the organizers tried to dodge until it became obvious, disappointed protesters started to leave in increasing numbers. Organizers appealed for them to stay, aiming for a ruling by an arbitrator that the situation posed a “health and safety” threat to longshoremen, which, by the terms of the ILWU contract, would mean longshoremen could refuse to cross the picket line without penalty.

The union argued to the arbitrator that it would be a threat for Oakland cops to force an opening through the picket line, as demanded by employers. In April 2003, Oakland police assaulted longshoremen who honored a picket line set up to protest the Iraq war. The cops fired wooden bullets and other “non-lethal” projectiles at ILWU members and antiwar protesters, 41 of whom were injured, some seriously. Two dozen were arrested and then dragged through the courts on bogus charges that were eventually dropped. This time around, the arbitrator ruled that there was a “health and safety” issue, and longshoremen left with the promise of partial pay for the day. The picket line then quickly dispersed, with the organizers urging protesters to return at 4:30 p.m. for the afternoon dispatch.

Spartacist League supporters also participated in the much smaller afternoon picket line. SSA had cancelled its order for an evening crew to work the Zim ship. But when the ship finally arrived after 5:30 p.m., a protest organizer announced that it was being tied up to the docks. Someone yelled out to ask who was doing the work. The question was ignored, and no wonder, since it was ILWU linesmen who were working behind the picket line. The ship was unloaded the following morning by an ILWU crew.

We do not fault the longshoremen who tied up the ship. For all the hoopla, the fact of the matter is that little to no effort was made to mobilize ILWU members for what some on the left are trumpeting as a “historic” labor action. Most ILWU members were not even aware that this protest was taking place. Those ILWUers who refused to cross the morning picket line had not been dispatched to work the Zim ship for the simple reason that it hadn’t even arrived. Confronted with the picket, these workers were either sold illusions in their class enemy by the promoters of the “boycott, sanctions and divestment” movement or just walked away with the promise of some of their wages. As a former ILWU Local 6 member argued on the Advance the Struggle Web site:

“The claim that the rank-and-file stopped an Israeli ship in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is misleading. Pro-Palestinian activists set up a picket line with the intent of invoking an arbitrator to send the longshore workers home for ‘health and safety’ reasons according to their contract. Which worked, but NOT based on any agency on the part of the workers.”

For International Labor Solidarity!

Many speakers at the June 20 picket invoked a 1984 action by ILWU Local 10 members who refused to unload South African cargo aboard the Nedlloyd Kimberley in solidarity with the fight of the black population of South Africa against the apartheid regime. We saluted the longshoremen who stood firm for ten days despite the refusal of the ILWU tops to give the action official union backing, leaving the longshoremen to go it alone. At the time, Workers Vanguard supported Local 10 executive board member Stan Gow, who fought for a solid union picket line to stop all work on the South Africa-bound Kimberley and to shut down the port against any retaliation by the shipping bosses. Helping the ILWU tops head off any such action were a couple of left-talking operators on the Local 10 executive board, including Howard Keylor, a supporter of the misnamed “Bolshevik Tendency.” At the June 20 protest, Keylor promoted himself as the author of the 1984 action. (For an honest and synthetic account of this action, see “The Truth About the 1984 Nedlloyd Kimberley Boycott,” WV No. 873, 7 July 2006.)

The ILWU Local 10 bureaucracy has a long history of spouting fine words of “solidarity” that cover for inaction or betrayal of the class interests of the workers in practice. Heyman and Thomas, who have long been fixtures in the bureaucracy, merely give this game a “militant” veneer in their role as the labor face of the Bay Area radical-liberal milieu. At a June 5 Bay Area protest against the Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara, Heyman argued that “pressuring the Obama administration for justice is illusory” and counterposed mobilizing workers power to appeals for “consumer boycotts.” But it was precisely appeals to the imperialists to rein in their Zionist allies that were behind the June 20 protest picket, of which Heyman was a central organizer. Rather than advancing class-struggle action by longhshore and other workers in defense of the Palestinians, these politics contributed to the token nature of the Oakland port protest.

International labor solidarity is key to defending the struggles of the working masses and oppressed peoples of the world against their brutal subjugation by the imperialists and their local henchmen. Not only would such solidarity by U.S. trade unionists strengthen the power of the workers overseas in the fight for the socialist overthrow of their capitalist rulers, but also it would advance the class struggle in this country against the main enemy, U.S. imperialism. This perspective means fighting for a new leadership of the unions—one rooted in a program of proletarian internationalist struggle, not pandering to the class enemy—as part of the struggle to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Only such a party can lead the struggle for the socialist liberation of humanity.