The ILWU will hold its 32nd International Convention this year in San Francisco from April 28-May 2. The delegates you have elected from your locals will be entrusted with setting the direction our union will take in the next three years.

This is an awesome responsibility. The lives of all ILWU members will be affected by the decisions we will make about how to defend our gains and extend our influence and decisions about how we will shoulder those responsibilities and finance those programs we decide on.

This is a daunting task, especially because we have just one short week of meetings to complete it. Given the challenges we have faced recently from our employers and the government and the challenges we can already see ahead of us and the rest
of the labor movement, the International officers will be bringing some proposals to the Convention. Among these will be proposals to increase the ILWU’s political and legislative activities.

When the Longshore Division was under attack last year by the combined forces of the employers and the Bush administration and its Republican allies in Congress, our Washington, D.C. office and our rank-and-file Legislative Action
Committee moved quickly to rally our friends in Congress and in state governments to come to our defense. Those timely actions helped blunt the most extreme moves against us. The Bush administration was forced to drop its plans to send the military to seize West Coast docks and to publicly deny it ever threatened or planned to do so. Pending legislation to take away the ILWU’s rights to collective bargaining and to strike or to break up our coastwise contract never made it to the floor.

The only weapon Bush had left to use against us was the Taft-Hartley injunction. But when the employers tried to use the injunction’s prohibition against slowdowns to break the union, our friends in state governor’s houses and legislatures and in local governments raise and legitimized our realistic safety concerns, helping us to dodge that bullet.

While we emerged from this struggle intact and with a good contract, our enemies are not done with us. They still see us—right- fully—as the most democratic, progressive and militant expression of workers’ power in this country.

Right now the employers are cynically using the terrorist threat and the need for security to weaken the ILWU. They are working overtime to see that legitimate port security legislation is twisted to harass individual longshore workers, to diminish our power at the point of production and to chip away at our jurisdiction, reducing the jobs that should be ours.

Then of course there is the constant barrage of Republican anti-worker laws that are aimed at all workers and affect ILWU members as well. These include everything from tax cuts for the rich that shift the burden of federal expenses further to workers, to laws that allow employers to escape their pension obligations to proposals to impose burdensome and costly
accounting requirements on unions far in excess of what corporations must report.

It is clear that the defense of ILWU interests—and the interests of all workers—requires us to be much more involved in the political process. We need to make sure our voices are heard and listened to. We need to reward our friends and punish our enemies.

There are several ways we can do this. First we need the commitment and involvement of every member of the ILWU. The load is lighter if everyone helps to lift it. We need members to contribute financially and to volunteer their time and
skills.

It is an unfortunate fact that political action requires money. We need to not only staff and operate our legislative office in Washington, D.C. and send rank-and-filers to the Capitol to lobby, we need to contribute money to pro-worker politicians.
This is part of rewarding our friends. They have to run for reelection and ward off challenges by better funded pro-business candidates or they won’t be around to help us. The law requires that union political donations, unlike those from corporations,
come from a voluntary fund, so you must take the initiative for this to succeed. The International officers will be proposing to make a $50 per year per member voluntary political action contribution official ILWU policy. If everyone pitches in, we
could have nearly half a million dollars to spread around.

But your union needs more than money—it needs your time and energy to make politics work for us. There are many ways you can help and each member should find one or two.

Each geographic area of the union has a “District Council,” the ILWU’s political action branch. [Local 142 has a Local Political Action Committee whose basic function is the same as the District Council.] District Councils lobby politicians, endorse candidates and promote legislation and policies beneficial to the ILWU and all working people. Your local’s officers can put you in contact with your District Council and get you involved.

While the rank-and-file members of our Legislative Action Committee periodically travel to Washington, D.C. to lobby on our behalf, it is not necessary to go across the country to influence Congressional representatives. They make regular trips back
to their home states. The District Councils can and should be organizing lobbying visits when the representatives are home. In the same manner local members should pay regular visits to state representatives at their home offices and get to know local officials as well—mayors, city council members, county supervisors. Politicians need to and like to hear from rank-and-file union members.

Another thing rank-and-filers and their locals can do to extend the ILWU’s political influence is to join and work with the AFL-CIO political organizations—your state Federations of Labor and your Central Labor Councils. [Local 142 is a member of the Hawaii State AFL-CIO, also called the “State Fed” for short.] These organizations bring together all the AFL-CIO unions in the area to effect political change in favor of workers. Pooling our efforts makes us all stronger, and gives us an excellent opportunity to build solidarity with other unions as well.

Last year the ILWU sent out 33 rank-and-filers to campaign in key states just before the November elections to try to defeat anti-worker candidates and elect pro-worker ones. They were effective and made great contacts with other union workers.
This is another way we can reward our friends and punish our enemies and we need to do more of this.

We do not need to be the victims of political power in this country. Organized labor, and especially the ILWU, can have influence far beyond our numbers if we stay strong, smart and active.