Will a Tsunami of Suits Sink Dockworkers?

Jack Heyman, a member of Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in San Francisco, faces the possibility of being fined hundreds of thousands, maybe millions in damages because he honored a picket line. He’s also threatened with being permanently barred from doing his job. Members of the Laney College Labor Studies Club in Oakland face the same financial sanction because the club’s banner was seen at the same picket line. The Peace and Freedom Party faces such fines for similar reasons.

All these people and groups are also being harassed to name all participants in the protest and to reveal all their past political and union associations.

What provoked this assault?

In the fall of 1997, there was a protest in the port of Oakland against a container ship called the Neptune Jade chartered by a Singapore company. The reason for the protest was the ship’s British cargo. Back in 1995, the Mersey Docks and Harbor company in Liverpool fired 500 men when they refused to cross a picket line set up by their work mates, some of whom had been fired earlier for having tried to fight employers’ attempts to sabotage a labor agreement. Liverpool was at the time the last organized port in the Britain with a collective bargaining agreement. The fight sparked a big response by dockworkers all over the world. There were pickets from Vancouver south to Long Beach and across the Pacific to Japan and Australia. Unable to discharge its cargo in Oakland, the Neptune Jade traveled to Vancouver, then Yokohama, then Kobe. At each stop, the dockers said no.

It was a reaction that might surprise some in this era when organized labor has been so much on the defensive. But worldwide, even in these dour times, the dockworkers have had a huge political effect. When Nelson Mandela visited the United States in 1991, he made a particular point of thanking ILWU workers for solidarity actions in the 1970s and 1980s--refusing to handle South African cargo, for example--which he said had been crucial in “reigniting” the spark of anti-apartheid action in the U.S.

While in theory the men in charge of the employers’ Pacific Maritime Assn. might be against apartheid, they were, and are, even more fiercely opposed to anything that inhibits their capacity to move cargo as swiftly and cheaply as possible. Such is the logic of business that prefers casual dockers to union workers, or cowed union workers to organized folk standing up for their rights.

In the wake of the Neptune Jade protest, the PMA has brought lawsuits against the ILWU and the picketers, designed to send a simple message: Acts of worker solidarity will not be tolerated. Again and again, the PMA has gone to court in a program of intimidation in the form of multimillion-dollar damage suits and associated legal maneuvers against individual workers and sympathetic outsiders as well as the unions.

The drive-them-to-the-wall strategy of the PMA is the work of Joseph Miniace, who came two years ago from outside the industry--from the health care sector. Miniace tells the Journal of Commerce that all he wants is the unions to be “accountable.” He talks about “win-win” situations in reorganizing the dispatch halls in the interests of competition and efficiency.

If there’s one thing workers have learned these last 20 years when most workers’ wages have remained static, it is that a win-win plan from management means a sure loss for workers. The Longshore workers, precisely because they’re tough and well-organized, make good money--though not nearly as good as Miniace’s.

The PMA continues to seek damages for a 1995 coast-wide strike in support of two Seattle officials of the ILWU who, the union says, were unfairly disciplined on the job. The PMA has already won a federal injunction forcing the union in the Port of Oakland to cross solidarity picket lines. And the PMA is readying McCarthy-style probes against anyone who might defy them.

Part of the bedrock of freedom is the right to strike, though the right to honor a picket line was eroded as long ago as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Nonetheless, the dockworkers have always found ways to act in support of causes such as fighting apartheid. But if the PMA’s lawsuits stick, the union will be busted, which is Miniace’s obvious aim. Unless all workers see the importance of this struggle, the right to set up and honor picket lines, the very survival of the labor movement is at stake.