ILWU International
President Jim Spinosa
27 June 2002
Thanks you brothers and sisters. It’s a great turnout
today. I can’t tell you how proud we are when we get together and show
our solidarity, and we express it in a meaningful way, as we are doing
here today. In ports across the country, longshore workers and teamsters
are standing together to demand waterfront justice, to demand that the
shipping and stevedore companies negotiate a fair contract with the
ILWU, that guarantees our healthcare benefits and our pensions, and to
demand that they recognize the efforts of port truckers to unionize with
teamsters.
Here in Oakland, we also stand with SEIU 790, port
workers whose contract also expires Monday, and who are also facing
cutbacks and outsourcing. And we have with us today representatives from
dockworkers unions around the world, pledging their support for our
struggle. This is a great show of workers’ solidarity, it is the kind
of solidarity we need all the time, but even more when we face difficult
contract negotiations.
We know what they have in mind for us. We’ve seen it
before, at other times in other places. First they try to separate the
community from the union, planting stories in the media that the unions
have special interests, interests separate and different from the
community. Then they start to outsource our jobs to weaken our position,
and then they try to pick us off one at a time.
But it’s not going to happen this time. This time the
community is not going to fall for the bosses’ propaganda. And this
time the unions are going to stick together.
But this time there’s a new twist. Ever since 9/11,
the government and the employers have been using the excuse of national
security to attack workers and unions. When we exercise our rights to
collectively bargain new contracts, with better wages and conditions,
when we enforce those rights by collectively withdrawing labour, then
they claim we are unpatriotic. But these are legal rights. There’s
nothing unpatriotic about American workers insisting on their rights
under the American law.
Because of the effects of the 9/11 attacks, there’s a
weakened economy, the government and the employers say that the economy
is disrupted by labour disputes. By workers demanding our rights, they
say we are aiding terrorists. But the real measure of a prosperous
economy is whether the workers have a good standard of living, whether
we have health care, whether we live in communities with clean air, and
good schools, and housing. We’re not the terrorists, and we’re not
aiding the terrorist attacks.
We demand a share of the wealth we produce every day.
Waterfront workers are facing these terrorist accusations, not just as
we negotiate our contracts. There’s legislation in Congress right now,
the Maritime and Port Security Act, that treats every port worker like a
terrorist suspect. Everyone will have to pass an FBI background check,
to be able to keep their job. Many of the crimes listed in the
legislation that will cause workers to lose their jobs, have nothing to
do with terrorism, and there’s no reason to believe any port worker
would blow up his job and the community. But the government and the ILWU
employers, who are mostly foreign shipping companies, are trying to say
that the American workers, the same workers who produced the economic
boom in the 1990’s and kept international trade moving, should now be
viewed as the enemy.
At the same time, these foreign companies are fighting
any legal requirements to examine the real security risk in our ports.
The thousands of containers that arrive every day from overseas. The
employers don’t want to take the time to check those containers to see
if they carry terrorists or terrorist bombs, because it would cost them
money. There is no clearer example of what this national security game
is really all about. Destroy American unions so that big business can
make more profits.
We are here today to say we won’t stand for that. We
demand real national security, the security of our jobs and livelihoods,
the security of our healthcare for everyone, the security of our
communities’ environment. And we will settle for nothing less.
Let us go in solidarity, let us tell the world and show
the world that the dockers of America, the dockers and the labour of
America and the world, stand together to show everyone that an injury to
one, is clearly an injury to all.
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