We spoke out about the Vietnam War and were one of the first ones to do it. We refused to load scrap to Japan just prior to the Second World War. We refused to load cargo destined for South Africa during the apartheid of that country, and so forth and so on.
Not only is the Iraq War killing a large number of America’s young soldiers, it’s also killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and it’s literally bankrupting this country.
At this point it has the consequence of perhaps eliminating what little safety net we have left in this country, in terms of the ability to take care of health care, retired people, the infrastructure and so forth. It’s being ignored in order to print money to pay for the war. That impacts our members and our members are angry about it.
They don’t see anything being done by the politicians, so we decided to lay our tools down for a day to see whether people would take notice.
We have about 25,000 workers on the West Coast, working both days and nights. We stood down in every port on the West Coast – 29 ports. We report that our entire membership stood down. Our employer group, The Pacific Maritime Association, is trying to spin it with low numbers, saying only 6,000 stepped down. That's just like happens with any kind of a demonstration.
Most of the comments that are coming in to our office are “Congratulations, we’re glad you did it.” People came down to where we were demonstrating with pies and American flags. We’ve had very little negative responses.
What We Want
We are hoping to get the troops home now, but it appears at this point that we’re going to have to wait for the new administration. It appears that the war will continue in its current fashion into the next presidency. In fact right now our Congress is putting together bills to fund it right into July of 2009, which would be six months into a new presidency.
Both opposition candidates that are vying for the opportunity to run against the Republicans are probably stating that they intend to end the war, but timelines are not clear. You want my personal opinion? My personal opinion is that it should be automatic.
Two years ago I met with a group of union oil workers from Iraq who were touring the United States. They said they could handle their country themselves. They said our being there is what’s causing all the division between the Sunnis and Shiites. They said the sooner the better, and I believe that. I say just pack up and leave.
The Iraqi dock workers in two significant ports in Iraq stood down for an hour at the same time that we stood down in support of what we were doing. The employers, on the other hand, are not behind us. They absolutely did not cooperate in this case, and the reason for that in my opinion is that they’re largely made up of foreign interests who run these vessels, and they make a lot of money off of moving war materials.
There was some negligible impact in the larger economy, but I think it was largely mitigated by the fact that we telegraphed it two months in advance, and so it allowed the employers to mitigate any costs.
When 25,000 dock workers walk off the job it’s very quiet and eerie on the docks. Nothing moves. Employers close their gates, chain ‘em and wait until we come back to work. We only did it for one shift, so we went back to work at 6 o’clock last night, which is the start of the normal night shift.
Whether we’ll take action again, we’ll have to wait and see.
