Open World Conference of Workers
In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights
ILWU
1) Presentation by Brian McWilliams, President of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) to the first plenary session of the OWC on Saturday, February 12
2) Statement by ILWU International President Brian McWilliams to the April 16 demonstration in Washington, D.C., against the IMF and World Bank. (Brother McWilliams could not attend the demonstration on account of union business; his statement was read at the rally by IBU-ILWU member Robert Irminger.)
Presentation by Brian McWilliams to the first plenary session of the OWC on Saturday, February 12
I'd like to welcome you all to my hometown of San Francisco, the site of the 1934 general strike and the center of that year's great West Coast maritime strike that gave birth to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. February is not our best weather month, but I do hope you enjoy your stay here.
I want to apologize for not being here last night at the inaugural rally or being able to stay throughout the weekend. The work of the union demands my immediate attention, with pending issues from Alaska to Hawaii. And I regret that I cannot be here for the whole conference because there are many questions that I would like to explore with all of you, especially after our great show of opposition to the WTO in Seattle.
With the Seattle action, we fired up the general public's consciousness, and now international trade and globalization are political issues that are publicly debated in places they never were before. We formed potent coalitions amongst labor, environmentalists, farmers, students, and human and civil rights activists that gave us credibility, a broad base and many strong voices in harmony. And we had a significant impact on the WTO meeting itself, from physically shutting down the opening session to contributing to the wider collapse of the talks.
But our success - which I think was greater than we dared anticipate, let alone planned for - has left us with a new batch of questions for which we are unprepared and which we need to face and figure out soon.
How do we build on the propaganda campaign that we put together in Seattle? How do we take advantage of this opening to further educate our members and the public in general on the varied and systematic dangers of corporate globalism: the exploitation of labor, especially child labor; the danger to the environment, to the world food supply, and to democracy? How do we stick together and strike with the coalition we forged in Seattle? What kind of activities do we pursue to keep up the momentum which had such a great effect? The WTO was a great consciousness-raising event and a great protest action - but now we need to formulate strategies that use our collective power not only to challenge the WTO vision of this world but to block it from it being created. And that raises more questions.
When we turn to organizing workers internationally, we have to keep in mind the globalization does not affect us all in the same way. In developed countries like the United States, many workers experience globalization as runaway shops, with their jobs being shipped overseas. In lots of countries, workers experience globalization as industrial super-exploitation, as environmental rape and the destruction of their traditional ways of life.
We have to find ways to deal with the tremendous gap in living standards between developed and less-developed countries, a gap enforced by U.S. military and economic policy. As long as that gap exists, decent pay and jobs will drain out of developed countries - with or without the formal agreement of the WTO - without any benefit to the standard of living of workers in the developing nations or any support for a sustainable environmental policy.
Strategies that can reconcile the needs of these two sections of the world's workers and their social and cultural differences need to be understood and dealt with as well.
Here in the United States, it was a big deal that President Clinton finally signed the ILO Convention against child labor, but before we impose this everywhere, we have to understand that in some countries, the children's income is necessary for the survival of the family. So any prohibition of child labor must include provisions to make sure that this policy doesn't become an enforcement of poverty.
It's becoming a clichˇ to say that if capitalism is going global, workers must organize globally. Corporate globalism carries the seeds of its own demise. While chanting "No to the WTO" in the streets of Seattle, I was nevertheless thankful for the opportunity provided us by that WTO meeting. It was inevitable that the arrogance of capital would express itself so boldly so as to completely disregard those who produce the wealth - and the planet which sustains us.
We seized that moment, and perhaps that was the only chance of our lifetime in this country to express our outrage at the global economy the multinationals are trying to build. By integrating the world economy, the transnational corporations have brought us together. They have given us common interests and common cause and made the need for international working class organizing undeniable and immediate.
While we need to create new strategies to deal with the new realities, the basis for our activity is not new. We need international worker solidarity. That's the only way we'll have everybody able to stand up to the power of international capital.
So as you start your discussions today, I hope you will pour out your experiences, share your knowledge with your collective wisdom, and start coming up with the answers to the questions that are before us. There is no better time than now. I want to thank those people who work so hard to organize the conference - particularly Ed Rosario, Alan Benjamin, and Mya Shone for all the good work that they have done, and I wish all of us the greatest success on our deliberations.
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2) Document No. 1: Statement by ILWU International President Brian McWilliams to the April 16 demonstration in Washington, D.C., against the IMF and World Bank. (Brother McWilliams could not attend the demonstration on account of union business; his statement was read at the rally by IBU-ILWU member Robert Irminger.)
The policies of the IMF and the World Bank are completely contrary to the goals and aspirations of the labor movement in general and the ILWU in particular. Theirs is a sinister system, designed to exploit working people in a Draconian way.
These institutions walk into countries acting they're doing them a favor loaning them money, and then walk away leveraging every resource and changing whole cultures. They make countries slaves to the debt, undercutting their ability to develop a sustainable economy and slashing their investment in the health and education of their people. They force countries to become export economies and low-wage production centers for transnational corporations. This directly impacts the standard of living of the majority of workers in the world - good union jobs are shipped to these indebted countries and in the process become another way to bleed them.
We in the ILWU and in the labor movement as a whole know we are no better off than the least advantaged. That is why the ILWU has always opposed the exploitation of working people anywhere in the world, whether it's a coffee worker in El Salvador or a grape picker in California's Central Valley, whether it's a gold miner in apartheid South Africa or an aluminum worker in Spokane, Washington, whether it's locked-out longshore workers in Australia or locked-out longshore workers in Charleston, South Carolina, the ILWU is there.
So now the ILWU adds its voice to the growing chorus calling for the abolition of the IMF and World Bank. We also support the Jubilee 200 call for the cancellation of the debt. But the debt cancellation is not enough. These countries have been plundered for far too long, and atonement is required. They deserve reparations to provide them the tools to rebuild their economies and make them sustainable. The masters of international capital should be held accountable for the devastation they have wrought.
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