United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

On Wednesday, the web site of the San Francisco Chronicle carried a piece by longshoreman Jack Heyman annoucning that "dockworkers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have decided to stop work for eight hours in all U.S. West Coast ports on May 1, International Workers' Day, to call for an end to the war."[1] -- "The San Francisco longshore union has a proud history of opposition to the war in Iraq, being the first union to call for an end to the war and immediate withdrawal of troops," he wrote. -- "There's precedent for this action. In the '50s, French dockworkers refused to load war matériel on ships headed for Indochina, and helped to bring that colonial war to an end." -- Also on Wednesday, the new magazine of the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, Miller-McCune, published a piece noting that should contract negotiations that began in March with the ILWU, "simultaneously the most politically radical, materially comfortable and economically significant group of U.S. workers," fail to reach agreement on a new contract, then "a ports shutdown could threaten the economy," according to Stephen Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy.[2] -- "Full-time portside equipment operators can earn salaries into six figures, and union-hall conversation can drift into splitting hairs over early-20th-century Russian history," Matt Smith said. "Most significantly, their ability to stop goods from entering or leaving the country through the Pacific makes them the blue-collar equivalent of Tom Wolfe's masters of the universe. -- The union's industrial might has its roots in a 1930s San Francisco general strike that created one of the most politically radical, democratically run, and impenetrably unified American labor syndicates." -- Chris Hedges, in his Mar. 23 endorsement of Ralph Nader's presidential candidacy, included a sentence endorsing the ILWU May 1 action: "We should, in solidarity, strike with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on May 1 against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."[3] -- NOTES: According to a piece posted on Indymedia, the decision to stop work, which "[t]he union tops tried to stop . . . to no avail," was reached on Feb. 8, 2008; there is no reference to it on the ILWU web site. -- The ILWU endorsed Barack Obama for president on Feb. 29, 2008.

While millions of people worldwide have marched against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and last week's New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that 81 percent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction -- key concerns being the war and the economy -- the war machine inexorably grinds on.

Amid this political atmosphere, dockworkers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have decided to stop work for eight hours in all U.S. West Coast ports on May 1, International Workers' Day, to call for an end to the war.

This decision came after an impassioned debate where the union's Vietnam veterans turned the tide of opinion in favor of the anti-war resolution. The motion called it an imperial action for oil in which the lives of working-class youth and Iraqi civilians were being wasted and declared May Day a "no peace, no work" holiday. Angered after supporting Democrats who received a mandate to end the war but who now continue to fund it, longshoremen decided to exercise their political power on the docks.

Last month, in response to the union's declaration, the Pacific Maritime Association, the West Coast employer association of shipowners, stevedore companies, and terminal operators, declared its opposition to the union's protest. Thus, the stage is set for a conflict in the run up to the longshore contract negotiations.

The last set of contentious negotiations (in 2002) took place during the period between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the invasion of Iraq. Representatives of the Bush administration threatened that if there were any of the usual job actions during contract bargaining, then troops would occupy the docks because such actions would jeopardize "national security." Yet when the PMA employers locked out the longshoremen and shut down West Coast ports for 11 days, the "security" issue vanished. President Bush then invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, forcing longshoremen back to work under conditions favorable to the employers.

The San Francisco longshore union has a proud history of opposition to the war in Iraq, being the first union to call for an end to the war and immediate withdrawal of troops. Representatives of the union spoke at anti-war rallies in February 2003, including one in London attended by nearly 2 million people, the largest ever held in Britain. Executive Board member Clarence Thomas went to Iraq with a delegation to observe workers' rights during the occupation.

At the start of the war in Iraq, hundreds of protesters demonstrated on the Oakland docks, and longshoremen honored their picket lines. Without warning, police in riot gear opened fire with so-called less-than-lethal weapons, shooting protesters and longshoremen alike with wooden dowels, rubber bullets, pellet bags, concussion grenades, and tear gas. A U.N. Human Rights Commission investigator characterized the Oakland police attack as "the most violent" against anti-war protesters in the United States.

And finally, last year, two black longshoremen going to work in the port of Sacramento were beaten, Maced, and arrested by police under the rubric of Homeland Security regulations ordained by the "war on terror."

There's precedent for this action. In the '50s, French dockworkers refused to load war matériel on ships headed for Indochina, and helped to bring that colonial war to an end. At the ILWU's convention in San Francisco in 2003, A. Q. McElrath, an octogenarian University of Hawaii regent and former ILWU organizer from the pineapple canneries, challenged the delegates to act for social justice, invoking the union's slogan, "An injury to one is an injury to all." She concluded, "The cudgel is on the ground. Will you pick it up?"

It appears that longshore workers may be doing just that on May Day and calling on immigrant workers and others to join them.

WHEN: 10:30 a.m., May 1, followed by a rally at noon
WHERE: Longshore Union Hall, corner of Mason and Beach (near Fisherman's Wharf)
WHAT: March to a rally at Justin Herman Plaza along the Embarcadero
FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.maydayilwu.googlepages.com; http://www.ilwu.org; http://www.transportworkers.org or call (415) 776-8100.

** International trade bottlenecks at ports, and the specter of a strike sends shivers through the nation's body economic. **

In 2001, market manipulation by electricity traders provoked a California fiscal crisis. This March, risk taking by mortgage-backed securities investors threatened the U.S. financial system.

Now, a University of California, Berkeley economist adds to the list of faceless functionaries with their hands on levers that, if pulled in the right combination, can bring down the economy. Would you believe . . . blue-collar dock workers?

Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, began negotiations for a new six-year unified West Coast contract with shippers in March. If talks stutter, a ports shutdown could threaten the economy, said Stephen Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy.

A stoppage "carries the very real risk of triggering a sudden crisis in international financial markets," Cohen wrote in a paper published in 2002. That summer, talks dissolved into a 10-day lockout that Cohen said panicked White House economic advisers.

In 2008, "I don't think the significance is any different," Cohen said. "At some point you start running out of parts, and the factory stops, and the factory that relies on that factory for components stops, and you have a chain reaction that's really rather a nightmare.

"This is not just another industry like aluminum or tires, or even automobiles. It's more like utilities. This affects the whole economy very broadly and very quickly."

The ILWU, which represents 25,000 dockworkers at 29 Pacific coast ports, is simultaneously the most politically radical, materially comfortable and economically significant group of U.S. workers. Full-time portside equipment operators can earn salaries into six figures, and union-hall conversation can drift into splitting hairs over early-20th-century Russian history. Most significantly, their ability to stop goods from entering or leaving the country through the Pacific makes them the blue-collar equivalent of Tom Wolfe's masters of the universe.

The union's industrial might has its roots in a 1930s San Francisco general strike that created one of the most politically radical, democratically run and impenetrably unified American labor syndicates.

Representatives of both the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association, a negotiating entity representing shipping companies, said in interviews that talks to renew the contract that expires July 1 will be more amicable than they were in 2002.

But outward signs point toward the potential for a conflict that could add to the woes of a U.S. economy suffering from a weak dollar and imploded mortgage markets.

The union and shippers are already butting heads over ILWU plans to shut down all West Coast ports May 1 in protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea was to exploit a work rule allowing the union to request a day off for a local shop meeting, by requesting simultaneous days off at every port. The shippers refused. And now the ILWU is poised to conduct the equivalent of a one-day walkout.

"For us, folks aren't going to be working on May 1. Everybody here's clear about that," said ILWU Communications Director Craig Merrilees.

The significance of the May Day antiwar stoppage is small when compared to the threat of a longer shutdown. But this spring's wrangling, which pits union jobs against shippers' profits, might portend the sort of confrontation Cohen fears.

Shippers wish to streamline operations -- possibly threatening jobs. Shippers have also shown interest in bypassing the ILWU by moving port-related facilities inland, where cargo might be unloaded and routed with cheaper non-union labor.

Though the West Coast is the American way station for high-tech goods to and from Asia, the ports themselves are relatively backward from a technical standpoint. The shipping newspaper Lloyds List reports that West Coast dockside productivity is dismal compared to the rest of the world; moves per crane average less than 30 per hour in Los Angeles and Long Beach, compared with more than 40 at more automated facilities.

"We're looking for an agreement that allows us to manage record cargo volumes as efficiently as possible so that we can get the goods where they need to be as quickly as possible at the lowest cost to customers," PMA spokesman Steve Getzug told Miller-McCune.com.

In a possible echo of the 2002 talk's head butting over the use of technology, workers in Vancouver, Canada's independent ILWU affiliate this February stopped work during two shifts as a show of strength during negotiations over a three-year labor agreement. At issue, according to the Journal of Commerce: whether companies could dispatch work assignments over the Internet rather than at union hiring halls.

"The hiring hall is an important institution that provides a center and focus for the union that is part of the culture and tradition members fought and died for, and it's one of the few democratic and fair mechanisms workers have to allocate work on an equal basis," said Merrilees, referring to the Vancouver stoppage.

At least as important as technology is an ongoing turf battle between the union and shippers. Employers have shown an interest in moving work away from the docks, which the ILWU dominates. The union, meanwhile, would benefit by expanding into areas of the supply chain currently controlled by employers.

The modern, just-in-time global economy is often analyzed as a threat to workers because fluid international markets mean that jobs can be outsourced anywhere. Overlooked is the fact that when companies depend upon international logistics, they are at the mercy of workers who run the cargo network.

"It's someplace you have great power," notes Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

So negotiators for both sides will be mindful of how far the union might extend its influence into companies' distribution networks. Extended far enough, this logic includes the idea of inking high-wage-and-benefit contracts for the workers stocking shelves at non-union Wal-Mart.

"I think the real challenge for the ILWU is following the work," Jacobs said. "Unions such as the ILWU and the Teamsters really are looking at the supply chain in terms of organizing."

Shippers, manufacturers and retailers, meanwhile, are motivated to push in the opposite direction, moving work away from jobsites the union already controls.

ILWU organizing director Peter Olney, who previously served as associate director of UC Berkeley's Institute for Labor & Employment, said talks will focus in part on moves by shipping and other companies to move cargo operations away from the docks.

Olney describes proposals on the drawing board for a Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, Calif., which would place air, rail and other unloading facilities 99 miles from the Port of Los Angeles. Such a facility threatens to move work such as freight container dispatching and cross-country train loading away from the docks, and out of ILWU's grasp.

"There's knowledge-based technology work, but there's also good old-fashioned muscling and hustling of cargo," Olney said.

The last time West Coast shippers and workers faced off over issues as weighty as these, the showdown gave economists nightmares.

In 2002, when the PMA attempted to break the union with a lockout, "they kept asking, ‘How much is it costing the economy per day?'" Cohen recalled. "The first day doesn't cost much. Neither does the third or fourth. But the 30th day: My God! It's a grand snowball, and at some point, the snowball becomes an avalanche."

--M. Martin Smith is a Northern California journalist who's held staff positions at newspapers and wire services in New Mexico, Idaho, Virginia, Latin America, and California. He holds a master's degree from Columbia University in New York.

Those of us who oppose the war, who believe that all U.S. troops should be withdrawn and the network of permanent bases in Iraq dismantled, have only two options in the coming presidential elections -- Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. A vote for any of the Republican and Democratic candidates is a vote to perpetuate the occupation of Iraq and a lengthy and futile war of attrition with the Iraqi insurgency. You can sign on for the suicidal hundred-year war with John McCain or for the nebulous open-ended war-lite with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or back those who reject the war. If you vote Democrat or Republican in the coming election be honest with yourself -- you have voted to allow the U.S. government to continue, in some form, the campaign that needlessly kills ever more Americans and Iraqis in a conflict that has become the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history and a crime under international law.

“When will the American people actually vote to give to the world more than bombs and missiles, sweatshops, dubious science, frankenfood, poverty, and misery?” Cynthia McKinney, the presidential candidate in the Green Party primaries, told me. “Not only do we need an immediate, orderly withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, we need an end to the militarism that has placed U.S. troops on the soil of over 100 countries. A true peace agenda means a complete redefinition of security. I remain convinced that if people in Haiti, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua can vote a peace and justice agenda into power, then so too can we.”

Examine the proposals on Iraq offered by Clinton and Obama. They talk about withdrawing some troops, but they also talk about leaving behind forces to protect U.S. bases in Iraq, assigning troops to train the Iraqi army, and continuing the fight against “terrorism.” Clinton and Obama do not throw out numbers, but a rough estimate would be 40,000 or 50,000 troops permanently stationed in Iraq. Obama, his advisers say, will also not rule out continuing to use private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq. The war would not end under a Democratic administration. It would drag on until the mission collapsed and the U.S. retreated in humiliation. And when pressed, the Democratic candidates have admitted as much. Tim Russert in the New Hampshire debate asked the Democratic candidates to guarantee that all U.S. troops in Iraq would be home by 2013. No one, including John Edwards, was prepared to make such a commitment. Dennis Kucinich, the only Democratic candidate who opposed a continuation of the war, had been excluded from the debate. When the question was asked he was standing outside the hall in the snow with supporters to protest his exclusion.

But the lust for militarism by Clinton and Obama does not end with Iraq. The two remaining Democratic candidates back the occupation of Afghanistan. They defend Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon, which killed hundreds of Lebanese, destroyed huge parts of Lebanon’s infrastructure, and left U.S.-manufactured cluster bombs littered over southern Lebanon. Clinton and Obama praise the right-wing government in Jerusalem and callously blame the Palestinian victims for the suffering inflicted on them by Israel. They support, in open defiance of international law, the 40-year Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the draconian siege of Gaza, dismissing the grim humanitarian crisis it has unleashed on the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in the world’s largest open-air prison.

The Democrats, who took control of the Congress in midterm elections largely because of public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, have continued to fund the war, ignoring anti-war voters. The party, as a result, has sunk even lower in public opinion polls than the president, to a 19 percent approval rating, according to a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. Clinton and Obama dutifully lined up with most other Democratic legislators to cast ballots in favor of squandering more than $300 billion in taxpayer money on a war that should never have been fought. And, if either is elected, he or she will spend billions more on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I will skip the rest of the mediocre voting records of Obama and Clinton, which include pandering to corporate interests, failing to back a universal single-payer health care system, refusing to call for the slashing of the bloated military budget, not urging repeal of NAFTA and the Taft-Hartley Act, which cripples the ability of unions to organize, and not seeking an end to nuclear power as an energy resource. Let’s stick with the war. It is depressing enough.

The anti-war movement bears much of the blame. It sold us out to the Democratic Party. The decision by anti-war activists to accept a moratorium on demonstrations in 2004 in order to support John Kerry ended our chance to build a widespread, grass-roots movement against the war. Kerry, in return for this support, ridiculed and humiliated those of us who opposed the war. He called for more troops in Iraq. He mouthed thought-terminating patriotic slogans to out-Bush Bush. He promised victory in Iraq. He assured voters that he, unlike George W. Bush, would never have pulled out of Fallujah. Anti-war voters stood passively behind him as they were humiliated and abused. And the anti-war movement has never recovered. The groundswell of popular revulsion that led hundreds of thousands to take to the streets before 2006 collapsed. The five-year anniversary of the war was marked with tepid protests that were sparsely attended. Why not? If the anti-war movement gutlessly backs pro-war candidates, what credibility does it have? If it fails to support those candidates on the margins of the political spectrum who stand with it against the war, what is the movement worth? Why not be cynical and go home?

“It is a virus,” Nader said in a phone interview. “It is self-defeating. What are they doing this for if they can’t push it into the political arena? Is it all theater?”

“The strategy of the Democratic Party is to beat the Republicans by becoming more like them,” Nader said. “How can they get away with that? If they become more like the Republic Party they start eating into the Republican vote. This usually would inflict a price on them. They would lose the left’s vote, but since the left signaled to the Democrats that their vote can be taken for granted because the Republicans are too horrible to contemplate, they get both. As a result, when you put this cocktail together, becoming more Republican to get Republican votes and hanging on to the left because they have nowhere to go, you set up a tug in the direction of the corporations. There is no discernable end to this strategy by the left. When you ask the left they say not this year, sometime later. But when? If it is not now, if it is sometime in the future, when? What is their breaking point? If you do not have a breaking point you are a slave.”

The energy and idealism are out there. Nader, in a March 13-14 Zogby poll, took 5 to 6 percent in a race between McCain and either Clinton or Obama. Nader, among voters under 30 and among independents, polled 12 to 15 percent. If the anti-war movement gets behind him and McKinney, if it stands behind its principles, it could begin to shake the foundations of the Democratic Party. It could re-energize itself. It might even force Democrats to offer voters a concrete plan to withdraw from Iraq.

War is not an abstraction to me. I know its evil. It is time, if we care about the state of the nation, to take an unequivocal stand against the war. If Clinton and Obama do not want to join us, so be it. I support those candidates and organizations that fight back. We should, in solidarity, strike with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on May 1 against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should support Code Pink’s refusal to pay the portion of our taxes that go to funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But most of all, we should refuse to be suckered by Democratic candidates who use fuzzy language and will not commit to a total withdrawal from Iraq. We owe it to the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured. We owe to those Iraqis and Americans who will die in the coming days, weeks and months. We owe it to ourselves so, at the very least, we can salvage our integrity.