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“The Ships Must Sail on Time”: Histories of Longshore Workers and Why Their Unions Still Matter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2013
Extract
Before dawn on Sunday morning, June 20, 2010, upwards of one thousand people gathered near the Port of Oakland, an industrial, sometimes barren section of west Oakland. They then converged on four gates operated by the Stevedore Services of America, one of the main shipping companies on the US Pacific coast and in the world. The protesters were awaiting the arrival of an Israeli cargo vessel in order to protest Israel's ongoing blockade of the Palestinian residents of Gaza as well as the recent Israeli assault on Turkish vessels in the Mediterranean that had resulted in the deaths of nine civilians, part of an international group sympathetic to the Gaza Palestinians. For hours activists protested, including a chant that referenced both the Wobblies and antiapartheid struggle: “An injury to one is an injury to all, bring down the apartheid wall.” Crucially—and not coincidentally—members of Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) refused to cross this picket line, citing safety reasons. After several hours of negotiations, an arbitrator agreed with the ILWU members that the situation could cause harm to the workers, who therefore could not be punished for not unloading the vessel. Subsequently, the Zim (Israeli shipping line) vessel departed from San Francisco Bay, looking to be unloaded in nearby Monterey Bay. Simultaneously, dock unions in Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey—all members of The International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF)—also announced that they would join the “Boycott against Israel campaign.” These dramatic, militant, and overtly political actions by longshore workers across the globe are not unprecedented—at least for union dockers—though they are almost unheard of in the twenty-first century for other sorts of workers on any continent.
- Type
- Review Essay
- Information
- International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 83: Strikes and Social Conflicts , Spring 2013 , pp. 210 - 225
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013
References
NOTES
Thanks to Kate Brown, Jack Heyman, Jennifer Klein, Herb Mills, and the anonymous reviewers for their assistance in writing this essay and helping crystallize my thoughts.
1. “Historic Victory at Oakland Port–Israeli Ship Blocked from Unloading,” “Swedish dockworkers block Israeli goods in boycott action,” “Turkish Dock Workers Union Joins Boycott against Israel,” all found at http://www.transportworkers.org/ (accessed June 25, 2010). In a much earlier example of political activism of longshore workers, Irish American NYC longshoremen boyotted British ships in 1920 to support Irish independence; see Nelson, Bruce, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, 2001), 26–38Google Scholar.
2. Johnson does not concern herself with the sexist and white supremacist aspects of Revolutionary-era radicals; it is not the focus of her work.
3. During the height of the Occupy Movement, in Fall 2011, much of the City of Oakland was shut down—most notably the Port of Oakland—in what was called a General Strike. See Peter Cole, “Bay Area's History of General Strikes,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 2, 2011 and “Oakland's Second General Strike: OWS and Unions Join Hands,” Counterpunch, November 2, 2011 at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/02/oaklands-second-general-strike/.
4. Another historical sociologist has spent much of his career asking similar questions: See Kimeldorf, Howard, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5. Ibid., x.
6. For a recent book that explores anarchism, including anarcho-syndicalism, as a global phenomenon, see Lucien van der Walt and Schmidt, Michael, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter Power, Vol. 1 (Oakland, CA, 2009)Google Scholar. Editors' Note: For a mostly European history that makes similar points about syndicalists and their influence during this era, see above Ralph Darlington's article in this issue of ILWCH, “Syndicalism and Strikes: Leadership and Influence: Great Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States,” 37–53.
7. Johnson, 25–26.
8. Witwer, David, Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (Urbana, 2003)Google Scholar and Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor (Urbana, 2009)Google Scholar.
9. Adams, Maud' book, Men Along the Shore: The ILA and its History (New York, 1966)Google Scholar remains a quasi-sanctioned history of the ILA that is far too celebratory for any academic historian to accept but must be consulted, if only for background. The ILA's own online history is a study in omission; http://www.ilaunion.org/history.html (Accessed [December 15, 2010]).
10. Davis, Colin, Waterfront Revolts: New York and London Dockworkers, 1946–61 (Urbana, IL, 2003)Google Scholar; Risa L. Faussette, “Race, Migration, and Port City Radicalism: New York's Black Longshoremen and the Politics of Maritime Protest, 1900–1920 (Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University-State University of New York, 2002); Kimeldorf, Howard, Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (Berkeley, 1988)Google Scholar; Nelson, Divided We Stand; Winslow, Calvin, ed., Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class (Urbana, IL, 1998)Google Scholar; Mello, William J., New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks (Gainesville, FL, 2010)Google Scholar.
11. Herb Mills has compiled many of his writings on the disastrous impacts of containerization on longshore workers at his website: http://www.ilwu10hmills.com (Accessed December 15, 2010.) Though its primary focus is not on workers, the best book on containerization does treat the matter with some depth; Levinson, Marc, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 6.
12. While containerization resulted in dramatic job losses in US ports, for an excellent article on how this same technological innovation resulted in similar job losses in South Africa, see Dubbeld, Bernard, “Breaking the Buffalo: The Transformation of Stevedoring Work in Durban between 1970 and 1990,” International Review of Social History 48 (2003): 97–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13. Levinson, The Box. The entire book is invaluable, but see especially chapters 5, 6, and 10 for these issues.
14. Levinson, The Box, chapter 6; Self, Robert O., American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003), 153–54, 205–10Google Scholar. One of the many fascinating aspects of Levinson's book describes how containerization destroyed long-standing working-class portside communities. These issues (technological change, weakening of unions, declining working class urban neighborhoods) all are brilliantly explored by David Simon in his HBO television show, The Wire, in season 2; see Cole, Peter, “No jobs on the waterfront: the end of the industrial city,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 10:1 (2013): 11–20Google Scholar. On how technological changes and a lack of unions have impacted the most important locus of warehouse work in the nation, see Allen, Nicholas, “Exploring the Inland Empire: Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California's Retail Fortress,” New Labor Forum 19 (2010): 36–43Google Scholar, esp. 40–41 on these “communities.”
15. Levinson notes that global shipping firms, with their large vessels and precise schedules that seek to maximize the number of trips, favor Charleston to ports on the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in it becoming the nation's fourth busiest port by 2000; The Box, 200, 236, 271.
16. In March 2009, Labor Notes, investigating salaries of labor union officials, reported that four of the fifteen highest paid officials are in the ILA; cited in Pier Pressure: Voice of the ILA Rank & File 5 (2010): 7. lwcjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/pier-pressure-5-web.pdf (Accessed February 25, 2011.)
17. On the Del Monte conflict in Philadelphia and the wildcat in the New York area, see Mischa Gaus, “Wildcat Strikes Halt East Coast Shipping,” www.labornotes.org/2010/09/wildcat-strikes-halt-east-coast-shipping (Accessed October 1, 2010). For a different look at this issue, from the world of social networking, see the Facebook page, “Support Union Longshormen in their Fight for Survival.”
18. Ashby, Steven K. and Hawking, C. J., Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement (Urbana, 2009)Google Scholar.
19. Colin Davis' book comparing the experiences of dockers in NYC and London is the best example of such a project on twentieth-century longshore workers. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh's well-known intellectual and social history of the early modern Atlantic world is another; The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (New York, 2001)Google Scholar.
20. Levinson, The Box; Andrew Herod, Labor Geographies; Bonacich, Edna and Wilson, Jake B., Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2008)Google Scholar; Appelbaum, Richard and Lichtenstein, Nelson, “A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers Chains,” International Labor and Working-Class History 70 (2006): 106–25Google Scholar; Allen, “Exploring the Inland Empire.” Also see Schwartz, Harvey, The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934–1938 (Los Angeles, 1978)Google Scholar.