23.01.1997

Liverpool: worldwide boycott grows

Swedish dockers join the picket

The international day of action in support of the Liverpool dockers dawned as a group of 16 sacked workers and their supporters passed through port security and occupied three cranes, halting unloading of the ‘Lake Erie’ grain carrier.

Down on the ground a mass picket of dockers and Women of the Waterfront gathered at 6am, cheering the occupation and chanting at the scabs. No container vessels were in port. The picket included delegations from the victorious occupation of Scottish engineering factory Glacier RPB, where 103 workers had been sacked in November and won reinstatement earlier this month, and the Darlington kitchen equipment firm, Magnet, where TGWU workers remain sacked after beginning an official pay strike last year. Solidarity messages flooded into the office.

At the Danish port of Arhus, a mass meeting on Monday morning voted 53-21 in a secret ballot for a 24-hour sympathy strike, plus a £500 donation to Liverpool.

Lloyd’s List’s New York correspondent quoted a statement by members of the International Longshore-men’s Association in New Jersey, Baltimore, and Hampton Roads, who “intend to honour the request for a boycott” of vessels still calling in Liverpool. ILA official spokesman Jim McNa-mara told Lloyd’s List he believed the boycott would be observed at all ILA ports on the east and Gulf coasts.

The Canadian port of St John, New Brunswick, shut down from 8am to 7pm Monday and will send $5,000 to Liverpool. 

Longshoremen, checkers and railway workers in the Port of Montreal held their first ever joint meeting on January 19, along with the Syndicat des Débardeurs.

Belgian dockers, fresh from last week’s boycott of the “Atlantic Compass”, were heading off to demonstrate at the British embassy in Brussels and preparing further industrial action later this week.

In Sweden, with the Hamnarbetarforbundet union due to hit all ACL and CAST container traffic the following day, the syndicalist SAC union in Malmo demonstrated at the ACL offices in Stockholm on Monday.

The Swiss Revolutionary Reconstruction occupied the headquarters of the Rhine Shipping Company in Basel on Monday. Other messages of support and protest letters to Mersey Docks or the British government turned up from:

Hava-Is, the civil aviation sector union in Turkey; ZCTU, the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions; CNT Transport in Brazil; OTV, the transport and public service union in Germany; Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions; the Federation of Hong Kong Transport Worker Organisations; the Asian Domestic Workers Union; the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee; Union des Syndicats du Canton de Genève in Switzerland; Zenkoku Kowan; the National Council of Dockworkers Unions in Japan; National Federation of Sales Representatives Unions in Bombay; SEV-VPT Public Transport Conductors in Lausanne; Solidarnost in Kaliningrad, Russia; and many other political and human rights organisations and individuals.

As yet, we await confirmation of other industrial actions expected to take place Monday. But CNN in San Francisco has just phoned Labournet seeking Liverpool video footage for tonight’s coverage of the ILWU longshoremen’s solidarity stoppage, which took place as planned.

Greg Dropkin