05.12.1996

ITF betrays Liverpool dockers

This letter by ITF inspector Jack Heyman follows his resignation in response to a lack of support for the Liverpool dockers and criticism of their attempts to set up international rank and file organisation

An open letter to Richard Flint, ITF communications director

I’ve been following with interest your internet correspondence on the question of the relationship of the International Transport Federation to the Liverpool dockers’ strike. Being simultaneously an ITF inspector and supporter of the Liverpool dockers, I felt myself conflicted, and ultimately resigned my ITF post, effective October 1 1996. I’d like to shed some light on the ITF’s role in the Merseyside struggle, which led me to make that decision.

Some of your statements are blatantly untrue. Other errors are distortions and omissions. Let’s begin with the charge against the ITF that it has undermined support for the Liverpool dockers. Cited as an example was an ITF inspector who was ordered by Kees Marges, ITF dockers secretary, not to attend the international dockers’ conference in Liverpool in February. I was that ITF inspector.

Although I was delegated by the January West Coast longshore union (ILWU) Longshore Caucus (Convention) to represent our union at the conference, the ITF did try to prevent me from attending. You perfunctorily dismissed this charge as “ridiculous”, stating only the “general secretary or the assistant general secretary responsible for seafarers could issue an instruction to an inspector”. You are wrong. As ITF director of communications, you knew better.

The day before I was to fly to Liverpool, Kees Marges, who’d not been able to reach me by fax, insisted in a telephone conversation that I not attend the international dockers’ conference in Liverpool. He stated that: 1) the strike was illegal and unofficial, not having been endorsed by the Transport and General Workers Union; 2) the TGWU, an ITF affiliate, was not requesting support and the ITF was adhering to that request; 3) the dockers couldn’t win.

After I refused his orders, he stated the ITF couldn’t stop me but that I shouldn’t mention the ITF at the conference or to the media. In order that we wouldn’t “mix our banners”, since the ILWU was supporting the dockers and the ITF was not, it was decided to take me off the ITF payroll and put me on the ILWU’s for the week of the conference. Despite an earlier statement by you, this was a political, not a financial decision.

What disturbs me is the ITF paradox, arguing on the one hand that they support the strike and on the other why they can’t. I first encountered this contradiction at the ITF’s worldwide inspectors seminar this January. I’d just come from Liverpool (my first trip there), where on behalf of the ILWU I had expressed international solidarity greetings at a mass rally and strike meeting.

I was moved by the rank and file dockers’ sense of commitment, determination, discipline and morale, which after a four-month low ebb was surging again in the wake of a stunning industrial action by the ILA (East Coast longshore union) honouring a Liverpool dockers’ picket in New Jersey. Real international dockers’ solidarity had been re-awakened and the demoralising isolation broken. And I was there to give a big West Coast salute to both. With some good fortune we were able to break through a news blackout and get extensive coverage on BBC for the strikers.

Since the ITF’s Flag of Convenience (FOC) campaign - which seeks to organise mostly exploited third world seafarers aboard ships with phoney registries under a union agreement - is based largely on support of the dockers’ unions, it seemed only natural that the Liverpool dockers should be given an opportunity to address the inspectors regarding their strike. To my astonishment I discovered that the Thatcher government in 1989, smashed all of the dockers’ unions in Britain except ‘Red’ Liverpool. Perhaps this is why Britain, where the ITF is headquartered, was not included as one of the countries in the ITFs North-West Europe ‘Week of Action’ FOC campaign in June.

Why did ITF heads resist offering the Liverpool dockers a forum? Was it fear they would send a bunch of hooligans who would tear up their new headquarters building, as was preposterously argued? Or was it a continued attempt to isolate the militant dockers? As consensus amongst inspectors mushroomed to give a platform for the dockers, ITF heads acquiesced and an evening time slot was found. Jimmy Nolan, chairman of the Merseyside Port Shop Stewards Committee and strike leader, appeared by himself and gave a cogent presentation on the history of the dockers’ struggle. It was one of the most well attended and well received of all the week’s sessions, though one could hardly tell from general secretary Cockroft sitting on the dais, enveloped in feigned ennui. The standing-room-only audience gave Nolan a thunderous ovation.

Speaker after speaker - from Los Angeles, Hamburg, Johannesburg - took the deck to laud this courageous struggle. Most impassioned was Thulani Dlimani, the TGWU representative from South Africa, who remembered well the Liverpool dockers’ solidarity actions during the bloody anti-apartheid struggle.

Norm Pickles, an inspector from Australia, offered a resolution which passed unanimously and was acknowledged in a glowing letter the following day, January 19, from Marges to the Liverpool dockers, “calling upon their unions throughout the world to organise financial and moral support, and where possible to organise industrial action, including boycott actions” in support of the dockers. And Marges’ letter accurately quoted another inspector as expressing the feelings of all: “The trade union moment in the UK has lost many battles; this needs to be won.”

Splendid! The ITF was supporting the Liverpool dockers ... or so we inspectors were led to believe. No sooner did we arrive home than reality struck. On January 23, a subsequent circular by Marges put the brakes on any supportive action: “ITF affiliates must await the signal of the ITF before organising any solidarity action.” But ITF signalmen have been asleep at the switch from the start.

From the July 3-5 Fair Practices Committee meeting came a pronouncement that the ITF was finally “supporting” the dockers. Alas, but it was not to be. Ten days later four Liverpool dockers in a dramatic action occupied two container cranes in Montreal, Canada. Through this action and a previous tour, the strikers were able to galvanise support from the longshoremen and much of the Canadian labour movement. According to Michel Murray, president of the Syndicat des Débardeurs, the Montreal longshore union, the ITF inspector called London to inform them of the action and suggest he board the affected ship (which had an ITF contract) to make sure seafarers were not scabbing by doing longshore work during the action.

It is important to understand this is the ITF position as enunciated in a document entitled, ‘Important message to seafarers: don’t do dockers work’, signed by Kees Marges and Ake Selander, then assistant general secretary and seafarer’s section secretary, dated January 12 1996.

The ITF inspector was firmly told, “Don’t go near that ship”. The ITF inspector, who’d been supportive of the Liverpool dockers, interpreted those instructions as no ITF support to the action. So does the ITF “support” the Liverpool dockers? Yes, like a rope supports a hanged man. ITF hypocrisy has functioned consistently throughout the strike, saying one thing publicly and doing another behind closed doors. As they say on Montreal’s docks: “Plus ça change ...”

While I did not attend the international dockers conference in August (ILWU did send a delegate), no one should be surprised if the ITF, as is charged, tried once again to thwart unions from attending. ITF heads have finger-pointed at both Bill Morris of the TGWU and at the Merseyside strikers, but not once have you looked in the mirror for a healthy self-examination.

Why has the ITF been navigating such a treacherous course? I believe there are a number of reasons which basically emanate from the ITF’s conservative world view. Richard, despite your characterisation of the ITF as “the greatest organisation in the world, that operates genuinely in a democratic fashion”, it would be more humble and honest to say that the ITF is the richest of all the international trade secretariats, a wealth derived from the FOC campaign vis-à-vis shipowners’ contributions to the Welfare Trust. And the hard truth is that ITF tactics, programs and mandates that flow from the top down, not the other way around, have been at best modestly effective in confronting shipowner exploitation of third world seamen.

The militant leadership of the Liverpool dockers uses class struggle tactics which challenge capitalist property ‘rights’, such as the occupying of container cranes, and seeks to build picket lines that stop scabs. For this they have been ostracised in Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and other sections of the capitalist press as being “self-avowed” communists hell-bent on violence, no different from the news media’s red-baiting of Harry Bridges and other leaders of the 1934 West Coast longshore strike that launched our union.

Against all odds - against an anti-labour government, anti-labour laws, anti-labour news media, a predatory employer, Mersey Docks and Harbour Company, and a class-collaborating union bureaucracy - the Liverpool dockers have succeeded in inspiring real international labour solidarity, like no other struggle in recent maritime history. Their victory could be a catalyst to reverse the tide of labour defeats since 1989 that have inundated the British docks through privatisation and casualisation.

But a victory for the Liverpool dockers would destroy Cockroft, Marges and co’s self-fulfilling prophecy that the dockers can’t win. It would offer an alternative to the defeatist strategy of the ITF/TUC/TGWU that contains struggles against employer attacks within ‘legal’, ‘responsible’ and ‘official’ bounds, a strategy that has so far lost every port save Liverpool, much to the dismay of maritime workers around the globe. Anything more, they cry, would threaten sequestration of ‘their’ union treasuries.

This aristocracy of labour, while bemoaning draconian Thatcherite anti-labour laws (which their darling Labourite Tony Blair has vowed to uphold if elected), actually use them as an excuse for inaction. Besides, Blair’s election requires labour peace: ie, subservience to the employing class. A great philosopher once said, “The point is to change it.” The Liverpool dockers are doing that by boldly defying the dictates of capitalist rule.

What really underlies ITF fear of a successful strike in Merseyside is the creation of a parallel organisation of dockers. The Liverpool dockers have inspired maritime workers around the world to come together to discuss how they can concretely support them in the heat of battle. Beyond that there is the obvious need to organise a coordinated, militant, international effort to defend workers against privatisation and attendant casualisation attacks from global shipowner alliances that we all face. As the ILWU slogan warns: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Should a militant, coordinating network of maritime workers arise, so be it.

The irony of this whole matter, as I said after Jimmy Nolan’s presentation at ITF headquarters in January, is that the ITF is celebrating its centenary this year. The ITF was launched in 1896, when British seamen, sailing into strikebound ports in Holland, joined striking Dutch dockers. They didn’t fax their union for official authorisation, or check to verify it was legal, or fill out forms before taking action. They just did it. That’s how the ITF was born.

Now, British dockers are slandered as “strike tourists” by Kees Marges, the Dutch ITF dockers secretary, and ITF general secretary Cockroft for not getting prior approval before going to Holland to seek dockers’ strike support, both in 1989, when British dockers unions were being wiped out, and now, when the last union port appeals for help. Shame.

These men represent the best in the British tradition of class conscious fighters. Proudly displayed on the wall of my ITF office in the San Francisco longshore union was a picture given to me by one of the strikers. It was a photograph of the 1911 Liverpool strike committee, amongst whom was his great-grandfather. Many dockers are the sons and grandsons of dockers. Their roots reach deep into the class struggles of Britain and Ireland. In sharp contrast only a scant few in the ITF leadership have ever worked in maritime. Tourist?

Finally, I was hoping the ITF would donate more than the parsimonious sum of £10,000 to the most important ongoing strike in British maritime. West Coast longshoremen have donated over ten times that. East Coast longshoremen have given up more in wages honouring the Liverpool picket line and have paid costly legal fees. Cockroft boasts that the ITF gave £7 million (largely to religious organisations) last year, not to mention the £l.5 million being donated to the ‘poor’ UN’s International Maritime Organisation. Certainly, one would think, more funds are available for workers’ organisations from the five million member ITF. What’s more important: your illusory quest to buy bourgeois respectability or support to the Liverpool strikers? Victory to the Liverpool Dockers!

Jack Heyman