Liverpool/Frisco speaker

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Interview with San Fransisco dockers lead Jack Heyman after he
spoke to striking Liverpool dockers rally:

copied from UK Labornet


Jack Heyman is a docker from San Francisco. He visited Liverpool
12-13 January on behalf of the International Longshoremen and
Warehousemen's Union to express solidarity with the sacked
dockers on strike since 28 September. Arriving in the wake of
industrial action by rank and file members of the (East coast)
International Longshoremen's Association who respected a picket
line of Liverpool dockers in Newark NJ, Jack was given a standing
ovation by the 500 men. He told them they were "reigniting trade
unionism" all over the world.

After a march and rally on Saturday, Jack Heyman spoke to Greg
Dropkin for LabourNet.
I haven't seen this kind of militancy for years, I'd have to
think back to some of the militant miners strikes in West
Virginia in the United States. But the support they're getting is
astounding to say the least, because there hasn't been this sort
of international campaign in a long time.

Most of the cargo from Liverpool to the United States goes to the
East coast. And so the rank and file longshoremen on the Atlantic
coast have been refusing to unload the scab cargo. It is quite
unusual given the state of class struggle in the United States.
There's an atmosphere that if you go on strike you may not have
your job. So to say that these East coast dockers have honoured
the picket line in support of a struggle not in their country or
their union but of another union in another country is quite an
amazing feat.

Unfortunately, Liverpool ships don't come to the West coast. If
they did, I think our rank and file would respond in the same
manner. However there are other ways that we can help, one of
which is to spread the word around to other dockers unions
particularly in the Pacific Rim and South America to support this
critical strike.

I think dockers are beginning to realise that the struggle here
in Liverpool is one we can all identify with. The employers have
been pushing casualisation everywhere. So to the extent that the
Liverpool dockers are successful in combatting the employer here,
it will have a ripple effect around the world. That's why
solidarity is exploding internationally.

LabourNet: The strike has had to go outside the law in Britain.
What kind of legal constraints do American workers face?

For workers to win struggles, we've always had to challenge the
law. In the United States for example not too long ago, blacks
were not permitted to sit at a lunch counter with whites. Blacks
sat down at the lunch counters. It was illegal but it spread like
wildfire and became known as the Civil Rights movement. But a lot
of those tactics like the sit down which challenged private
property, came out of the labour movement in the 30's. Our modern
labour movement in the United States was born in the sit down
strikes in the auto factories. Employers said it's illegal for
you to occupy the plant. And it was illegal under capitalist law.
However workers challenged that and won.

LabourNet: What are the main organising issues for the ILWU now?

As I said, one of the big issues is casualisation. The longshore
union has jurisdiction on the docks, but the employers are
attempting not to register any new longshoremen. I think they're
called "permanent" here, we call them "A" men, or registered
longshoremen. So we're having to fight the employers over
casualisation, which essentially means organising workers on the
docks. That's why this is not just a liberal gesture of support.
It's rooted in a material basis, that if the Liverpool dockers
win their fight against casualisation it will have a ripple
effect in the United States as well.

In the last few weeks the ILWU has had some good press, which is
rare. I think the headline in the Journal of Commerce was
something like "Aggressive West Coast Longshore Union Organises
Unorganised Workers".

These are not longshoremen. They're in the longshore industry.
They're office workers, people that plan where the containers go
on the ship. And you know quite often office workers are the most
exploited workers because they put on a coat and tie or they can
wear a dress to work and they think they're privileged, they're
the aristocracy of labour. They don't even identify themselves
with labour, they think they're part of management. In reality
they're making half of what longshoremen make. So when we went in
to organise the planners, mainly in the Port of Los Angeles, we
met with great success.

Of course there was resistance from the employers, they didn't
want to recognise the planners as part of the ILWU and we had to
persuade them otherwise. Somehow the ships that came from the
docks where employers were refusing to recognise these workers,
those ships weren't unloaded. So in very short order the company
came around to a realistic position that they were going to have
to recognise those workers.

LabourNet: Do you think that there is any permanent possibility
of international rank and file organisation and how do you see
the forthcoming Liverpool conference in terms of that?

Well I not only see it as a possibility but as a necessity.
Unless the dockers can organise themselves internationally I'm
afraid that unionised dock forces around the world will be
decimated.

Three years ago the ILWU sponsored the conference that brought
together all of the dockers unions in the Pacific Rim trade. More
recently a couple of years ago we sent a delegation down to
Mexico in the wake of NAFTA, which we saw as an effort by a
dominant US imperialism to claim the Western Hemisphere as its
sphere of influence and as an attempt through privatisation to
bust the unions there, and that's exactly what's going on in
Mexico which is why we went down there.

It's not easy to organise workers internationally. It hasn't been
done in maybe a century really. There've been efforts at
particular times.

For instance in 1948 we had a strike on the West coast in which
the government threatened to use the military to load the ships.
Our president at the time, Harry Bridges, responded by reaching
out to the European dockers unions and they in turn said to the
government in effect that if the ships are loaded by scab labour
they will not be unloaded in Europe. And that's what broke the
back of employer intransigence and won the strike in 1948.

LabourNet: One of the great problems has been the division of the
labour movement through the Cold War. Does the end of the Cold
War open up new possibilities for international organisation?

Well it opens up new possibilities but you have to look at the
end of the Cold War in an objective fashion, as a defeat for the
working class internationally. I believe that the social
ownership of the means of production is an advancement for the
working class, and I think that that was destroyed with the fall
of the Soviet Union and Eastern block countries. That has
provided the capitalist class with virgin territory to exploit,
and they're going in like the California Gold Rush in '49.

The Eastern block and former Soviet Union working class is
relatively skilled and the capitalist class has been attempting
to exploit that internationally. For example on many of the
foreign flagged ships, the officers will be from the Eastern
block or from Russia and the crew will be Filipino. So for the
capitalist class the demise of the Soviet Union has opened up
opportunities.

On the other hand it's given us the capability of reaching out to
link up with workers in those lands, explain to them that the
streets of America or Europe are not paved with gold, that
privatisation means ever greater exploitation of the working
class. And to the extent that the capitalist class here in
England and the United States is increasing the rate of
exploitation, it's driving workers to more desperate tactics,
more militant tactics. And I think that's a good thing.

We've taken for granted too long that we have unions and we will
always have unions, and that's not the case. I think the working
class is waking up to realise that we are an international class,
and it's time to begin to organise ourselves to defend our
unions, our standards of living and that's going to take an
international effort.

LabourNet: Are we entering a period where the whole concept of
being in a union is under challenge, like the period before
unions?

We're really going back to the fundamentals of what unionism is
all about, and that is directly related to the cockiness, the
arrogance of the capitalist class internationally where they are
pushing privatisation and the destruction of unions. In their
minds there's a sense that they're completely unchallenged. I
think we have something like only 15% of the workforce actually
unionised in the US.

So we're going back to the drawing table, going back to the
basics and seeing what we have to do, what we haven't been doing
for decades and decades, and we're relearning things. And
hopefully this will lead to more militant tactics and more of a
political class conciousness on the part of the working class.

LabourNet: The East coast action in support of Liverpool
contradicts the version of American politics reported over here
of an enormous swing to the Right, the Republicans capturing
Congress, Clinton in trouble etc. Does this mean that electoral
politics doesn't have much to do with how workers react when
they're presented with a class issue in America?

Well I think that's in large part truth. Workers in the United
States are politically backwards. They've never realised the
importance of having their own party. And so quite often you'll
find workers can be very militant in terms of a union strike for
instance, but when it comes to the political front they vote for
capitalist parties, usually the Democratic Party.

Maybe there's a breakthrough happening now because more and more
the Democrats do not differentiate themselves from the
Republicans. A lot of the social programmes that were won through
militant class struggles in the '30s are now being liquidated
jointly by Republicans and Democrats. So I think it forces to the
forefront the question of the political struggle being tied in
with our economic situation.

For the first time in probably 50 years there's a real
possibility of a Labour Party in the United States. Now what
shape that Labour Party takes, what its programme will be it's
difficult to say at this point. There's a real possibility that
it won't be a true independent labour party, that they would come
out in support of the Democratic Party.

I know there's a Labour Party in Britain, that it's been
continuously more and more conservative, that they've given up
their position for social ownership of the means of production,
which for me is the basis for having an independent class party,
a working class party. If a Labour Party or Workers' Party can't
stand for social ownership of the means of production then it's a
capitalist labour party or a bourgeois labour party.

LabourNet, UK
c/o chrisbailey@xxxxxxxxxx

Any labour movement organisation or publication is welcome to reproduce our
material. All we want is an acknowledgement. We can supply GIF format photos
of Jack Heyman with the Liverpool dockers and other photos of the dockers
fig


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