the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 7, 2002
In response to United Airlines’ outrageous demand that workers give up nine billion dollars in concessions, spread over six years, leaders of the five unions which represent United workers offered a counter proposal: they are ready to give five billion dollars worth of "savings" in labor costs, spread over five years. If these "savings" were to be divided equally among United’s 66,000 union workers, this would average out to about $15,000 a year.
The coalition of five unions said that this package plus other "cost savings" and "broad initiatives" it had proposed would allow United to increase "its core profitability" by two to three billion dollars a year. And what are those other "cost-savings"? The union press release forgot to explain that, but whatever else is included, increased productivity–that is a brutal increase in the workload of every worker–is sure to head the list.
Said the president of the flight attendants union: "Being a part of the solution that assists United in surviving its near-term financial crisis is central to our goal of ensuring that the Flight Attendants’ long-term interests are represented."It’s the classical class collaboration that union leaders have pushed for years. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they continue to argue that if workers ensure the well-being of their own company, they will guarantee their own well-being.
What has happened in the airline industry itself proves exactly the opposite.
In 1994, the unions at United made similar arguments, justifying a round of concessions they gave up then. The pilots and the machinists, along with salaried non-union employees, gave up 4.8 billion dollars in pay cuts, and reduced pension contributions. In exchange, they got 55% of company stock shares–and the company’s promise that it would repay wage and benefit cuts when company prospects turned up.
Things didn’t quite work out as promised. It’s true that company profits soared: between 1996 and 2000, United racked up 5.9 billion dollars in earnings. As late as 2001, United had so much spare money lying around, it could propose to buy USAir for 4.3 billion dollars, plus taking responsibility for paying 7.3 billion dollars in USAir’s debt.
The workers were left out in the cold. While the pilots recovered some of their losses at the end of 2000, the rest of the workers did not see any restoration of wage and benefit cuts until the spring of this year. But only a few months later, the company came back, demanding new and much bigger concessions–nine billions worth.
As for the famous stock–which supposedly turned United into a "worker-owned company"–today it’s worth almost nothing, only 2.5% of what it was worth in 1997, and the company, by threatening bankruptcy, shows it is ready even to get rid of that obligation.
Despite all claims to the contrary, concessions did not save jobs. They did not produce an improvement in the workers’ standard of living. They produced only an enormous increase in wealth for the executives and rich investors and money with which the company sought to buy up other companies.
The workers and the bosses do not stand on the same side. The bosses accumulate their wealth by exploiting us. We can defend ourselves only by taking back some of that wealth. The bosses put their interests first. The workers have to do exactly the same.
When the bosses want concessions, of course they can produce a balance sheet that shows they are about to go out of business. But balance sheets lie. The proof is how fast the richest people in this country have increased their wealth, leaving the rest of us further and further behind.
The ability of the workers to defend our standard of living does not depend on what a faked-up balance sheet shows. It depends on our understanding that we have nothing in common with the bosses who exploit our labor; and it depends on our readiness to fight for ourselves. This is what will decide the fate of the workers at United today, and the rest of the working class tomorrow.
Oct 7, 2002
Five sheriff’s deputies recently shot Rolando Sanchez six times with electric stun guns, beat him up and then left him lying injured on the floor of the largest food market in the city. When they realized he was not the person they were after, they walked out on him without calling for medical help.
Sanchez, who had been working repairing the roof of Baltimore’s Lexington Market, stopped to take a lunch break. The deputies rushed into the market after a bank robbery suspect was reported in the market.
Sanchez did not fit the description of the robbery suspect: an African-American wearing blue jeans and a dark T-shirt. Sanchez, by contrast, is a light-skinned Hispanic who was wearing shorts, work boots and an orange T-shirt at the time.
So why did they attack Sanchez? Probably because, since he speaks little English, he didn’t immediately respond to their demands to show identification.
A week after the brutalizing of Sanchez, Baltimore Hispanic activist Angelo Solera said at a press conference, "They left him on the floor like a dog. Thugs do that. They beat you up and they leave you in the middle of Lexington Market."Thugs he called them, thugs they are!
Oct 7, 2002
As of October 1, Los Angeles County has closed 11 of the county’s 18 health centers and four school-based clinics. In addition, the County Board of Supervisors has voted to cut 25% of its subsidies to private clinics serving uninsured patients.
The clinics that closed down had been receiving about 350,000 patient visits per year. Now the patients will be directed to the seven county clinics which remain open. Each one of these clinics will have to handle almost three times the patient load as before, not to mention the longer distances patients will have to travel to get to a clinic.
By any measure, these closures are a big step towards eliminating L.A.‘s public health system. Providing service to anyone who came in, it had been one of the last remaining public clinic systems in any major U.S. city, along with New York. Closing these clinics means eliminating the last resort for many uninsured people, numbering three million in L.A. County alone. Most of the uninsured are workers with full-time or part-time jobs who can’t afford health insurance and whose employers refuse to buy it for them.
In other words, this is a major attack on the working class, affecting millions of workers and their family members, especially children. Along with the clinic closures, the county also cut subsidies for child immunizations. Since children have to get immunizations involving several shots to get enrolled in school, this will be a considerable additional expense for families without health insurance.
County officials say they are forced to make these cuts because the county’s health budget is running a big deficit. Politicians and officials at the state and federal levels say that their hands are tied, that there is no money.
No money? These sums are a tiny fraction of what the government spends on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere. It is also a fraction of what the government–federal, state and local–hands out to big corporations in tax breaks and subsidies–like the billions of dollars the federal government gave to the airlines after 9/11. In California, the state has been handing out billions of dollars to electricity companies since the "energy crisis" two years ago.
No, it’s not a question of money. It’s a question of priorities.
Oct 7, 2002
Eight people–cops and other Detroit Police Department employees–have now been indicted in the theft of cocaine from the property room of police headquarters.
In March this year, the Detroit police reported that some 35 kilos–or 12 million dollars worth–of cocaine had disappeared, replaced with flour and powdered sugar.
The deputy chief of police has now admitted that the amount of cocaine missing was "substantially more than we originally believed." But the room with the evidence is such a mess that the police say they cannot tell how much is missing.
Where did the cocaine go? It was way too much to snort–even for Detroit cops. So was it sold by cops on the street? Or was it used to frame up someone the cops wanted to convict? Or both?
It comes as no surprise that there are some big criminals down at police headquarters–on the supposed "right side" of the law!
Oct 7, 2002
Trumpeting that it lost five billion dollars last year, one of the country’s largest insurance companies, State Farm, announced large rate increases to everyone they cover–homeowners, automobile owners, commercial properties, etc.
In Michigan, for example, State Farm raised home insurance by an average 32%. In Maryland, home insurance was up 25% and car insurance was up ten%. And the company stopped writing any new policies in Maryland in a kind of extortion attempt to force state insurance commissioners to okay more rate hikes.
State Farm is not the only insurance company to raise their rates. Over the last two years in Michigan, Nationwide Mutual Fire Insurance raises their rates by 23%, Safeco Insurance Co. of America raised their rates by more than 80%, Allstate Insurance raised theirs by 85%, etc.
State Farm, of course, claims that it "is costing us more in home building materials, labor and medical costs." In fact, insurance companies almost always lose money on their claims. But they more than make enough on their financial investments, or speculation, not only to make up the difference, but to make a tidy profit.
But–as we all know–the stock market is down, down, down. And since insurance companies were some of the biggest players in its run up–now they are swallowing some losses.
But, unlike workers whose 401(K) plans almost disappeared, insurance companies plan on making up their losses–by raising our rates.
No–they kept the benefits when the market was soaring. Let them pay the price now.
Oct 7, 2002
Last January, an imprisoned serial rapist and murderer confessed to two separate, but similar, beatings and rapes of women in New York City’s Central Park back in 1989. He described in detail to prison officials and investigators how he alone carried out these attacks. The district attorney’s office has since determined that his DNA matches the DNA recovered from semen found on the sock of the second woman who was attacked.
There is a problem however. In 1990, five black and Puerto Rican teenagers, four of them under 16 years old at the time, were convicted of the second beating and rape–of a 28-year-old white woman who worked as an investment banker and had been jogging in the park. They all served long years in prison for it. Four of them have now completed their sentences and are out of jail. One is still serving time on another unrelated charge.
The only evidence actually linking these young teenagers to this crime were video-taped confessions from four of them. What hadn’t been videotaped were the long hours of questioning and suggestion these teenagers had been subjected to during which they were isolated, intimidated and physically harassed by hardened police interrogators. The police failed to inform defense attorneys for the teenagers that an almost identical beating and rape had occurred nearby in the park only two days earlier.
The prosecutor introduced as evidence in the trial a blond human hair found on one of the young men, saying it came from the victim. Later DNA testing proved it did not. And as for the DNA from semen found on the victim, it did not match the DNA of any of the teenagers. But the police and prosecutors explained that a match wasn’t needed to convict.
Although there were many inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case, the media had carried on such a hate campaign against the five teens, that the trial was carried on in a lynch-mob atmosphere. The videotaped confessions were sufficient to convince the jury that the five teenagers were "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt".The same thing was true in a second trial, held after all the defendants retracted their testimony charging that the police had forced them to confess during the hours-long interrogations that occurred before their "confessions" were videotaped.
At the time of their second conviction, the teenagers’ lawyers said they were the victims of racism. One said the real attacker was still unknown and would be out committing more rapes and possibly even murder.
He was right. After the teenagers were sent to prison, the real attacker went on to commit several more rapes, beatings and robberies, and also killed a pregnant woman before he was finally arrested and imprisoned. These victims also paid a price for the racism of the police and the news media.
Oct 7, 2002
A few months ago, it appeared that Chancellor Gerhard Schroder would lose the elections–reproached by the electorate for a dismal economy.
But then Schroder found a good election issue: in the last weeks before the election, Schroder announced his opposition to Bush’s plan for a war against Iraq. That was enough to win him re-election, given the overwhelming opposition in Germany to such a war.
Almost as soon as the election was over, Schroder was back to trying to worm his way into Bush’s good graces.
And German voters who liked Schroder’s anti-war stance will find out how their votes stack up if the U.S. decides to go to war–just like those who count on the Democrats to stop the drive toward war.
Oct 7, 2002
Newsweek magazine created a stir when it published documents detailing U.S. government shipments of disease producing, toxic and other biological research materials to Iraq in the late 1980s. The chief use of these materials was to make biological weapons. The shipments included anthrax, botulinum and the bacteria that cause gas gangrene, as well as the West Nile virus. They were sent by the U.S.‘s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Type Culture Collection. And although the U.S. government today claims they were sent only for "medical research," in fact the shipments went directly to Iraq’s Atomic Energy Commission, to the Sera and Vaccine Institute, which was known to carry out Iraq’s biological weapons program, and to its chemical weapons program laboratory.
When Senator Robert Byrd read from the Newsweek article to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a Senate hearing, Rumsfeld said, "I have never heard anything like what you’ve read, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it." Obviously Rumsfeld has a lot of practice at telling barefaced lies–shamelessly!
Newsweek pointed out that Rumsfeld himself met with Saddam Hussein on December 20, 1983. This meeting was shown to the world via TV. The U.S. note taker at the meeting recorded that Rumsfeld conveyed President Reagan’s greetings and then got down to the business of arranging for U.S. aid to Iraq in its war against Iran. Newsweek also detailed the agreements to ship U.S. tanks to Iraq via Egypt, as well as helicopters, which were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds.The Newsweek article, while giving some new details, was not the first to reveal this information. U.N. inspectors who detected and destroyed Iraq’s biological weapons, had already reported that these weapons were built from biological strains given by the U.S.
Nonetheless, this exposé reveals something else interesting: when confronted by overwhelming amounts of evidence Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney and company continue to lie in the most blatant fashion.
These liars are the same people who today are trying to convince us to accept another war against Iraq.
Oct 7, 2002
For 24 years now there has been a Biological Weapons Convention, an agreement between many governments to limit biological weapons. You’d think that someone who wants to protect the world from such weapons–as Bush claims to do–would do everything he could to see that it was enforced.
But on July 26, 2001 the Bush administration pulled the U.S. out of the negotiations aimed to set up inspections under the Convention. Pretending, at first, that the inspections would not be thorough enough to detect biological weapons, the Bush administration finally got to the main point: they would threaten the proprietary business information of U.S. companies whose biological weapons labs are inspected. In other words, the inspections would turn up what the U.S. corporations have been doing to produce such weapons–like the ones they sent to Iraq 15 years ago!
Oct 7, 2002
On September 28, the largest peace demonstration since the Gulf War, and perhaps even since Vietnam, took place in London. There were 140,000 demonstrators according to the police, and over 300,000 according to the organizers. An unusual fact is that there were also 60 government representatives from the Labor Party who chose to disassociate themselves from Prime Minister Tony Blair by supporting this demonstration. It’s an indication they’re worried about the attitudes of the population.
Blair certainly has tried to convince the British population to change its opinion. Months ago he announced he had "incontestable proof" of the danger Saddam Hussein represented to the world in general and to Great Britain in particular. This obviously didn’t have the effect Blair wanted. Public opinion polls show that more than 75% of the population is now opposed to the war rhetoric of Blair against Iraq, and that this opposition has been increasing.
Finally on Tuesday, September 24, with a big media splash, Blair released his 50-page document that supposedly gave "incontestable proof."The massive British demonstration four days later shows that a significant part of the population wasn’t fooled by this latest propaganda stunt.
Demonstrations against war in Iraq have also taken place in the U.S. Although much smaller than the one in London, such demonstrations show there is a part of the U.S. population that has the reflex to oppose the wars which have been so disastrous for the working class and for large parts of the whole population.
Oct 7, 2002
Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, announced with a good deal of publicity that he had 50 pages of proof against Iraq. Bush, of course, immediately grabbed hold of his sidekick’s document to buttress his war moves.
Of these 50 pages, only 16 actually dealt with weapons. What is most striking in these 16 pages of "incontestable proof" is that they simply repeat the pretexts used for the American and British air attacks all during the 1990s, including the most destructive operation called Desert Fox in 1998, "proofs" which have since been disproved by the U.N. weapons inspectors themselves. Blair has added some satellite photos that supposedly show chemical factories built upon the ruins of installations bombed in 1991 or destroyed afterwards by the United Nations inspectors. But Blair’s own report makes it clear that these chemical products are very useful for civilian use, especially to replace the products Iraq can no longer import due to the American and British embargo. Nonetheless, the report says that these products could also be used for the production of chemical and bacteriological weapons–COULD, not that they are being used. Using this same reasoning, every single country that has chemical and bacteriological production facilities should also be accused of producing such arms. And, as the anthrax scare in this country shows, some countries do produce them–with the U.S. leading the pack.
As for Iraq’s missiles–Blair lists a whole series of missiles that, according to the report, are in such a shape, they couldn’t be used. Blair also tells us that the Iraqis are taking apart old Scud missiles (made from Soviet technology dating back to the 1950s) in order to understand how they work. In other words, Iraq doesn’t have modern missiles, and doesn’t yet know how to build the ones which date from half a century ago.
In 1998, Blair claimed that Iraq already had a pilot-less plane, electronically guided, able to go into any country in order to spread anthrax. At the time, Blair used this story to justify British participation in the bombing operation "Desert Fox." Blair’s current dossier modifies this lie a bit, claiming only that "Iraq tried to convert one of its training planes into an air vehicle capable of transporting chemical and bacteriological agents over a long distance." TRIED–not did it. It’s obvious that a country that does not have even the technology to produce a working guidance system for its missiles could not be capable of building a guided plane to send over thousands of miles. It seems that Blair forgot his 1998 lie when he released his current report.
As far as the famous Iraqi nuclear bomb, Blair’s report says it all: there are laboratories which "could" begin to produce enriched uranium, IF Iraq could purchase uranium in sufficient quantities. And IF it was able to enrich the uranium, it COULD then produce weapons-grade enriched nuclear materials. And finally it COULD then produce a bomb in a year or two–which we could say of almost any country, even the poor ones if they have a little scientific knowledge, nuclear installations and the technicians to run them. After all, Pakistan already has an atomic bomb.
This is the so-called "irrefutable proof" which reduces itself to one idea: IF Iraq had the industrial and technological means, maybe it could produce all these "arms of mass destruction" that it today is accused of having. It other words, it doesn’t have them today and it most certainly does not have the logistical means to use them against the West, nor even in any sustained way against its regional rivals.
As for the rest of the Blair report, more than two thirds is just a reminder of the past, beginning with the career of the dictator Saddam Hussein, his role in the Iran-Iraq war, the repressive and military character of his regime, and his resistance to the arbitrary and provocative dictates of the United Nations–all things already known.
What is not found in the report is the role the major world powers played to reinforce this dictatorship. Nor does it show the way imperialism used Hussein to maintain its order in the region at the cost of a million lives in both Iraq and Iran, after its former pillar of support, the Iranian regime of the Shah, was overthrown. Nor do we find in the Blair report any trace of the fact that, when Saddam Hussein did have "arms of mass destruction," it was thanks to the imperialist leaders and the more than 100 billion dollars of arms that the West’s biggest companies sold him. U.S. and British imperialism fed Saddam Hussein’s ambition to impose himself as the regional leader. But Blair’s report conveniently forgets this.
This report underlines to what extent all this loud rhetoric coming from Blair and from Bush to legitimize their politics is simply a bunch of pretexts and lies. They are trying to make Saddam Hussein into a sufficiently credible scarecrow so that they can have a cover for the reactionary policies they are pursuing against their own populations. What is intolerable is that the Iraqi people are threatened, once again, with having to pay for this with their blood.
Oct 7, 2002
In the middle of September, Steve Conn, a teacher in the Detroit public schools, was given a three-day suspension, charging him with "excessive absenteeism" for calling in sick last February 20. And yet, during the summer, Conn had been given a $150 bonus, rewarding him for "good attendance" for the whole year.
Did it take the board seven months to take his temperature? Or was it just a bureaucratic mix-up, in a system well known for its heavy-handed bureaucracy?
Actually, it was neither. Conn was disciplined because he, along with other people, had fought last year against the Detroit School Board and its "CEO" David Burnley over the board’s reduction of supplies, books and staff in the schools. Conn had helped organize demonstrations and a Day of Protest for Quality Schools last February 20–the day for which he was disciplined.
Maybe the Board figured it would wait until things cooled down a little before disciplining Conn.
Maybe they figured wrong, since Conn’s discipline provoked a rally outside the high school where he teaches.
That’s what should happen when a militant is disciplined.
Oct 7, 2002
According to company reports, there were fewer people working in September. According to state unemployment services, more people applied for unemployment benefits. According to newspaper reports, there were fewer help-wanted ads. Even temporary agencies report they had few orders for temp workers from companies that were calling for them last year.
All signs point to an increase in the rate of unemployment. But it seems that government statisticians couldn’t read the signs. They reported that unemployment had gone down last month.
No big thing–just another little old lie told by a government which knows very well how to tell some big ones!
Oct 7, 2002
On September 25, a U.S. federal grand jury indicted three former leaders of UAW Local 594, two of whom had led an 87-day strike against GM in 1997. The outcome of the strike included an agreement to hire 567 new workers and to pay to union members grievance awards totaling eleven million dollars.
Two of the three indicted were accused of prolonging the strike to settle back pay grievances of their own. And all three were accused of conspiring to get two people–a family member and a friend–included in the list of new hires for skilled trades, even though unqualified.
The fact is that GM–with whom the three supposedly colluded–is not being charged, even though it would have been just as guilty for cutting those supposed deals. But the government’s suit is not about justice. It is about intimidation of officials in unions who are willing to lead a fight.
Over the years, Local 594 in Pontiac, Michigan, gained a reputation as one of the more militant UAW locals. It had often demanded that GM pay workers who had grievances. This contrasted with the many locals which settled grievances with management’s promise not to do it again. In the mid-1990s, Pontiac management decided to stop paying many awards, stop settling manpower grievances and also to stop paying union officials for the overtime they worked in the plant. These moves were out and out violations of the contract, and therefore violations of the law; but no grand jury was called to look into GM.
In 1997, Local 594 officials led the workers in a strike. The strike lasted 87 days and did not please the top national UAW leadership, which preferred to emphasize partnership and cooperation with the bosses. The difficulty of such a long strike, combined with the lukewarm support by national officials, caused some division within the local. Soon after the strike was settled, some local members sued the local leaders, alleging they had prolonged the strike in order to settle their own grievances–that is, they took payoffs.
In fact, the so-called payoffs were no more than back pay, the overtime that the company owed them from before the strike, a small part of the total eleven million dollars paid out to hundreds of workers in the plant.
As for the matter of getting friends and family hired: it’s favoritism, something workers in every plant detest. Did it happen at 594? Hard to know, given all the lies–but if it did, is that reason for a government prosecution? Almost every UAW plant is loaded with not only the friends and family of union officials, but more importantly, loaded with all the big and little bosses’ friends and family who can’t find other jobs. If the government wants to prosecute, there were plenty of other places to investigate–with lots bigger and worse examples of favoritism.
It’s not just a coincidence that the government is selectively prosecuting only these few local leaders for something that goes on in every plant, every day. It’s a message loud and clear to any and every union official in the country, that if they decide to fight their company, they could have to fight the government too. And the government will search until it finds a pretext.
Oct 7, 2002
On September 29, the PMA (the Pacific Maritime Association, the association of the owners of shipping lines and stevedoring companies) locked out members of the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union), effectively closing all 29 ports on the West Coast.
This attack by the PMA was hardly a surprise. The old contract had expired on July 1, and the big shipping companies have been pushing to impose a new contact with big takeaways that include the outsourcing of clerical work. The bosses justified this by saying that they wanted to automate the clerical work, that is, to bring in scanners and computers to keep track of cargo. But when the ILWU proposed that current clerks be trained to do this work, the companies turned them down cold. Obviously, the shipping companies are trying to whittle down higher-paying jobs covered under union contracts–shipping them instead to low-wage workplaces.
Finally, at the end of September, the owners denounced the ILWU because its members were "working to rule"–that is, observing all the safety rules. The owners called this a "strike with pay." They used that as the pretext to do what they had been threatening to do throughout the summer: lock the workers out. Once the lock-out began, the ILWU organized picket lines.
The lies the PMA and the news media have told about the ILWU workers are absurd. Supposedly, for example, they make $100,000 to $150,000 per year. In fact, they make between $60,000 and $80,000–but only if they are in the top categories, working with overtime. And a big percentage of dockworkers are temps, or "casuals." In the largest port in the country, Los Angeles-Long Beach, for example, which handles more than two-thirds of all the cargo on the West Coast, half the dockworkers are "casuals." These supposedly high-paid workers have to scrape by on irregular pay and benefits while they wait for a possible opening as a registered, full-time longshoreman. Of those who finally make it to full-time work, they often have only 10 or 15 years left to go before they retire.
Obviously, these kinds of lies are aimed at isolating the unionized workers who make somewhat better pay (or at least have the hope to, if they ever make full-time) from the rest of the workforce.
The best response the longshore workers could make to this kind of attack is to propose to other workers to fight to improve their own pay and conditions. We are all under attack.
Oct 7, 2002
Kennecott Copper negotiators in Utah walked out on negotiations with the USWA (the United Steelworkers of America) on September 30. Then, as a kind of afterthought, they stuck a new offer–worse than the earlier ones–under the door of the union negotiators, declaring it to be the company’s "final offer."When negotiations break down, a company can legally impose its final offer. Kennecott used exactly this pretext to impose big concessions on the USWA workers.
Wayne Holland, a union negotiator, said, "We think the NLRB probably will agree with us that negotiations were not at an impasse. And we believe they will rule Kennecott’s attempt to impose the terms of its final contract offer is illegal."A labor law that contains such a provision hardly offers the workers protection. To ask workers to put their faith in it is little more than asking them to commit suicide.
What counts in this kind of situation is not the courts and the NLRB, which will take years to decide in the workers’ favor–in the best of cases. What counts is the workers’ readiness to fight right now.
Oct 7, 2002
On the third day of the longshore strike President Bush said, "Any strike’s a tough situation, but this one happens to come at–or a lockout is a tough situation or no work is a tough situation–this is coming at a bad time." As Bush’s stumble indicates, it’s a little harder for him to be appear to be defending the health of the country when it’s the bosses who locked out the workers.
Before the lockout began, the Bush administration strongly threatened it would immediately intervene if any strike shut down the ports. Labor Department officials called the union and threatened to use the military to operate the ports, threatened to take away the bargaining rights of the union under the National Labor Relations Act and threatened to break up the coast-wide contract. There was talk of a Taft-Hartley injunction to end any strike. But now Bush appears hesitant to act. After all, it’s the bosses who shut down the ports–not the workers.
This doesn’t mean Bush won’t obtain a Taft-Hartley injunction–and even soon. If the workers don’t cave in, facing these threats, he may easily impose draconian conditions on the workers, forgetting who closed the ports. And if Bush does issue the injunction, then what?
Will ILWU leaders be ready to defy Bush? That isn’t so clear. The union leaders let months go by after the contract ran out without even asking for a strike vote, and called on Democratic Party politicians for support, despite the fact that it’s exactly when the bosses’ interests are in sharp conflict with the workers that the Democrats have most clearly shown their support for the bosses. In fact, the last Taft-Hartley injunction was issued by Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, against the miners in l979. And Clinton used the Railway Labor Act to order American pilots to end their strike in 1997, the first time in 30 years the Act had been used.
The longshoremen can defend themselves, not by relying on supposed politician friends, but by preparing to fight for what they want. The coal miners showed in l979 that an injunction can be defied. Not only did they throw back the mineowners’ demands for concessions, they backed off the government which didn’t dare jail them–or even dare try to fine them. But they were ready to fight.
The same determination is needed today.