Workers Vanguard No. 987
30 September 2011
Police Assaults, Arrests, Injunctions
Defend Longview ILWU Against Bosses’ Cops and Courts!
SEPTEMBER 27—Six days ago, the small town of Longview on the Columbia River in Washington State was occupied by an army of police from throughout the surrounding area. Armored SWAT vehicles and rifle-wielding cops in riot gear flooded the streets and closed down roads leading to the town’s port. Around the port rail tracks outside EGT Development’s newly built grain terminal, which is being run with scab labor, were some 50 protesting members and supporters of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21. As a train carrying grain appeared, cops swarmed the tracks, handcuffing and arresting ten protesters, including Local 21 president Dan Coffman and wives and mothers of longshoremen. One 57-year-old woman had her rotator cuff torn. When two Local 21 officers rushed to her aid, they were hurled to the ground and cuffed, their faces shoved into the gravel and their eyes directly and repeatedly sprayed with mace. Now they’re charged with assaulting the police!
This massive display of force by the cops is the latest chapter in the ILWU’s struggle against the multinational EGT conglomerate, which is dead set on breaking the union’s 80-year hold on work at Pacific Northwest grain terminals. Like every conflict between labor and capital, the confrontation in Longview is a hard-nosed struggle between class forces whose interests are irreconcilable. Which side prevails is determined by the relative strength of the opposing forces. Repeatedly, Local 21 has mobilized militant labor action to stop trains from bringing grain shipments into the terminal. On September 8, the union came out on top when it brought its power to bear as several ports across Washington were idled and picket lines in Longview reinforced. Before the day was over, police and private security had reportedly turned tail and EGT was howling about all the grain strewn on the tracks.
The ILWU and its allies are up against EGT and its allies—the cops, the courts and capitalist government agencies like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The giant grain exporter wants to establish the $200 million, state-of-the-art Longview terminal as a prime location for shipments to growing markets in Asia. If EGT gets away with refusing to hire Local 21 members as its lease with the Port of Longview obliges it to do, it would embolden other employers up and down the coast to gun for the ILWU. In the face of this deadly threat to the ILWU’s future, the rest of the labor movement must rally to the defense of Local 21.
The cop rampages, including a September 7 assault on ILWU International president Robert McEllrath, amply demonstrate the role of the police: to protect the property and profits of the capitalist class through brute force. Following the union victory on September 8, Longview police and Cowlitz County sheriff’s deputies unleashed a campaign of terror and intimidation. Trade unionists, among them Local 21 leaders, were accosted in their homes and cars, arrested and jailed by gangs of cops for non-violent misdemeanor citations that ordinarily would not merit arrest, let alone jail. To date, at least 135 ILWU members and supporters have been arrested in connection with union protests.
McEllrath, who had a warrant for his arrest stemming from the union’s actions on September 7-8, turned himself in to Cowlitz County authorities yesterday and was released after being given a citation. Officials from both the ILWU and the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which is based on the East and Gulf coasts, accompanied McEllrath in solidarity and, according to the ILWU, longshoremen all along the West Coast stopped work for 15 minutes.
A federal civil rights lawsuit filed on September 22 by the ILWU against Sheriff Mark Nelson and Police Chief Jim Duscha details one brutal arrest after another. Describing an attack on a Local 21 member and former union official outside her home, the suit states that the cops “grabbed her, threw her down onto her stomach, shoved her onto the hood of her car and handcuffed her with her hands behind her back. Then, before putting her into the police car, two officers proceeded to slam her body onto the side of her car and then onto a wooden fence even though she was already handcuffed.” A member of another ILWU local, who is also a minister, was dragged from his home by cops, one of whom brandished a semiautomatic weapon, and taken to a crowded school parking lot where he was handcuffed and arrested in front of his wife and children. Even people just driving vehicles or wearing clothes identifying them as ILWU supporters have been followed and roughed up. This criminalization of longshoremen smacks of the arrests, beatings and worse that the cops mete out to black people every day in America’s urban ghettos.
On September 16, some 200 union members and supporters, led by Coffman and ILWU Coast Committeeman Leal Sundet, marched to the Cowlitz County Hall of Justice to offer themselves up for mass arrest. This was a sharp statement against the cops’ “made for TV” assaults, in which individual unionists are picked up and hauled off. Some 30 police officers in full riot gear were assembled inside, but the unionists, who waited around for a half hour, were just told to go home. Then, a couple of hours later, the vicious roundups resumed with the arrest of Local 21 vice president Jake Whiteside in front of his children in a church parking lot.
The day before the march, Sundet had sent Sheriff Nelson a letter voicing unionists’ anger at the arrests and police brutality, pointing out that those being rounded up were the same ones who had dispersed on his orders from the port railroad tracks on September 7 and were not arrested at the time. The letter nailed the sheriff as “EGT’s propagandist” for carrying out a “sensationalized media campaign to mischaracterize union members as lawless criminal aggressor thugs.” Among the lies planted in news outlets was the accusation that union members pepper-sprayed policemen when, as the letter states, “it was the other way around.”
Sundet’s letter made an appeal to the sheriff to “remain neutral” in this conflict, and now the union has launched a petition campaign to recall Nelson. The notion of police “neutrality” is a suicidal illusion. The cops are the hired guns of the capitalists. As one old labor saw goes, there is more education at the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in four years of college. During the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, seven union men were killed, including two gunned down by San Francisco cops on “Bloody Thursday,” July 5, which sparked a citywide strike that led to the founding of the ILWU. Unions in the U.S. were built in the course of just such bitter battles against the capitalist state—the cops, courts and military like the National Guard—and its strikebreaking auxiliaries, from the Pinkertons to the Ku Klux Klan. The struggle to organize unions and win real gains is a history of laws broken and injunctions defied.
The Constitution of Bay Area ILWU Local 10 codifies an important corollary lesson coming out of such hard-fought strikes: “No member of the State Militia, or officer or agent of a corporation or association of employers, or a deputized city, county or state police officer, shall be permitted to hold membership in this Union.” But the enlistment of port security—the “ILWU Watchmen”—in Bay Area Local 75 is a direct violation of this prohibition. Security guards at the Los Angeles/Long Beach port and elsewhere are also in the ILWU. EGT’s own private security force has served as the prosecution’s main witnesses against the ILWU. Neither the cops and prison guards nor private security guards have any place in the labor movement!
While the ILWU and every other union might have to fight some battles in the courts, there should be no illusion that the “justice” system is anything but a tool of the capitalist ruling class. In fact, the federal district court where the ILWU lawsuit against the police was filed is the same one coming down like gangbusters on the union. At the request of the NLRB, most of whose members are Democratic Party appointees, this court had earlier issued an injunction prohibiting the ILWU from aggressive picketing. The union was then found in contempt of court for the September 7-8 protests, with the judge giving the company and police carte blanche to come up with figures to set fines against Local 21, which according to the NLRB may reach nearly $300,000. The NLRB, whose purpose is to demobilize labor struggle and maintain class “peace” on behalf of the bosses, is building a case for slapping the union with additional penalties for the September 21 protests.
As we wrote in “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat” (WV No. 986, 16 September), “it’s been clear from the beginning that EGT wants a non-union facility” in Longview. The company has tried to disguise its union-busting as a “jurisdictional dispute” between the ILWU and scabs in Operating Engineers Local 701, who are working the Longview terminal. Criminally, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka has sided with the company by promoting this lie. The Trumka bureaucracy wants to squelch the ILWU’s battle for fear of undermining the Democratic Party and its leader, Barack Obama, whose 2012 presidential campaign is in trouble.
There have been a number of statements and resolutions from the ILA and other unions in the U.S. in support of Local 21, as well as from dock workers unions overseas and Japan’s Doro-Chiba rail workers union. The 24,000-member, Portland-based Joint Council of Teamsters No. 37 has voiced its support for the Longview longshoremen. At the same time, it is Teamsters-affiliated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen members who are crossing picket lines by driving trains into EGT’s Longview terminal. There’s a word for this: scabbing!
Some ILWU officials have presented the Longview struggle as a fight between the “local community” and a “foreign corporation.” But the Longview “community” includes the cops who are busting unionists’ heads, and the U.S. components of the EGT conglomerate are no less committed than their foreign partners to keeping the port union-free. The ILWU has the potential to win this struggle precisely because it is not local but coastwide. As the shipping industry’s Journal of Commerce (19 September) acknowledged: “It is this unchallenged jurisdiction at West Coast ports that makes the ILWU one of the most powerful unions in the United States. In the container sector, shipping executives know a dispute at one port can lead to the ILWU shutting down their operations on the entire coast.” If the union is going to stand down EGT, it has to be prepared to continue playing to its strengths: its collective organization and its ability to stop the flow of goods.
International working-class solidarity could be decisive, especially if scab grain starts being shipped out. The Journal of Commerce observed: “The bigger concern for EGT, however, could be the close connections the ILWU maintains with dockworker unions in Asia, where most of its grain will be exported. The ILWU and its Asian counterparts in the past have coordinated job actions on both sides of the Pacific against vessels involved in labor disputes at U.S. and Asian ports.” The ILWU augmented its power, as did the 250-member Panama Canal pilots union, when the pilots affiliated with the ILWU on September 17. But when ILWU leaders rail against EGT as a “foreign” threat to U.S. shippers, they line up behind the profitability of ILWU members’ red-white-and-blue exploiters and undermine international labor solidarity.
The ILWU Ladies Auxiliary has played a prominent role in protesting EGT’s union-busting. Alliances with working-class women and the unemployed played an important role historically in union organizing and strike battles. The ILWU’s multiracial membership—majority black in the Bay Area and Latino in L.A.—gives the union the potential to forge strong bonds with the ghetto and barrio masses. But to galvanize such support behind the unions requires a labor movement that links its struggles to the fight for black freedom and immigrant rights and defends all those thrown onto capitalism’s scrap heap.
The backstabbing role of the Trumka AFL-CIO leadership epitomizes the policies of the U.S. labor bureaucracy, which is wedded to the continued rule of capital and preaches reliance on the bosses’ state and political parties, especially the Democrats. Labor needs a leadership based on a class-struggle program and committed to the independence of the working class from the class enemy. Such a leadership would support the building of a workers party to lead all the exploited and oppressed in the fight for a workers government, destroying the capitalists’ repressive state machinery root and branch.
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