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Saturday, June 02, 2018
Massachusetts Poor Peoples Campaign via ActionNetwork.org
Questions for my government-Grace Bell Hardison Unitarian Universalist Minister and member of About Face: Veterans Against the War
Questions for my government
A View From The Left- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
More Americans Died From Hurricane Maria Than 9/11. Does Anyone Care?
A new study shows that, even by conservative estimates, more people were killed by Maria than those who died during the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The 3.5 million Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, a fact not understood by more than half the U.S. stateside population, according to a poll from September 2017. Still, the Trump administration and majority-GOP Congress treated post-Maria Puerto Rico with malignant neglect, delivering help expeditiously to the parts of Louisiana and Texas hit hard by Hurricane Irma earlier that month while failing to prepare for or launch an effective response to the two-hurricane punch delivered to Puerto Rico. As the 2018 hurricane season fast approaches, Puerto Rico remains in dire straits. Ultimately, however, the blame for the death and destruction in Puerto Rico really lies with all of us, their fellow Americans. More
TAKING ON THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Last week, with little fanfare, Connecticut governor Dannel Malloysigned a bill that officially adds his state to the National Popular Vote Compact. The compact, which only goes into effect when states totaling 270 electoral votes legally enter into it, allocates all participating states’ electoral votes to the presidential candidate that wins the national popular vote… The compact had widespread public support in the state: with 92 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of unaffiliated voters in support. “The vote of every American citizen should count equally, yet under the current system, voters from sparsely populated states are awarded significantly more power than those from states like Connecticut…This is fundamentally unfair,” explained Governor Malloy when the bill passed the CT state senate. The electoral vote total of the compact’s members now reaches 172. More
FEDERAL WORKERS UNION SUES DONALD TRUMP
The nation's largest union of federal workers filed suit against the Trump administration on Wednesday over an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that seeks to deny workers the right to job site representation—an established guarantee in existing labor law… "This president seems to think he is above the law, and we are not going to stand by while he tries to shred workers' rights," said AFGE national president J. David Cox Sr., in a statement announcing the lawsuit. "This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. No president should be able to undo a law he doesn't like through administrative fiat." …"This is more than union busting – it's democracy busting," Cox said on Friday after the president's signing of the orders was announced. More
THE TRUMP EFFECT:
New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism
…many political observers are concerned that increasing political polarization on left and right makes compromise impossible, and leads to the destruction of democratic norms and institutions. A new study, however, suggests that the main threat to our democracy may not be the hardening of political ideology, but rather the hardening of one particular political ideology. Political scientists Steven V. Miller of Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M have released a working paper titled "White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy." Their study finds a correlation between white American's intolerance, and support for authoritarian rule. In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy… In practice, the GOP has increasingly been embracing a politics of white resentment tied to disenfranchisement. "Since Richard Nixon's ‘Southern Strategy,’ the GOP has pigeon-holed itself as, in large part, an aggrieved white people's party," More
PENTAGON PAID FOR NFL 'PATRIOTISM'
A key component is missing from the current controversial discussion surrounding football players and the national anthem. In the recent days of argument over whether NFL players havethe right to protest racial inequality and systemic injustice in the United States, few have brought up the fact that less than a decade ago, professional football players didn’t even appear on the field during the national anthem. That changed in 2009, as the Department of Defense poured millions of dollars into the NFL in exchange for displays of patriotism during games. “Until 2009, no NFL player stood for the national anthem because players actually stayed in the locker room as the anthem played,” ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith explained in 2016. “The players were moved to the field during the national anthem because it was seen as a marketing strategy to make the athletes look more patriotic. The United States Department of Defense paid the National Football League $5.4 million between 2011 and 2014, and the National Guard $6.7 million between 2013 and 2015 to stage onfield patriotic ceremonies as part of military-recruitment budget line items.” More
U.S. House Makes Clear That There is No Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iran
On Tuesday night, the House unanimously passed an amendment making clear Congress’s position that no law exists which gives the President power to launch a military strike against Iran. Today, that amendment passed the U.S. House as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019. “The unanimous passage of this bipartisan amendment is a strong and timely counter to the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran deal and its increasingly hostile rhetoric,” Rep. Ellison said. “This amendment sends a powerful message that the American people and Members of Congress do not want a war with Iran. Today, Congress acted to reclaim its authority over the use of military force.” More
MOTIVATIONS FOR THE DEAD-END POLICY ON IRAN
The attraction of forever keeping Iran as a bête noire for the United States is even more obvious for Iran’s regional rivals. This especially means Saudi Arabia, along with its sometime ally the United Arab Emirates and its satellite Bahrain, and Israel. Those regimes are content to see a dead-end U.S. policy toward Iran that offers no prospect of any thawing of relations between Washington and Tehran. Such a policy assures that Washington always will take their side in their local disputes. It means continued U.S. cover for their own excesses and contributions to regional instability, with blame always focused on Iran. Thus Saudi leaders were delighted to hear Pompeo demand an end to Iranian aid to Houthi rebels in Yemen, while he said nothing in his speech about the far larger role of Saudi bombardment in turning Yemen into a humanitarian disaster. Israeli leaders were delighted to hear demands about ending Iranian aid to Hamas, in a speech that made no mention of the role of the Israeli military in the killing of scores and the wounding of thousands of what were overwhelmingly unarmed protestors in the Gaza Strip. More
TRUMP’S KOREAN SHELL GAME
Donald Trump wants a summit with Kim Jong Un. He wants the spectacle. He wants to demonstrate that he’s better than all the presidents who came before and failed to solve the nuclear crisis. He wants to prove that he, alone, can do diplomacy the right way (and so why not cut the State Department budget by a third?). But ham actors are acutely aware of the prospect of being upstaged. Trump wants a Korean drama, but only one that he controls… Pay attention to the key person in this account. It’s not Trump, who remains as always blithely unaware of what lies beneath the froth of current events. It’s John Bolton. Ostensibly he’s just the bearer of bad news in this story. But the national security advisor knew exactly how to play the president. He provided just the intelligence necessary to further Bolton’s own agenda: undermining the summit. More
THE HYPOCRISY OF THE WEST'S SYRIA POLICY
American diplomats do not try to justify, or even explain, their inconsistent attitudes towards the authority of the UN veto, despite the starkness of the contradiction. Perhaps it is a textbook example of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. More accessibly, it is a prime instance of American exceptionalism. The US, as the anointed guarantor of virtue and perpetual innocence in world politics, is not bound by the rules and standards by which we judge the conduct of others, especially adversaries… The end result is the reigniting of the Syrian war just when it seemed to be nearing its end, with the widespread recognition that Damascus prevailed, for better or worse. Now Israel has been given the opportunity to pour oil on the dying embers in Syria to sustain its policy of making sure that chaos and conflict persist, with neither side being allowed to win and end the violence. In the process, the West, led by the US, has again shown its contempt for international law and UN authority. More
The Ghost Of Lawrence Landon-With Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” In Mind
The Ghost Of Lawrence Landon-With Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” In Mind
By Zack James
[The Pete Markin mentioned in the sketch below and in a previous one about Delores Landon, Lawrence Landon’s wife and Si’s mother, is the late Peter Paul Markin who despite a lot of serious work as a journalist back in the early 1970s fell off the edge of the world down south of the border and fell down shot dead with a couple of slugs in some desolate back alley in Sonora after a busted drug deal as far as anybody in America was able to find out (after being seriously warned off the case by the Federales and some guys who looked like they ate gorillas for breakfast). The Peter Markin who moderates this site is a pseudonym for a guy, Frank Jackman, who along with Si Landon, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, Josh Breslin and a bunch of other guys knew Markin in the old growing up days and has taken the pseudonym in honor of his fallen comrade who before his untimely end had taught him a lot about the world and its ways, quite a lot. “Peter Paul Markin”]
Memory floods. Memory flows unstaunched down to the endless sea of time. Some people shut off that memory flow to preserve their sanity others, others like Si Landon from the old corner boy Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville make it their business, go a long way out of their way to make it their business to remember, to be known among their circle as great rememberers. Si Landon had recently had occasion to test that theory out in a sort of roundabout way. He had been driven to remember one set of memories and that exploded another set in his face almost by happenstance.
The whole episode had started when due to irreconcilable differences with his third wife, Maria, he had been given “the boot,” had been given his walking papers by her after almost a decade together. We will not get bogged down with the particulars of the causes for the separation except to say that Maria’s complaints were centered on Si’s increased moodiness and distance (that was Maria’s polite way, as was her way, of putting the matter) as well as her own need to “find herself”. The long and short of the situation was that both had agreed that “rolling stone” Si would leave the house they had shared for the previous decade. He wound up for several months staying at various friends’ places and in a sublet from a friend’s daughter before he realized that he needed some rootedness, some familiar surroundings now that he was alone again with only his thoughts and memories.
One tough “exiled” day, that was the way Si described his various experiences since the breakup with Maria he had an epiphany which led to his decision to head back to the old neighborhood after an almost fifty year absence. After a certain amount of searching he was able to find a condo for rent (he was not ready to seek a permanent condo-type situation or quite sure that he was up for that experience since he had spent the previous forty or so years in single family housing so a rental was testing the waters). The condo was located a couple of blocks from his growing up family tumbled down shack of a house in a school which had been closed when the demographics in the area changed and converted to the condo complex. Although he had not gone to school there since his family had moved from “the projects” back into his mother’s old neighborhood when he was in junior high school three of his four younger brothers (no sisters to his mother’s dismay) had gone there and that memory had helped determine his move to location.
He had strong recollections of his brothers’ time there and that was a source of some solace once he got settled in. Then a couple of days after that moving in he noticed in the front foyer that the developers of the place had kept some of the historic aspects of the place by keeping a series of graduating class photographs on one wall. On another was the 1907 announcement in the North Adamsville Gazette of the opening of the school. That hard fact triggered a sudden re-emergent long suppressed fear in Si once he realized that that 1925 date meant that his mother had also gone to school there something that he probably know way back when but had forgotten about. Sure enough looking at those old graduating class photos there was Delores Landon (nee Riley) sitting in the front row. All the battles from early childhood until just a few years before her death came rushing back into his head.
[Their relationship as described in a previous sketch had consisted of longer and longer periods of withdrawal after recrimination until there was a point of no turning back reflected in the fact that Si had not even attended his mother’s funeral for a lot of reasons but that one primarily.-Markin]
One late night when he could not get to sleep a couple of weeks after he had moved in Si thought he heard his mother’s voice calling out to him from the foyer that he would never amount to anything her favorite taunting mantra for him whenever he got in trouble. Si freaked out over the idea that he would have to re-fight all the old memory battles. Damn. (Si by the way turned out to have been a better than average lawyer so he put paid to that eternal standard Delores notion.)
No question the dominant force in the Landon household, the five surly boys household, was one Delores Landon. That sad fact was no accident, or if it was accident it was so by virtue of the circumstances which befell Delores Riley and Si’s father, Lawrence Landon. Delores and Lawrence had met through the contingencies of World War II when Lawrence Landon had been stationed before being discharged from the Marines at the famous Riverdale Naval Depot, a place which had earned its fame then for producing something like one troop transport vessel per day on those manic twenty-four-even shifts throughout the war. Delores had worked in an office in the complex doing her bit for the war effort. They had met at a USO dance one Friday night and the rest was history for the next forty or so years until he passed away at 65. Part of that history was the production of a crop of five boys, five hungry boys as it turned out led by Si. The other part was that Lawrence had originally come from the south, had been born and raised in coal country, in Harlan County down in Kentucky in the heart of “white trash” poor Appalachia. Before the Marines broke the string he had been the latest in about five generations of Landons to work the coal mines.
Coming and staying in the Boston area with nothing but a tenth grade education and useless coalmining skills meant that Lawrence was always scrabbling for last hired, first fired work. It also meant that scrambling to do his best as a father to provide for his own that he was a very distant figure in the day to day Landon household which in practice meant that Si was from an early age the “surrogate” father a fate which almost destroyed him before he finally left the family house. It also meant that beyond the distant figure of his father he also knew next to nothing about him. Except, and this was a big except, Lawrence Landon never ever sided with Si against his mother whether she was right or wrong in whatever accusations she made against him. Tough work, tough work indeed although he never was as bitter against his father as he had been against Delores. (A lot of what Si would learn about his father would only come after Lawrence had passed on from his youngest brother Kenneth who made serious effort to try and understand what his father had gone through. So Kenneth had known, which will become important in a minute, that his father had been called “the Sheik” by his fellow Marines for his abilities with the women what with his soft Southern accent and black hair and eyes. Kenny had known as well that beyond a young coal-miner’s skills his father had some talent as a musician, as a better than average guitar player and singer who was locally known in the Saturday night “red barn” circuit throughout Appalachian Kentucky for his prowess in song and with the girls along with his band The Hills and Hollows Boys.)
That is perhaps why when Si was old enough and thoughtful enough to know better he recognized that Lawrence had done the best he could with what he had to offer. It had been a hard lesson to learn even with some leeway. So it was no accident that a few weeks after Si’s strange nocturnal “encounter” with his mother (being a man of science he had eventually dismissed, or half dismissed that “voice” as just some gusts of wind coming from outside his windows) he had an “encounter” with the ghost of his father. Si had for many years, going back to his college days been something of a folk music aficionado. Had breathed in the folk minute that passed through the world starting in the very early 1960s.
For some thirty years previously well after the folk minute had burst and the remnants were to be seen playing before small crowds in church basement monthly coffeehouses Si had dilly-dallied with playing the guitar and singing along some folk songs which he had picked up through a famous folk music book which had the imprimatur of the late folksinger extraordinaire Pete Seeger (and lately had picked up songs from another source-the Internet- which moreover provided the chordal arrangements for many of the songs requested). His attention to the guitar and to practice had always been a hit or miss thing through three marriages and an assortment of children and lots of work to keep them in clover (and alimony and child support when those times came). Still Si never completely abandoned either singing or playing. (For lots of reasons but mainly to keep out of the family’s hair during the Maria marriage he had done his sporadic efforts on the third floor of their house far away from other distractions. But also to be able to say when serious folksingers, including Maria, asked about his abilities that he was a “third floor” folksinger, meaning third-rate which seemed about right. That would draw a laugh from those, again including Maria, whom he considered “first floor” folksingers.)
While he was in “exile” Si had had a fair amount of time on his hands not having to attend to family matters or the million and one other things that are required in a relationship. (Si had had to laugh, a bitter laugh, one night when he was thinking about those million and one things that he had been about nine hundred thousand, maybe closer to a million short on keeping the Maria relationship going.) He began one of the most consistent sustained efforts at playing and singing that he had ever done. He continued those efforts when he moved back to his hometown.
What he had begun to notice in exile was that the new material that he was picking up from the Internet or from song books were a lot of old time Hank Williams ballads. Now Si was a city boy, always made it clear when younger that he hated country music, the music of the Grand Ole Opry being his standard for what passed for country music except for one very brief period in the early 1980s when he was attracted to the music of “outlaw” country singers and songwriters like Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt. But he always had had something of a soft spot for the anguished Williams. Had done so ever since not knowing that it was country music at the time he would pester Lawrence to play Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart for him when he was a kid. (Lawrence always had a guitar around the house and always like Si would sporadically play when he had a few minutes from the never-ending toil of providing for the five hungry boys and the one overwhelmed wife.)
One night in his condo in North Adamsville he began to practice on the guitar when he suddenly thought about his father’s playing of that Williams’ song. He went on the Internet to get the lyrics and chords and began to play. As he played a few times he got a very strong feeling that something was pushing him to play that song far better than he played most songs. On a final attempt Si felt that he had played the song almost like he had heard his father cover the classic. That night he began to realize that the ghosts of his youth weren’t always going to haunt his dreams. That present in that old neighborhood former schoolhouse were lots of things that would surface. Mostly though that night he shed a tear as he finished up knowing that he had cursed his father more than he should have and he once again called out to the winds “Pa, you did the best you could, you really did.”
A View From The American Left-For Union Control of Hiring! Waterfront Commission, NJ State Troopers: Hands Off the ILA!
Workers Vanguard No. 1133
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4 May 2018
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For Union Control of Hiring!
Waterfront Commission, NJ State Troopers: Hands Off the ILA!
On his final day in office on January 15, New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie signed a bill to end the state’s support for the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, a government agency that polices union members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the New York and New Jersey docks and controls hiring and job allocation. The law, which is being challenged in court by the Waterfront Commission (and will very likely not be put into effect), directs the governor to turn over responsibilities for policing New Jersey’s docks—as well as the vast bulk of the commission’s $13 million annual funding—to the New Jersey State Police. Outrageously, the ILA tops joined the bosses’ New York Shipping Association in endorsing Christie’s measure. The ILA bureaucrats are promoting the lie that the racist New Jersey troopers will be more favorable to longshore workers than the Commission.
Government policing of the waterfront, whether done by the state police, the Waterfront Commission or directly by the Feds, is counter to the interests of longshore workers. Under federal law, all port workers, including longshoremen and port truckers, have to submit to extensive criminal background and immigration checks in order to receive a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC card), which is mandatory for work. This process has been used by the government to deny tens of thousands of port workers their jobs. In a country where prisons are overflowing with young black and Latino men and women, many of them rounded up for drug offenses, this screening has a viciously racist thrust, while also being directed against immigrants.
While the federal government’s TWIC screening is bad enough, workers in the New York/New Jersey harbor are subject to even more onerous targeting by the Waterfront Commission. All applicants are interrogated and then must be approved by the Commission before getting hired. If the Commission revokes a longshore worker’s ID pass, he or she is banned from working on the docks. The Commission can pull a worker’s ID pass if they fail to report any arrest, including a DUI off the job, and could still decide to take away the job even if the worker does report the arrest! Longshore workers can have their passes revoked if they are not available to work 15 days each month without an “acceptable” reason.
But the Waterfront Commission does not only threaten the livelihoods of longshore workers. A Commission investigation can lead—and has led—to criminal charges being brought against workers. Moreover, the Commission effectively has the power to decide who works, irrespective of the contract. For example, the ILA and shipping bosses negotiated a “second chance” program under which longshore workers who test positive for marijuana can reclaim their jobs after going through a rehabilitation program. However, the Commission can still stop the worker from returning to work.
1953: ILA Against Government Union-Busting
Regardless of the mechanism, the purpose of government policing of the ILA has nothing to do with fighting corruption or discrimination and everything to do with trying to undermine a powerful union with considerable social weight. This is proved by the entire history of the Waterfront Commission.
When announcing their support to the law to effectively eliminate the Waterfront Commission, the ILA tops recycled the myth that the Commission once served a useful purpose but then became “outdated and counterproductive” (ILA statement, January 15). In truth, the Commission was established in 1953 in order to cripple the union in the wake of militant longshore strikes, many of them wildcats. As World War II drew to a close, New York’s longshoremen began to rebel against the dictatorial rule of ILA president “King Joe” Ryan, who worked directly with the bosses for years to suppress strikes, purge Communists and other militants from the union and ensure sweetheart deals for the shipping companies.
In 1945, longshoremen held a port-wide strike against a sellout contract agreed to by Ryan and the shipping bosses. Strikes broke out again in 1947, 1948 and 1951. According to historian Howard Kimeldorf, author of Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (1988), there were 18 recorded work stoppages between 1945 and 1951, accounting for more than a half million workdays lost on the New York/New Jersey docks.
These strikes prompted New York governor Thomas E. Dewey to establish a waterfront Crime Commission, memorialized in the 1954 anti-union film On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando. For decades, the employers and politicians hadn’t raised a peep of protest about the mob corruption, the racial discrimination or the degrading “shape-up” system that required longshoremen to pay bribes to get work. After all, the employers were the main beneficiaries of the miserable working conditions. But when Ryan could no longer control his membership, the government suddenly viewed him as a crook who needed to be driven from office. Ryan was accused of siphoning off money, which the shipping bosses had paid for “fighting communism,” for his personal use. In November 1953, after Ryan’s indictment for “misusing” union funds, a special ILA convention forced him to resign from office.
Longshore workers fought back when the government and the leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) under George Meany tried to replace the ILA, which had been expelled from the AFL, with an AFL affiliate on the docks. They understood that this was an attack on their union and refused to believe the lie that the government just wanted to stop corruption. In 1954, ILA members in New York staged a massive 29-day strike. Despite the imposition of a Taft-Hartley injunction and heavy state intervention, the workers prevailed and won back recognition of the ILA (see “How Longshoremen Stopped the Finks,” WV No. 414, 24 October 1986).
The Crime Commission directed at the ILA became the model for a major campaign by the federal government to use “corruption” and “racketeering” to spearhead attacks on the unions. These attacks were principally directed at the Teamsters and ILA, which have the power to shut down economically vital areas like trade and transportation. A Senate select committee was set up on a resolution by anti-Communist witchhunter Joe McCarthy. Under chairman John McClellan and staff counsel Robert F. Kennedy, this committee set up the conviction of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, whose first-ever master freight contract raised the specter of a nationwide truckers strike.
The Crime Commission hearings also led to establishing the Waterfront Commission. One of its first acts in the 1950s was to purge 5,000 union longshoremen from the docks. William J. Mello’s book New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks (2010) describes the Commission’s long, dirty history of blacklisting communists and other trade-union militants.
Anti-Union Policing Today
Today, the Waterfront Commission spearheads investigations and prosecutions against elected ILA officials as well as members of the union. Insofar as there is corruption in the ILA, this is a matter to be dealt with by the union membership, not the capitalist government. Labor must clean its own house!
In 2005, ILA officials Harold Daggett and Arthur Coffey were hauled into court on fraud and conspiracy charges based on testimony by known mob informants. They were acquitted by a federal jury. As noted by reporter Tom Robbins, “Part of the government’s problem was that the defendants were not accused of violent crimes, while its own witnesses had murder and mayhem on their résumés” (Village Voice, 15 November 2005).
On 29 January 2016, thousands of ILA members walked off the job for several hours in what ILA spokesman Jim McNamara reported was a wildcat strike against the Waterfront Commission’s interference in the hiring process and induction of new union members. Immediately afterward, the Commission subpoenaed ILA members and officials in retaliation for what it called “an illegal walkout.”
Then in September 2016, the Waterfront Commission stripped ILA member Mario Gutierrez of his Waterfront registration (i.e., his job) because he refused to be a rat when called to testify about the January 29 walkout. (See “Special Craft Longshoreman Revoked for Refusing to Cooperate with the Commission’s Investigation of the January 29, 2016 Illegal Walkout,” 13 September 2016, wcnyh.org/newspage232.html.) Reinstate Mario Gutierrez!
For Trade-Union Independence from the Capitalist State!
That the shipping bosses favor government policing of the ILA is hardly surprising given that this benefits their attempts to curb and ultimately break the union. That the ILA misleaders have joined with the shipping association in trying to impose oversight by the NJ state cops speaks volumes about their own commitment to collaboration with the racist capitalist order. In addition to breaking strikes, New Jersey state troopers are notorious for their vicious racism, which gave birth to the term “Driving While Black.” In one infamous example, state cops in 1998 pulled over a van with four black and Latino men, shooting and wounding three of them. The state eventually agreed to pay the men nearly $13 million to settle a lawsuit.
The fundamental division in society is between the capitalist class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, which is forced to sell its labor power to the capitalists in order to survive. The capitalist class uses its state—i.e., the police, courts, military and prisons—to maintain its rule over the working class. It is necessary to fight for the class independence of the trade unions from the capitalist state.
The pro-capitalist misleaders of the ILA and other unions act to subordinate the labor movement to the employers and their government, courts and police. This is politically expressed in their allegiance to the Democratic Party. Accepting the capitalist profit system, they promote the illusion that the government acts—or can be pressured to act—in the interests of the working class. But history proves the opposite. The federal government, under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, has imposed strikebreaking Taft-Hartley injunctions on this powerful and hard-nosed union numerous times. A wide array of laws continues to treat the ILA and other unions as though they were, in effect, “criminal conspiracies.”
As part of defending itself and its members, the union—not the Waterfront Commission—must control hiring. Job allocation should be done through one union hiring hall. On the West Coast, longshore workers won the hiring hall through the 1934 strike, which smashed the old “shape-up” system. West Coast longshore workers, who were then organized in the ILA, repeatedly defied the attempts of Joe Ryan to throttle the strike. Key to this strike’s success was that it was led by reds—i.e., militants who at the time were committed to a program of class struggle. They did not buy into illusions in “labor friendly” government bodies and understood that the only possible road to victory lay in the workers mobilizing their power as a class against all the parties and agencies of the capitalist class enemy. (For more, see our pamphlet Then and Now.)
But over the years, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) hiring hall has been increasingly eroded by concessions made by the West Coast union bureaucrats. These include the division of ILWU members into “A men,” who have first choice of available work, and lower tiers (who are not union members). The introduction of “steady men,” consisting of higher paid skilled longshore workers who are not dispatched by the union but work directly for individual stevedoring companies, further undermined the hiring hall. However, despite its erosion, the ILWU hiring hall remains a thorn in the side of the bosses.
We are for a union hiring hall in the New York/New Jersey ports that would dispatch all jobs equitably on a rotating basis. Access to skills training and job promotion should be based on seniority. We are for the elimination of company lists, under which individual employers generate a roster of workers who get first preference at jobs. The aim of these lists, which tie longshoremen to the bosses, is to create a more docile workforce.
A union hiring hall makes it more difficult for employers to victimize or blackball workers for refusing to work under unsafe conditions. It would also help undercut the ability of the boss to discriminate against workers on the basis of political views or union activity. There is a long history of racist discrimination on the New York/New Jersey docks that the ILA bureaucrats have accommodated over the years, thereby playing into the bosses’ schemes to divide and rule their wage slaves. A hiring hall would help undercut discrimination on the basis of racial and ethnic origin.
Workers need a union leadership that understands that the interests of the workers and the employers are directly counterposed, and will mobilize the power of the unions accordingly, on the basis that the government and police forces exist only to serve the interests of the bosses. There will be no end to attacks on labor so long as the capitalist system exists. It is necessary to build a workers party to fight for workers revolution to end the whole system of wage slavery.
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