ILWU Local 10 Rank and File Support For Resolution For Workers Pary

ILWU Local 10 Rank and File Support For Resolution For Workers Pary
Trump Wins Election, Workers Must Fight Back

Democrats & Republicans: Twin Screws vs. Workers
We Need to Build a Workers Party, Starting Now!

In the December ILWU Dispatcher, President McEllrath said that Trump won, delivering a knockout blow to corporate liberalism, by tapping into the anger of America’s hurting working class frozen out by Wall Streeters from both parties for decades. No kidding. Hillary Clinton, he says, stood for the establishment. True enough, although he left out that he urged ILWUers to vote for Democrat Clinton. So now, a union-hating, racist corporate billionaire will be president.

The ILWU supported Bernie Sanders who ran a populist campaign in the Democratic primary against the “1%,” what he called the “billionaire class,” of Trump and Clinton. But after the Democratic Party establishment did him in, Sanders called for his supporters to vote for the candidate of the 1%. Many did, holding their noses. A lot didn’t. But what was the alternative?

The ILWU, like most unions, has supported the Democratic Party for decades. And look where it’s got us! It’s high time – in fact, way past time – to build our own party, a workers party to fight for working-class interests. We can’t continue to support and campaign for a party that represents capital. At every crucial moment, the Democrats have supported the maritime bosses.

· During the 2002 lockout, Republican President Bush threatened to occupy the ports with the military, but Democrat senator Feinstein called on Bush to invoke the slave labor Taft-Hartley Act against us. That forced longshoremen back to work under conditions imposed by PMA.

· In 2003, Democrat Oakland mayor Jerry Brown called out riot police to suppress antiwar protesters and longshore workers. The bloody police assault resulted in scores going to the hospital and a $2,000,000 damage suit against the city.

· In 2012, when a scab grain ship was docking at EGT in Longview, Washington it was the Democrats, President Obama and Governor Gregoire, who sent police and a Coast Guard cutter against ILWU pickets. After a long, militant struggle by rank-and-file longshore workers, ILWU officials, faced with such state power, surrendered and signed a terribly concessionary contract.

· In 1992, Democrat governor Bill Clinton running for president flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally incapacitated black man, Ricky Ray Rector. Dixiecrat Clinton won in a racist, tough-on-crime campaign. Like President Bush Sr., he pursued the “war on drugs” and mass incarceration which targeted African Americans and Latinos. Then he got NAFTA passed, paving the way for other “free trade deals” and the loss of millions of jobs.

Every time, the ILWU supported these Democrat politicians, and we always got screwed. As dock workers we face “Wall Street on the waterfront.” Goldman Sachs owned and recently sold SSA, but its former exec Sara Lee is the CFO of the Port of Oakland. In his campaign, Trump ran commercials denouncing Goldman Sachs – now his cabinet is full of its top brass.

The Preamble of Local 10’s Constitution says: “We also recognize by experience that organization of the working class and unity of action is imperative and essential to combat the encroachments of organized and consolidated capital on the fundamental rights of labor.”

Yes, and it is “imperative and essential” that we stop politically supporting the capitalist Democrat and Republican parties. We should join with another Local 10, the Painters Union in Portland, OR, in calling for a class-struggle workers party to oppose both corporate liberalism and corporate conservatism. We can make a start by voting for the following resolution: (over) 1/12/17

No Support to Democrats, Republicans
or Any Party of the Bosses!

Build a Class Struggle Workers Party!

Whereas, the bosses have two parties to represent their class while the millions of working people have none, and

Whereas, the Democratic president Barack Obama sent the U.S. Coast Guard to enforce scabbing against the International Longshore and Warehouse Union at the EGT Terminal in Longview in 2012, and

Whereas, Obama like Bush before him, supported the employers against the union—Obama did it during the grain handlers’ lock-out in 2013-14 of Northwest longshore locals and Bush did it in 2002 during the PMA lockout threatening all ILWU longshore locals with a military occupation of West Coast ports , and

Whereas, the Democratic governor Jerry Brown, when he was mayor of Oakland in 2003, called out riot police to attack longshoremen and demonstrators in the port protesting the Iraq War, and

Whereas, in 2014 Democrats in Congress joined with Republicans to pass a disastrous pension “reform,” allowing the bosses to escape their obligations and cheat our retirees, and

Whereas, the two presidencies of the Democrat Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush have been fifteen years of unending war in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, causing untold human suffering, millions of refugees, and attacks on our democratic and union rights at home, and

Whereas, the Democratic Party in power shamefully has deported some 5 million immigrants, a record, and

Whereas, across the country, from Oakland to Baltimore, police under Democratic politicians from mayors to president, regularly murder black men and women with impunity, and

Whereas, the 2016 presidential election offered us the “choice” between a raving, racist clown and a career representative of Wall Street, and

Whereas, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Virginia governor Tim Kaine, supports union-busting “right to work” laws and the Republican vice-presidential candidate threatens to turn back the clock fifty years on hard-fought labor and social gains, and

Whereas, Democrats and Republicans are and have always been strike-breaking, war-making parties of the bosses, and

Whereas, so long as the labor movement supports one or another party of the bosses, we will be playing a losing game with a stacked deck,

Therefore be it resolved, that ILWU Local 10 does not support the Democrats, Republicans, or any bosses’ parties or politicians, and

Furthermore, we join with Painters’ Union Local 10 in Portland to call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party, and build our own class-struggle workers party.

Anthony Leviege #9576, Stacey Rodgers #101236, Sean Graham

#101180, Jack Heyman #8780 (ret.), Howard Keylor #20447 (ret.)