[Ok, Jack H. is a personal friend of mine and he asked me to post this
here. I'm not going to defend or disagree with this. I know John. H
will take an exception to this,but it'll stand here for documentation
purposes only. If you all want to debate this, fine.--DW]

Dear Editor:

Your article “War on Terror” Crackdown on the Docks (WV No. 936,
5/8/09) contains such a string of glaring omissions, willful
distortions and shameless lies that it is downright laughable for
longshore workers or anyone familiar with the struggles on the Bay
Area docks. Clearly, you are counting on your readers not having other
information than your dishonest account.

First of all, you use a false construct to criticize ILWU Local 10’s
banner in this year’s May Day march, “For Workers Solidarity to Stop
Government Repression, Stop the Unfair Use of TWIC Cards for Port
Workers, Stop Attacks on Immigrant Workers”. This, you claim, is a
“call for ‘fair’ implementation of government-enforced labor
discipline”. False. Are you saying that every time a union says
“unfair to labor” they are calling for “fair” bosses? Nonsense. You
can perfectly well oppose the discriminatory enforcement of a measure
and oppose the measure itself.

You go on to attack a call that I and others issued for a May Day work
stoppage this year to “defend our members who are unfairly denied
work” and to protest “the unfair implementation of TWIC cards for port
workers”. With an absurd rhetorical flourish, you ask: “What about
those who have been ‘fairly’ denied work and those, e.g., ‘un-
American’ undocumented workers and others, branded as ‘security
threats’”. You suggest that I don’t defend undocumented workers and
others branded “security threats”, and that I don’t oppose TWIC as a
whole. This is a vicious smear and pure invention, and no one on the
waterfront would believe it. Many longshoremen assumed my TWIC card
was held up for being a red.

ILWU members know that I’ve been in the forefront in opposing TWIC and
other acts of government oppression, leading fights in opposition to
the ILWU tops’ craven collaboration on the Maritime Security Act and
the Transport Worker Identification Credentials, and calling for our
union to act in defense of immigrant workers. In 2006, I put forward a
motion to “Oppose Repressive Port Security Measures Like HR 4954 and
the TWIC Card” which stressed that “some longshoremen have already
been deported because of these government background checks” and
“‘national security’ is being used to destroy union rights and power.”
I continue to fight against TWIC and for the rights of all immigrant
workers including ILWU longshoremen who've been deported. You can read
my recent 2009 ILWU Longshore Caucus and Convention Report about this.

At ILWU's November 2007 Labor Conference to Stop the War, which you
sneeringly dismissed, I and others put forward a motion urging union
action to stop the TWIC card as well as to strike against the war.
Again in December 2008, I ran for Longshore Caucus delegate on a
program including: “The phony ‘war on terror’ is being used to take
away democratic and trade union rights. Oppose TWIC cards, screening
of workers and the militarization of ports. Mobilize labor against the
repressive Maritime Transportation Security Act and USA Patriot Act
which will gut union power, ban job actions, strikes or any form of
port protest.” And at the recent ILWU Convention, I submitted a Local
10 motion for a “maritime conference to dump TWIC”. I also organized a
rank-and-file meeting at the Convention highlighting this demand.

The fact is that the union bureaucracy has consistently waved the flag
in the hue and cry over port security. So they squelched or “amended”
resolutions opposing the TWIC card outright to turn them into calls to
“improve” the Maritime Security Act. I have fought them on this down
the line while your lone supporter in the union has DONE NOTHING.

Despite our efforts to stop this piece of anti-union “national
security” legislation, the TWIC card was implemented last April. As I
predicted, it was used in a discriminatory way, particularly
blacklisting thousands of black, Latino and immigrant longshoremen. A
July 2009 study by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) reports
that more than 54,000 applications for the TWIC card were rejected,
and over 13,000 were not appealed. NELP reports that more than 70
percent of those appealing the denials were African American or
Latino, and that 40 percent involved immigrants. In other words, a
massive racist purge of dock workers has just taken place.

What should class-struggle unionists do about this? Follow your lead
in doing nothing, except to ritually denounce the TWIC card in
general? That is criminal abstentionism, in your case an increasingly
degenerative disorder. By denouncing calls to oppose the “unfair,”
discriminatory use of the TWIC card you are abandoning those thousands
of minority and immigrant workers, and even worse you are opposing a
struggle to defend them. Go explain to the victimized workers that it
is wrong to oppose the unfair implementation of the TWIC card that has
cost them their jobs. Your self-serving, backstabbing position is
shameful.

So the bureaucrats who repeatedly opposed or gutted resolutions
introduced by me against the TWIC card, even when they were passed by
the Local 10 membership, were now under pressure from the ranks who
were up in arms over the fact that thousands of maritime union members
were being denied the right to work. In this situation, I and others
called for the union to act on May 1, 2009 by stopping work to protest
both against how the TWIC is being used to keep out union members and
against the attacks on immigrant workers.

You gloat that this “never got off the ground” due to opposition from
the employers’ Pacific Maritime Association. In this, you join PMA
head McKenna and the ILWU tops. A motion for the work stoppage was
passed by Local 10, but the ILWU bureaucracy sabotaged it, quoting the
PMA’s opposition. Even so, we tried to get rank-and-filers to refuse
to take the jobs at the union's dispatch hall and march despite the
rain. Actually, SSA shutdown their yard operation in anticipation of
our action. YOU DID NOTHING.

In another of the lying smears in your article you write that “Heyman
goes on to take aim at ‘foreign seamen’”, maliciously distorting my op-
ed piece in the Daily Breeze (4/11/2009) for citing the fact that the
TWIC card was being used solely to exclude union members. Yet in a
leaflet that I and another Local 10 member distributed on May 1,
titled “Bay Area Labor: All Out to Defend Immigrant Rights!” we
sharply criticized union officials who “try to set U.S. and ‘foreign’
workers against each other,” saying “we have actively defended
international seamen in American ports and dockworkers in other
countries. To demonstrate this solidarity is why we are stopping work
on May 1.”

Since that doesn’t jibe with WV’s claim that I “take aim at ‘foreign
seamen’,” and since our leaflet criticized the inadequacy of the
previous Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee leaflet, you just
dismiss this as “deception.” The only deception here is your attempt
to deceive your readers, since we were fighting to stop work in
defense of victimized black, Latino and immigrant union members and
foreign-born workers, whereas your only interest seems to be in
smearing those of us in the union who have actively fought the
government’s militarization of the ports and continue to do so even
after the TWIC card has been implemented.

In fact, I’ve always called for organizing seamen on foreign flag
ships, a demand raised when I was an organizer for the Militant-
Solidarity Caucus of the National Maritime Union, a rank-and-file
group politically supported by the SL in the 1970s when it sought to
build class-struggle oppositions in the trade unions, which you no
longer do. In 1996, in the port of Stockton I organized a dock action
to demand Filipino seamen be paid remittances that their families
depended on which the shipowner had been withholding for several
months, and they be given their right to repatriation. They won their
demands by a concrete act of solidarity by longshoremen refusing to
work the ship.

That brings me to your egregious omissions. You write about the
government’s threats during the 2002 contract negotiations. You don’t
mention that you didn’t call for a strike then, in defiance of a Taft-
Hartley injunction, and that you suddenly dropped your call for “hot-
cargoing” war materiel. When, at an ILWU port rally, I made public the
threats by then-Homeland Security Czar Ridge and Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld to occupy West Coast ports with troops if cargo was stopped
by longshore workers, and I called for mobilizing the unions against
this threat, I was threatened with discipline from the ILWU piecards.
WV remained silent. You refer to the contract negotiated then as
concessionary, which it certainly was, but don’t mention that WV
didn’t call to oppose the contract, as I and other longshoremen did.
In fact, you made excuses for voting for the contract.

You do not report that I organized Local 10’s rallies at the Woodland
courthouse to defend brothers Ruffin and Harrison, racially targeted
by police in the guise of port security in the port of Sacramento. Nor
do you inform your readers that I have strongly  defended the right of
Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee spokesmen to speak at
rallies, sometimes at your request, against sectarian attempts to
exclude the SL and PDC. On the other hand, at a PDC rally in defense
of Mumia Abu-Jamal in Oakland last spring, when your organizers tried
to prevent Fred Hampton, Jr. of Prisoners of Conscience Committee from
speaking, I protested and PDC organizers acquiesced and allowed him to
speak. One month after your drivel appeared, I led a fight at theILWU
Caucus against the union bureaucrats to mobilize our union and the
labor movement behind a Ruffin/Harrison campaign to stop racial
profiling in port security. By your twisted logic, if workers oppose
racial profiling, then they must support “fair” port security.

I find it curious that you mention that “only a handful of
longshoremen came out to the protest in defense of immigrant rights”
on May 1, since your only presence there was half a handful of WV
salesmen. It’s also curious that you're calling me a bureaucrat. I am
a working longshoreman and have fought the union bureaucrats on TWIC
on every one of their sellouts. I was violently assaulted and arrested
by the cops in April 2003 when they attacked an antiwar demonstration
at the Oakland docks. In the gut instinct of a class-struggle
militant, as a business agent of Local 10, I had gone to defend our
union members, six of whom had been shot. Is that your idea of a union
bureaucrat?

Class-struggle militants in the trade unions not only oppose TWIC but
all forms of government repression. In November 2007 when the feds
intervened in Local 10 to take over our union elections, union
officers moved to comply. When I spoke against the feds’ iron heel,
calling for a labor mobilization to stop it, the Local 10 president
tried to rule me out of order at our union meeting.  A score of angry
union members rushed to the microphone to defend union democracy and
my right to speak. Your supporter stayed seated, consistent with the
armchair pseudo-revolutionary politics of your tendency.

This is particularly true of your treatment of the ILWU’s May Day 2008
West Coast port shutdown against the war. Even you are forced to admit
after the fact that it “pointed the way to the kind of working-class
action that is needed against the imperialist occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan.” But you did nothing to build it, and since then you have
devoted yourself to bad-mouthing this historic event, the first-ever
strike action by a U.S. union against a U.S. imperialist war. You
claim that it was “against the occupation of Iraq, but not
Afghanistan, the preferred war of the Democrats.” This is false, and
you know it. The motion by the ILWU Longshore Caucus from Local 10 for
the work stoppage was explicitly against the war in both Iraq and
Afghanistan and called for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from
the entire region.

It is true that the union bureaucrats sought to undermine the action,
opposing it from the outset and then spouting a lot of “support our
troops” rhetoric to distort its meaning when they couldn’t stop it
outright. What you do is equate the union tops with the union itself,
and if the bureaucracy doesn’t support an action, your immediate
reaction is that it isn’t a labor action and shouldn’t be supported.
This is a capitulation to the sellout union bureaucracy. A corollary
to that is your refusal to criticize NYC Transport Workers Union
President Toussaint for his misleadership of the 2005 TWU strike. Once
upon a time the Spartacist League stood for workers strikes against
imperialist wars, but that day is long gone. Today your role is to
gleefully quote the PMA and sellout union bureaucracy in attacking
those fighting for militant workers struggles. Yet, the PMA denounced
the May Day port shutdown as an “illegal strike,” and brought Taft-
Hartley charges under the NLRB against the union. The ILWU forced the
employers to drop these charges!

In fact your articles on the May Day 2008 ILWU coast-wide port
shutdown against the war recall nothing so much as your earlier
dismissal of the April 1999 ILWU port shutdown demanding freedom for
Mumia Abu-Jamal. After sneeringly dismissing it as nothing but a “two-
hour” union meeting, you later had to backtrack and say that you
should have “commend[ed] the ILWU stop-work action as an important
statement of the kind of social power needed for Jamal’s defense” (WV
No. 841, 2/4/05). You also admitted to a “sectarian error” in refusing
to participate in a September 1997 picket of the Neptune Jade in
solidarity with the Liverpool dock workers’ struggle in Britain. This
pattern is so repetitive that longshoremen have commented to me that
you have a knee-jerk dismissal of any struggle I've initiated.

And then there was the work stoppage by port truckers days after the
May Day 2008 ILWU port shutdown. We had been working with port
truckers, many of them immigrant workers, seeking in weekly conference
calls to organize joint strike action on May 1 in the Bay Area, Los
Angeles, New York and elsewhere. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed. But
energized by the ILWU’s shutdown, and by a limited simultaneous action
by railroad workers at the Port of Oakland, on May 5 and 6 the
truckers struck here. However, your supporter was working at the SSA
terminal on the morning of May 6 while the truckers were picketing!
Class principles demand honoring the picket line, the elementary line
in the class struggle. WV hypocritically takes the ILWU bureaucracy to
task for not calling on its members to respect the picket lines, but
that doesn't excuse your supporter working behind the picket line and
then joining the picket later during the lunch hour. Further union
records indicate your supporter worked at the SSA terminal a full day.

As we say in the labor movement of phony militants, “they talk the
talk, but do they walk the walk?” Having abandoned the fight to forge
a class-struggle opposition inside the unions, the Spartacist League
often strikes a combative posture in the pages of Workers Vanguard,
while your supporters do nothing to implement these calls. With your
paper positions, you try to give the appearance of militancy while
ducking the hard fight on the ground when it counts.

For principled class struggle against government repression,
Jack Heyman

On Oct 19, 11:09 am, nada <dwalters... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:

[Ok, Jack H. is a personal friend of mine and he asked me to post this
here. I'm not going to defend or disagree with this. I know John. H
will take an exception to this,but it'll stand here for documentation
purposes only. If you all want to debate this, fine.--DW]

I happen to have known Jack for a very, very long time. Though I can't
say I ever was a personal friend of his, once upon a time I had a very
high opinion of him.

I think he's gone down a wrong course, and he is regularly producing
lawyers' arguments for it. There are a number of his letters to WV
that have been published there with answers, likely this one will be
too, but who knows. One of the postings I put in here a few weeks ago
had criticisms of his course in the ILWU, which I agree with.

But I am uncomfortable about doing an indirect polemic with him here
on APST, for the same reason I never wanted to polemicize with Fred
Ferguson here either. And, unlike Jack Heyman, I never liked Fred
Ferguson much. Hell, I had some doubts about Ferguson back when he was
a member of the SL.

For all Jack's faults he is a fellow union brother, and I am simply
not interested in what the likes of Dusty and Vangelis might have to
say about this.

-jh-



Dear Editor:

Your article “War on Terror” Crackdown on the Docks (WV No. 936,
5/8/09) contains such a string of glaring omissions, willful
distortions and shameless lies that it is downright laughable for
longshore workers or anyone familiar with the struggles on the Bay
Area docks. Clearly, you are counting on your readers not having other
information than your dishonest account.

First of all, you use a false construct to criticize ILWU Local 10’s
banner in this year’s May Day march, “For Workers Solidarity to Stop
Government Repression, Stop the Unfair Use of TWIC Cards for Port
Workers, Stop Attacks on Immigrant Workers”. This, you claim, is a
“call for ‘fair’ implementation of government-enforced labor
discipline”. False. Are you saying that every time a union says
“unfair to labor” they are calling for “fair” bosses? Nonsense. You
can perfectly well oppose the discriminatory enforcement of a measure
and oppose the measure itself.

You go on to attack a call that I and others issued for a May Day work
stoppage this year to “defend our members who are unfairly denied
work” and to protest “the unfair implementation of TWIC cards for port
workers”. With an absurd rhetorical flourish, you ask: “What about
those who have been ‘fairly’ denied work and those, e.g., ‘un-
American’ undocumented workers and others, branded as ‘security
threats’”. You suggest that I don’t defend undocumented workers and
others branded “security threats”, and that I don’t oppose TWIC as a
whole. This is a vicious smear and pure invention, and no one on the
waterfront would believe it. Many longshoremen assumed my TWIC card
was held up for being a red.

ILWU members know that I’ve been in the forefront in opposing TWIC and
other acts of government oppression, leading fights in opposition to
the ILWU tops’ craven collaboration on the Maritime Security Act and
the Transport Worker Identification Credentials, and calling for our
union to act in defense of immigrant workers. In 2006, I put forward a
motion to “Oppose Repressive Port Security Measures Like HR 4954 and
the TWIC Card” which stressed that “some longshoremen have already
been deported because of these government background checks” and
“‘national security’ is being used to destroy union rights and power.”
I continue to fight against TWIC and for the rights of all immigrant
workers including ILWU longshoremen who've been deported. You can read
my recent 2009 ILWU Longshore Caucus and Convention Report about this.

At ILWU's November 2007 Labor Conference to Stop the War, which you
sneeringly dismissed, I and others put forward a motion urging union
action to stop the TWIC card as well as to strike against the war.
Again in December 2008, I ran for Longshore Caucus delegate on a
program including: “The phony ‘war on terror’ is being used to take
away democratic and trade union rights. Oppose TWIC cards, screening
of workers and the militarization of ports. Mobilize labor against the
repressive Maritime Transportation Security Act and USA Patriot Act
which will gut union power, ban job actions, strikes or any form of
port protest.” And at the recent ILWU Convention, I submitted a Local
10 motion for a “maritime conference to dump TWIC”. I also organized a
rank-and-file meeting at the Convention highlighting this demand.

The fact is that the union bureaucracy has consistently waved the flag
in the hue and cry over port security. So they squelched or “amended”
resolutions opposing the TWIC card outright to turn them into calls to
“improve” the Maritime Security Act. I have fought them on this down
the line while your lone supporter in the union has DONE NOTHING.

Despite our efforts to stop this piece of anti-union “national
security” legislation, the TWIC card was implemented last April. As I
predicted, it was used in a discriminatory way, particularly
blacklisting thousands of black, Latino and immigrant longshoremen. A
July 2009 study by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) reports
that more than 54,000 applications for the TWIC card were rejected,
and over 13,000 were not appealed. NELP reports that more than 70
percent of those appealing the denials were African American or
Latino, and that 40 percent involved immigrants. In other words, a
massive racist purge of dock workers has just taken place.

What should class-struggle unionists do about this? Follow your lead
in doing nothing, except to ritually denounce the TWIC card in
general? That is criminal abstentionism, in your case an increasingly
degenerative disorder. By denouncing calls to oppose the “unfair,”
discriminatory use of the TWIC card you are abandoning those thousands
of minority and immigrant workers, and even worse you are opposing a
struggle to defend them. Go explain to the victimized workers that it
is wrong to oppose the unfair implementation of the TWIC card that has
cost them their jobs. Your self-serving, backstabbing position is
shameful.

So the bureaucrats who repeatedly opposed or gutted resolutions
introduced by me against the TWIC card, even when they were passed by
the Local 10 membership, were now under pressure from the ranks who
were up in arms over the fact that thousands of maritime union members
were being denied the right to work. In this situation, I and others
called for the union to act on May 1, 2009 by stopping work to protest
both against how the TWIC is being used to keep out union members and
against the attacks on immigrant workers.

You gloat that this “never got off the ground” due to opposition from
the employers’ Pacific Maritime Association. In this, you join PMA
head McKenna and the ILWU tops. A motion for the work stoppage was
passed by Local 10, but the ILWU bureaucracy sabotaged it, quoting the
PMA’s opposition. Even so, we tried to get rank-and-filers to refuse
to take the jobs at the union's dispatch hall and march despite the
rain. Actually, SSA shutdown their yard operation in anticipation of
our action. YOU DID NOTHING.

In another of the lying smears in your article you write that “Heyman
goes on to take aim at ‘foreign seamen’”, maliciously distorting my op-
ed piece in the Daily Breeze (4/11/2009) for citing the fact that the
TWIC card was being used solely to exclude union members. Yet in a
leaflet that I and another Local 10 member distributed on May 1,
titled “Bay Area Labor: All Out to Defend Immigrant Rights!” we
sharply criticized union officials who “try to set U.S. and ‘foreign’
workers against each other,” saying “we have actively defended
international seamen in American ports and dockworkers in other
countries. To demonstrate this solidarity is why we are stopping work
on May 1.”

Since that doesn’t jibe with WV’s claim that I “take aim at ‘foreign
seamen’,” and since our leaflet criticized the inadequacy of the
previous Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee leaflet, you just
dismiss this as “deception.” The only deception here is your attempt
to deceive your readers, since we were fighting to stop work in
defense of victimized black, Latino and immigrant union members and
foreign-born workers, whereas your only interest seems to be in
smearing those of us in the union who have actively fought the
government’s militarization of the ports and continue to do so even
after the TWIC card has been implemented.

In fact, I’ve always called for organizing seamen on foreign flag
ships, a demand raised when I was an organizer for the Militant-
Solidarity Caucus of the National Maritime Union, a rank-and-file
group politically supported by the SL in the 1970s when it sought to
build class-struggle oppositions in the trade unions, which you no
longer do. In 1996, in the port of Stockton I organized a dock action
to demand Filipino seamen be paid remittances that their families
depended on which the shipowner had been withholding for several
months, and they be given their right to repatriation. They won their
demands by a concrete act of solidarity by longshoremen refusing to
work the ship.

That brings me to your egregious omissions. You write about the
government’s threats during the 2002 contract negotiations. You don’t
mention that you didn’t call for a strike then, in defiance of a Taft-
Hartley injunction, and that you suddenly dropped your call for

...

read more »

On Oct 19, 11:09 am, nada <dwalters... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:

[Ok, Jack H. is a personal friend of mine and he asked me to post this
here. I'm not going to defend or disagree with this. I know John. H
will take an exception to this,but it'll stand here for documentation
purposes only. If you all want to debate this, fine.--DW]

I happen to have known Jack for a very, very long time. Though I can't
say I ever was a personal friend of his, once upon a time I had a very
high opinion of him.

I think he's gone down a wrong course, and he is regularly producing
lawyers' arguments for it. There are a number of his letters to WV
that have been published there with answers, likely this one will be
too, but who knows. One of the postings I put in here a few weeks ago
had criticisms of his course in the ILWU, which I agree with.

But I am uncomfortable about doing an indirect polemic with him here
on APST, for the same reason I never wanted to polemicize with Fred
Ferguson here either. And, unlike Jack Heyman, I never liked Fred
Ferguson much. Hell, I had some doubts about Ferguson back when he was
a member of the SL.

For all Jack's faults he is a fellow union brother, and I am simply
not interested in what the likes of Dusty and Vangelis might have to
say about this.

-jh-





Dear Editor:

Your article “War on Terror” Crackdown on the Docks (WV No. 936,
5/8/09) contains such a string of glaring omissions, willful
distortions and shameless lies that it is downright laughable for
longshore workers or anyone familiar with the struggles on the Bay
Area docks. Clearly, you are counting on your readers not having other
information than your dishonest account.

First of all, you use a false construct to criticize ILWU Local 10’s
banner in this year’s May Day march, “For Workers Solidarity to Stop
Government Repression, Stop the Unfair Use of TWIC Cards for Port
Workers, Stop Attacks on Immigrant Workers”. This, you claim, is a
“call for ‘fair’ implementation of government-enforced labor
discipline”. False. Are you saying that every time a union says
“unfair to labor” they are calling for “fair” bosses? Nonsense. You
can perfectly well oppose the discriminatory enforcement of a measure
and oppose the measure itself.

You go on to attack a call that I and others issued for a May Day work
stoppage this year to “defend our members who are unfairly denied
work” and to protest “the unfair implementation of TWIC cards for port
workers”. With an absurd rhetorical flourish, you ask: “What about
those who have been ‘fairly’ denied work and those, e.g., ‘un-
American’ undocumented workers and others, branded as ‘security
threats’”. You suggest that I don’t defend undocumented workers and
others branded “security threats”, and that I don’t oppose TWIC as a
whole. This is a vicious smear and pure invention, and no one on the
waterfront would believe it. Many longshoremen assumed my TWIC card
was held up for being a red.

ILWU members know that I’ve been in the forefront in opposing TWIC and
other acts of government oppression, leading fights in opposition to
the ILWU tops’ craven collaboration on the Maritime Security Act and
the Transport Worker Identification Credentials, and calling for our
union to act in defense of immigrant workers. In 2006, I put forward a
motion to “Oppose Repressive Port Security Measures Like HR 4954 and
the TWIC Card” which stressed that “some longshoremen have already
been deported because of these government background checks” and
“‘national security’ is being used to destroy union rights and power.”
I continue to fight against TWIC and for the rights of all immigrant
workers including ILWU longshoremen who've been deported. You can read
my recent 2009 ILWU Longshore Caucus and Convention Report about this.

At ILWU's November 2007 Labor Conference to Stop the War, which you
sneeringly dismissed, I and others put forward a motion urging union
action to stop the TWIC card as well as to strike against the war.
Again in December 2008, I ran for Longshore Caucus delegate on a
program including: “The phony ‘war on terror’ is being used to take
away democratic and trade union rights. Oppose TWIC cards, screening
of workers and the militarization of ports. Mobilize labor against the
repressive Maritime Transportation Security Act and USA Patriot Act
which will gut union power, ban job actions, strikes or any form of
port protest.” And at the recent ILWU Convention, I submitted a Local
10 motion for a “maritime conference to dump TWIC”. I also organized a
rank-and-file meeting at the Convention highlighting this demand.

The fact is that the union bureaucracy has consistently waved the flag
in the hue and cry over port security. So they squelched or “amended”
resolutions opposing the TWIC card outright to turn them into calls to
“improve” the Maritime Security Act. I have fought them on this down
the line while your lone supporter in the union has DONE NOTHING.

Despite our efforts to stop this piece of anti-union “national
security” legislation, the TWIC card was implemented last April. As I
predicted, it was used in a discriminatory way, particularly
blacklisting thousands of black, Latino and immigrant longshoremen. A
July 2009 study by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) reports
that more than 54,000 applications for the TWIC card were rejected,
and over 13,000 were not appealed. NELP reports that more than 70
percent of those appealing the denials were African American or
Latino, and that 40 percent involved immigrants. In other words, a
massive racist purge of dock workers has just taken place.

What should class-struggle unionists do about this? Follow your lead
in doing nothing, except to ritually denounce the TWIC card in
general? That is criminal abstentionism, in your case an increasingly
degenerative disorder. By denouncing calls to oppose the “unfair,”
discriminatory use of the TWIC card you are abandoning those thousands
of minority and immigrant workers, and even worse you are opposing a
struggle to defend them. Go explain to the victimized workers that it
is wrong to oppose the unfair implementation of the TWIC card that has
cost them their jobs. Your self-serving, backstabbing position is
shameful.

So the bureaucrats who repeatedly opposed or gutted resolutions
introduced by me against the TWIC card, even when they were passed by
the Local 10 membership, were now under pressure from the ranks who
were up in arms over the fact that thousands of maritime union members
were being denied the right to work. In this situation, I and others
called for the union to act on May 1, 2009 by stopping work to protest
both against how the TWIC is being used to keep out union members and
against the attacks on immigrant workers.

You gloat that this “never got off the ground” due to opposition from
the employers’ Pacific Maritime Association. In this, you join PMA
head McKenna and the ILWU tops. A motion for the work stoppage was
passed by Local 10, but the ILWU bureaucracy sabotaged it, quoting the
PMA’s opposition. Even so, we tried to get rank-and-filers to refuse
to take the jobs at the union's dispatch hall and march despite the
rain. Actually, SSA shutdown their yard operation in anticipation of
our action. YOU DID NOTHING.

In another of the lying smears in your article you write that “Heyman
goes on to take aim at ‘foreign seamen’”, maliciously distorting my op-
ed piece in the Daily Breeze (4/11/2009) for citing the fact that the
TWIC card was being used solely to exclude union members. Yet in a
leaflet that I and another Local 10 member distributed on May 1,
titled “Bay Area Labor: All Out to Defend Immigrant Rights!” we
sharply criticized union officials who “try to set U.S. and ‘foreign’
workers against each other,” saying “we have actively defended
international seamen in American ports and dockworkers in other
countries. To demonstrate this solidarity is why we are stopping work
on May 1.”

Since that doesn’t jibe with WV’s claim that I “take aim at ‘foreign
seamen’,” and since our leaflet criticized the inadequacy of the
previous Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee leaflet, you just
dismiss this as “deception.” The only deception here is your attempt
to deceive your readers, since we were fighting to stop work in
defense of victimized black, Latino and immigrant union members and
foreign-born workers, whereas your only interest seems to be in
smearing those of us in the union who have actively fought the
government’s militarization of the ports and continue to do so even
after the TWIC card has been implemented.

In fact, I’ve always called for organizing seamen on foreign flag
ships, a demand raised when I was an organizer for the Militant-
Solidarity Caucus of the National Maritime Union, a rank-and-file
group politically supported by the SL in the 1970s when it sought to
build class-struggle oppositions in the trade unions, which you no
longer do. In 1996, in the port of Stockton I organized a dock action
to demand Filipino seamen be paid remittances that their families
depended on which the shipowner had been withholding for several
months, and they be given their right to repatriation. They won their
demands by a concrete act of solidarity by longshoremen refusing to
work the ship.

That brings me to your egregious omissions. You write about the
government’s threats during the 2002 contract negotiations. You don’t
mention that you didn’t call for a strike then, in defiance of a Taft-
Hartley injunction, and that you suddenly dropped your call for

...

read more »

On Oct 19, 11:09 am, nada <dwalters... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:

[Ok, Jack H. is a personal friend of mine and he asked me to post this
here. I'm not going to defend or disagree with this. I know John. H
will take an exception to this,but it'll stand here for documentation
purposes only. If you all want to debate this, fine.--DW]

I happen to have known Jack for a very, very long time. Though I can't
say I ever was a personal friend of his, once upon a time I had a very
high opinion of him.

I think he's gone down a wrong course, and he is regularly producing
lawyers' arguments for it. There are a number of his letters to WV
that have been published there with answers, likely this one will be
too, but who knows. One of the postings I put in here a few weeks ago
had criticisms of his course in the ILWU, which I agree with.

But I am uncomfortable about doing an indirect polemic with him here
on APST, for the same reason I never wanted to polemicize with Fred
Ferguson here either. And, unlike Jack Heyman, I never liked Fred
Ferguson much. Hell, I had some doubts about Ferguson back when he was
a member of the SL.

For all Jack's faults he is a fellow union brother, and I am simply
not interested in what the likes of Dusty and Vangelis might have to
say about this.

sherlock can occasionally be interesting to discuss with, but it's
hard to have respect for a person who will forgo an interesting or
important discussion for sentiment's sake.

srd