By Gedda Burke

Despite the lack of official support from their own union, the Transport and General Workers' Union (the 'T&G') 500 Liverpool dockers, along with Women of the Waterfront (WOW ), have vigilantly maintained their picket lines for more than two years.

Their fight is against a return to casual labour conditions. Casualisation is a scourge of the 1990s and because of this, the dockers' fight is our fight too!

In September 1995, after engineering a provocation, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company dismissed five hundred dockers for defending basic trade union principles by refusing to cross a picket line.

The dock workers launched an international solidarity campaign using the World Wide Web.

In solidarity with the Liverpool dockers and WOW, dock workers, longshoremen and other unions operating at ports around the world have conducted industrial action against privatisation, casualisation and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company.

September 1997, the second anniversary

Over 7,000 people marched in support of the dockers in London. The Offices of Trade and Industry were occupied. (Twenty on the roof, 50 in the building, and 27 arrests). Drake International (the employment company supplying scab labour on the Liverpool docks) was briefly occupied by 13 members of 'Reclaimed Streets' in support of the dockers.

There has been action in at least 17 countries, including the USA, where 100 ships were affected on the West Coast; South Africa, where a picket line was set up and drivers refused to cross a picket line and a ship left empty.

There have been stoppages in major Australian ports of five hours or longer; 24 hour strikes in Canada, Holland, Sweden and Denmark. Stopwork meetings were held by dockers in India and Japanese unions passed a resolution to demand OOCL to boycott all vessels operating out of Liverpool.

In 1989 the Thatcher government abolished the Nation Dock Labour Scheme, taking away almost every right won in struggle in over 100 years.

Setting up the dockers

Nicholas Finney OBE, the former director of Britain's National Association of Port Employers, boasted to a meeting of Australia's New Right HR Nicholl's Society of how he had set up the dockers. His methods are chillingly reminiscent of the recent 60 Minutes witchhunt against Australian wharfies.

Finney bragged that 'I led the campaign to end the National Dock Labour Scheme...We used every political body which had influence. We also used the press and media. We constantly searched out and supplied the media with anti-docker stories, headlines...These headlines were all designed to make it easier for the dockers to be isolated. By the time government acted every national newspaper...had published an editorial calling for the government to end the dock labour scheme.

'We had a Times columnist write headlines like "dock wages on the dock", "queer seaside customs", "legalised extortion rackets", "time to end it", "block those dock rip offs"...

'We commissioned economic studies...to try and prove that by getting rid of the dock labour scheme, you actually create many more jobs than you lose.' He went on to say how he managed to 'drive a wedge home to isolate dockers and describe them as a selfish, small group of workers who were actually stopping people from gaining jobs.'

Backed by the anti-trade union laws and huge government financial handouts the port employers succeeded in smashing union recognition, cutting wages and introducing part-time casual work in all British ports, EXCEPT IN LIVERPOOL.

This was the only port where a trade union force of dockers continued to exist which was not casualised.

The docker's fight is for regular employment, for the conditions that their forefathers won and for the right to collective organisation. Their fight is therefore the fight of millions of men and women throughout Britain, facing uncertainty of employment both day-to-day and long term. Everywhere employers are introducing casual labour and individual contracts.

• They want to cut their costs through flexible labour.
• They want workers at their beck and call to be brought to work or discarded at their will.
• Nearly half the labour in Britain today is casual and part-time.
• In education, in services, in industry in banking and other clerical work there is a rash of individual short-term contracts.

THE WORLD IS OUR PICKET LINE!
SUPPORT THE LIVERPOOL DOCKERS

http://www.labournet.org.uk

Acknowledgment to LabourNet

Donations can be sent to the Merseyside Dockers' Shop Stewards' Committee,
c/- Jimmy Davis, Treasurer, 119 Scorton St, Liverpool L64 AS, England.

Editors' postscript.

Let's give Drake some curry

The Drake International firm which employs the Liverpool scabs operates in Melbourne and other Australian cities. Australian socialists and trade unionists must ensure that this crowd is not allowed to get off scot free. Whilst they operate here they are a dagger at the heart of the labour movement. Militant proposes a labour movement campaign to show them that they cannot expect to attack our brothers and sisters in Liverpool without dire consequences. We urge readers to take the matter up with their trade unions with a view to developing a broad based solidarity campaign.