The ILWU and its Radical Heritage
The ILWU has long been one of—if not the—most consistently militant labor unions in the United States. Since 1933 it has walked the talk of the old Wobbly slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all,” organizing not only across but against racial and ethnic divisions, refusing to load ships bound for Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa when the U.S. still supported those regimes, striking against imperialist wars and in solidarity with political prisoners, and practicing militant solidarity with other workers around the world and here in the belly of the capitalist beast.
No, it is not an anarchist organization. But it is an effective and militant working class organization, and uses direct action and its labor power at the heart of an essential global industry to achieve real results on behalf of its member workers and oppressed and exploited people worldwide. It also continues to practice one of the better examples of democracy and local autonomy within the American labor movement. If the measure of a person, or a group of people, is in what they do and not what they say are, then the ILWU are worthy allies for all radicals seeking to actively challenge capitalism and its disastrous consequences.
Local 10 in San Francisco has long been at the heart of this radicalism. As the local at the epicenter of the 1934 General Strike in San Francisco, in which striking workers were gunned down by cops, to this day it bars police from membership(!). It was Local 10’s Jack Heyman who stood up to riot cops at a demo to block the shipment of war materiel to Iraq in 2003, and faced (and thankfully beat) serious charges as a result. I first met Jack years before on an airplane as he was on his way to speak to sympathetic trade unionists in Turkey about the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. That sympathy evaporated when he connected the oppression of Black people in the U.S. to that of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, and he was asked to leave. It is this kind of consistency and guts of many individual ILWU’s that helps maintain the union’s reputation as a model of active, effective militancy.
The ILWU is honoring national Black history month this February 14 at the Local 10 Hall, once again connecting struggles for freedom and justice, past and present, locally and abroad, as one struggle with many battles. From defending the freedom and work of blacklisted radicals such as Paul Robeson and Angela Davis, to defending the lives of Troy Davis and Mumia Abu-Jamal, to protesting police murders such as the recent execution of Oscar Grant in Oakland, these are battles that the ILWU not only calls attention to, but actually fights.
So come out and support them in their efforts on behalf of our collective struggles for a better world, and make some new friends and allies in the process.