Anyone know if the ILWU is going ahead with the port action tomorrow (May Day)? The ILWU plans to shut down all 29 west coast ports to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pacific Maritime Association (the employers' association) has said it would appeal to Taft Hartley, blocking the action.

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

Gets me thinking about a recent discussion on a US Labor listserv:

On Tuesday (April 8 ) John Sweeney gave a speech in Baltimore and was
asked: when did labor's decline start in the US?

Sweeney hem-hawed around and said it's been about 30 years but I
thought: what a great debate for this list!

I put the date as 1946: after more than 5 million workers struck, the
1946 elections brought in a strong anti-union Congress, including
Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy, followed by the collapse of Operation
Dixie, the red scare and the expulsion of 11 unions, the social mobility
and suburban dispersal of union workers and finally the absorption of
the CIO into the AFL in 1955. It's been downhill from there. Obviously
the growth of the global economy had an enormous impact.

What do you all think?

It depends on what you mean.
Here are some contexts, reasons, and dates: post-World War II
anti-communism's critical triumph in the Taft-Hartley Act, 1947; Cold
War anti-laborism, entrenched in the "Labor Reform Act of 1959";
termination of Bretton Woods Agreement, beginning deregulation and
deindustrialization, 1971-73; never mind labor's own anti-communism,
business unionism, and just-us/ism.

Yes, 1946 exactly. It's when the US State Dept, Assn of Catholic
Trade Unionists, former socialists, assorted redbaiters, combined to
knock off the reddish unions and leaders. Taft Hartley and effective
cleansing of the union movement were perfect preconditions for what
we have today. It seemed to happen very fast, historically
speaking. I was there.

I wanted to buy a Teamsters jacket. I look up how much one would cost me.
150 bucks for a gay ass 1987 looking silver windbreaker, what are they insane?
350 bucks for a halfway decent looking leather jacket? Come on now.
A THOUSAND dollars for a leather trenchcoat?!
Where do my union dues go?
Not to the fashion and marketing departments, apparently.

Rick Reuben wrote:

John Sweeney wrote:Obviously
the growth of the global economy had an enormous impact.

What do you all think?

That's not a Sweeney quote. It's the Director of Labor Studies at a Baltimore college, who only paraphrases Sweeney on the decline having begun "about 30 years" ago. The second quote is from a Harvard historian. The third quote is from a really interesting guy. Born in Chicago in 1926, he's the veteran of the recent screenwriters strike and, in his own words, has struck with "auto workers, office workers, student journalists, grownup journalists, film cleaners, teamsters, postal workers and coal miners." He also wrote the celebrated American working class novel/memoir Going Away and the screenplay for Frida.

Funny that "asshole sellout leftists" who smear "pro-labor/pro-American sentiment" don't figure on their radars as they seem to for a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who spends his working hours frothing like a lunatic on a recording studio's online message board. They all agree that a postwar purging and crackdown on radical left elements was pivotal to labor's decline. But what would they know; they've only devoted their lives to the subject.

not crap

Rick Reuben wrote:cowardly asshole fraud.

Reply to my PM.

Not Crap

Colonel Panic wrote:Not Crap

The idea of them is not crap but alas, they are as corrupt as the corrupt system they are there to protect us from.
I have very little faith in my union.

Marsupialized wrote:
I have very little faith in my union.

No kidding. You're a Teamster. Fuck business unionism.

Meanwhile, there's the NYT's buried, token reportage on dock workers blocking all shipping on the west coast of the country today (The NYT's number one "Business" story for today:"For Exxon Mobil, $10.9 Billion Profit Disappoints"). The action was pointedly in protest of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, calling for all US troops out of the middle east. I guess longshoremen need better press officers.

connor wrote:Yup. But this time: no Cold War.No Cold War but also no belief in social emancipation, which is to say the communist project as interpreted by N American commie radicals. That belief in an attainable grand narrative -- however naive re: the reality of the USSR -- was key to the incredible dedication of early 20th-century labor radicals. By contrast, today, a default neoliberal consciousness seems pervasive. As Sam Gindin is right to constantly stress, fatalism rules the day. It's up to us to dream bigger, to insist on alternatives, and to organize in ways that inspire by building strength and capacity on the ground. Doesn't sound easy. And it won't be.

We must strive for an attainable serious alternative, but the question of how to do that is epic, not least when even present-day organized labor essentially needs to be overthrown from below. As Sam Gindin said to me: Sam Gindin wrote:The ineffectiveness of unions through recent decades makes future rebellions of some kind almost inevitable. But the question is whether such surges of opposition will be sporadic and contained or lead to union revival. I m wary of making predictions “ when change comes, it often surprises us “ but I m skeptical about the rank-and-file rebellions being sustained on their own. Rank-and-file workers are too fragmented, too overwhelmed with immediate concerns, and too distant from their own history to exhibit the degree of strategic self-confidence essential to seriously contemplating “ never mind carrying out “ a persistent challenge to their leadership.It s much the same for the new forms of labour struggles. It s not just that such struggles have generally depended on unions or NGOs for temporary resources. It s also that their dependence on unions who are themselves limited in their vision and strategy is itself limiting. Moreover, while the tactics involved have been innovative, we need to note the modest goal of these movements: they generally want only what unions have already achieved. As important as this might be, it is a far cry from addressing the larger context of capitalist globalization. And without that, it s difficult to see what renewal might mean.It s possible these new movements and their inventive tactics will create a momentum and new questioning that goes beyond their initial goals. But even then, the question remains how to keep such a dynamic going, expand its range, and give it independent organizational forms that don t get reintegrated into the logic of capitalism.In both cases “ unions and new worker-based movements “ the issue is not whether to give up on workers taking their organizations in new directions but to emphasize that this is inseparable from the existence of a broader left culture and organizational presence that must have its feet planted both inside and outside these unions and movements. The dilemma of overcoming the working-class failures of the past decades takes us back to the broader failures of the socialist left.http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/ ... ground-up1