More than 200 leaders of dockworker unions worldwide pledged support for the ILWU in its bargaining with the shipping and stevedoring companies of the Pacific Maritime Association and signed a letter to President Bush demanding he stop interfering in the negotiations.

At its annual Congress in Vancouver, British Columbia last weekend, the International Transport Workers Federation Dockers Section, representing 400,000 port workers in the sea transportation industry in 170 countries, passed a strongly worded resolution committing themselves to a successful conclusion to the ILWU’s negotiations.

The international docker unions, that have contracts with most of the same companies that compose the PMA, have seen the same kind of employer/government collusion against longshore unions before. In a situation just four years ago that foreshadowed Bush’s threats to send the National Guard to occupy and operate West Coast docks, the Australian government sent federal troops to seize port facilities in that country in 1998.

The Maritime Union of Australia united their national labor movement and galvanized international support—including the ILWU’s refusal to work the first and only scab-loaded ship to call on a U.S. West Coast port in May 1998—to stop that threat and protect the jobs of their members.

“This situation is not a surprise to any of these docker unions,” said ILWU International Vice President Bob McEllrath, who represented the ILWU at the ITF Congress. “They know this is the strategy of the international shipping and stevedoring companies. And they know that if the ILWU falls, they’re next.”

The docker union leaders also sent a letter to Bush telling him in part that “Negotiations on the future of the longshore industry and issues such as job security and technological change should take place through free collective bargaining between employees and management, without heavy-handed intervention by government officials at the request of corporate executives.”