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The Liverpool Dockers
Chris Baily, founder of Labournet writes on the internet and the labour movement in this report on the Liverpool Dockers.

In December 1995, in the week leading up to Christmas, three Liverpool dockers picketed at the port of Newark, New Jersey, USA against a ship from Liverpool called the Atlantic Companion. The Mersey Docks & Harbour Company (MDHC) had sacked 500 dockworkers in Liverpool on September 25th for refusing to cross a picket line. Faced with a difficult situation in Britain because of Thatcher's anti-union laws the dockers had decided to appeal for international support. For three days, the mainly Puerto Rican longshoremen who worked at the port refused to cross the Liverpool men's picket line. The longshoremen's union, the International Longshoremen's Association, had signed a no strike agreement with the Newark port authority. The union told the longshoremen that there was no instruction from the union not to cross the picket line and that it was a matter of "individual conscience" whether they did. Not one man crossed even though they were eventually offered much more than their usual wages to do so. This act of international labour solidarity might have passed unnoticed. There was hardly any reporting of it in the traditional media.

However, news of this solidarity action was quickly spread around the world using the Internet. A few weeks before the Newark action the LabourNet web site had been set up to assist the Liverpool dockers in their fight, using the slogan "the world is our picket line". LabourNet was also posting regular messages concerning the dockers' struggle onto labour mailing lists and to individuals. No one could be sure what kind of results this use of the Internet to provide an alternative media outlet for the dockers might bring. But it soon began to pay off. Dockers visiting Australia and New Zealand reported that when they arrived they found people already knew about their struggle "from the Internet". The first positive response LabourNet received was from Japanese dockers who announced they were sending money to Liverpool.

The news of the Newark longshoremen's action had a big impact, particularly in the USA. East Coast longshoremen very rarely go on strike because of the strict contracts that exist and such an act of solidarity was considered outstanding. LabourNet received a large number of messages praising this action and wanting to know more about the Liverpool dispute. Amongst these were messages from US West Coast longshoremen. Arrangements were soon made for one of them to visit Liverpool. In this way, the Internet enabled the Liverpool dockers to publicise their dispute widely and make contacts at ports around the world. In some cases, in Canada for instance, national support networks for the Liverpool dockers were built from this Internet work. At first, the dockers saw the support coming from such quarters mainly as a way of raising money for their dispute. They were getting action against Liverpool ships from dockers in some of the ports trading with Liverpool, but they could not conceive of workers striking on their behalf elsewhere. But when dockers visited the US West Coast to raise money they began to realise there was a possibility of receiving more than financial support there. They briefly picketed and stopped Los Angeles port, the first time they had achieved action at a port not trading with Liverpool. Truck drivers they stopped were so impressed by this action they blockaded the port themselves a few weeks later! LabourNet did not attempt to dictate or impose policies on the dockers. It worked only to help them build a powerful and flexible international communications network that enabled them to supply, in effect, a daily news service about the Liverpool dispute to dockers around the world. Using this network the dockers were able to organise two international days of action in their support.

Various chains of authority within dockers' organisations world-wide were used as far as they could be, but where they failed to produce action, they were bypassed by the network and replaced with new ones. In the first day of action, the body that supposedly possessed the authority to call international dockers' actions, the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), was circumvented in this way and reduced to trailing limply behind the dockers' network. It organised virtually no action itself and when asked by the press to supply information on the pending action it was forced to send begging E-mails to LabourNet to try to find out what was actually happening! This first day of action, on 20th January 1997, resulted in what one international union official described as "the biggest international working class action for 100 years". In 27 countries, 105 ports and cities, dockers, seafarers, and other workers took part in workplace meetings, public meetings, demonstrations at British Embassies and Consulates, work-to-rules, and full-scale stoppages ranging from 30 minutes up to 24 hours. Whilst this was happening, the Liverpool dockers' union, the Transport & General Workers' Union (TGWU), was trying to persuade the Liverpool dockers and their families to accept redundancy payments and quit their fight. The international support was inspiring them to carry on and was making the TGWU leadership's task much more difficult. When the Liverpool shop stewards called a second day of action on 8th September 1997 the TGWU insisted that the ITF must not support the action.

This made very little difference. If anything the action was bigger than the first one. US and Canadian longshoremen closed down the entire North American West Coast from Alaska to Los Angeles for 24 hours. The flexibility of the dockers' communication network was illustrated by the fact that they were able to organise this action whilst keeping the employers in the dark about its actual date, only publicly announcing it at the last moment. A combination of the Internet and the strong support from American West Coast longshoremen was now used to bring about another powerful international action in support of Liverpool. At the end of September 1997, the local community in Oakland, California put up a picket against the Neptune Jade, a ship from Britain with containers on board from a company using Liverpool. Longshoremen refused to cross this picket and after several unsuccessful attempts to unload the ship left. Shortly afterwards it docked in Vancouver, Canada, where it received similar treatment from both the local community and longshoremen and again could not unload. Eventually it sailed to Japan. Here, dockers in two different ports also refused to work on the containers. The Internet had been used to track every move of the ship and prepare action against it wherever it docked. The expense of bringing the ship back to Britain with the containers still unloaded would have been enormous. Instead the ship was eventually sold in Hong Kong together with its cargo. This action caused great fear amongst ship owners and their insurers, even more than the international days of action had. Despite this growing international strength, the dockers were ultimately forced to surrender by the connivance of the TGWU leadership. On 26th January, 1998, the Merseyside Port Shop Stewards Committee issued a statement notifying supporters around the world that "the Liverpool dockworkers decided to call an end to their long running dispute".

Behind the scenes, enormous pressure, full details of which have never been fully revealed, had been put on the shop stewards by the TGWU leadership to force them to end the dispute. Despite this defeat, the Liverpool dockers' struggle proved how powerful a networked union communication structure based on the Internet could be in the fightback against a globalised capital that dominates the mainstream media. During the course of the Liverpool fight, dockers in a number of other countries: Montreal in Canada, Santos in Brazil, Los Angeles in the US, Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Stockholm in Sweden all began producing their own websites. The defeat of the Liverpool men meant most of these websites later closed down, but workers elsewhere are still building Internet based communications networks inspired by the one built in support of Liverpool. During the Korean general strike in 1997, the, then illegal, Korean Confederation of Trade Unions used LabourNet and its own websites to publicise its actions. This later resulted in the formation of Korean LaborNet (NodongNet). In February this year, the All Japan Dockworkers' Union, which played a central role in taking action for Liverpool, worked together with labour media activists to launch LaborNet Japan (LaborNet Nippon). The full story of the Liverpool dockers' fight can be found at http://www.labournet.org/docks/index.html
Chris Bailey Founder of LabourNet.

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