12.12.1996

Incendiary

24-hour international shutdown can set the docks afire, writes Greg Dropkin

A worldwide storm is set to break over the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company in just six weeks, with a 24-hour international shutdown of the docks industry now planned for January 20.

The action will be both a coordinated show of solidarity with locked-out Liverpool dockers and their families, an attack on shipping lines which allow scabs to service their vessels or handle their containers, and a demonstration that dockers throughout the world are taking up the fight against casual labour, deregulation, and privatisation.

At least 15 different dockers’ unions and the International Transport Federation are stating support for the plan. The International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union on the North American West Coast have taken a lead. Last week their international executive board moved a 24-hour blockade in all ILWU-organised ports. This decision reflects the huge groundswell in local ILWUs.

Liverpool dockers are also welcoming the new ITF position, which calls on “affiliated organisations to undertake all possible legal trade union strategies to put pressure on the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company and on shipping firms carrying cargoes that have been loaded by strike-breakers in Liverpool”.

These words will be tested in the North European ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam, Bremer-haven and Hamburg, which hold the key to transatlantic shipping lines, ACL, CAST and CanMar, connecting North America with Liverpool and Europe. Swedish dockers have hit ACL for 12 hours every week since the summer. Danish dockers struck in solidarity with Liverpool in October, Le Havre held up an OOCL vessel for 16 hours and hosted the recent international dockers’ meeting. The German ÖTV union congress resolved to put industrial pressure on Mersey Docks and on shipping lines calling at Liverpool. However, attempts to engage the Belgian and Dutch ports in solidarity action have yet to bear fruit.

When ACL pulled out from Liverpool for four weeks last summer, Mersey Docks was in a panic. Now, despite their poor share price and increasingly bad press, the company continues to put on a brave face. If ACL, CAST, CanMar, ZIM, Andrew Weir, or Gracechurch were to pull out now, MDHC would be in serious trouble. But that can only happen when shipping lines discover they are all in trouble halfway round the world after calling in a scab port.

Fifteen months into the lockout, Mersey Docks thought Liverpool dockers and their families were looking for any way out and would grab the latest offer of 41 ancillary jobs and £25,000 severance in the run-up to Christmas. But in fact, as one rank and file docker put it last week:

“I find I’m getting stronger and more determined to win this, to make sure that we  go back. I will admit that I do get disillusioned at times, especially when I go down the picket line and see three ships there. I say to myself, ‘Is this working, this international set up?’ And I think everybody must ask themselves that question.

“But when you go round the country and see the commitment that people have for you, you owe it to them as well to win a victory, not only for ourselves but for other trade unionists. In Sweden, the dockers took me down and showed me the ACL coming in, took a note of the time, and took me back the next day and said, ‘There is the ACL line there, no work being carried out and it won’t start until 12 hours after it docked.’

“So I have seen it in operation, and I think it is tremendous that anybody can give that support to somebody in another country, and I only hope that we will be able to return the favour to those people that supported us.

“I want to see the scabs out of the port, and I want to see the men back that want to go back, and I want to see the union back in there calling the shots, and let’s have decent conditions. That’s what I want to see in the port of Liverpool.”