Thanks you brothers and sisters. It’s a great turnout today. I can’t tell you how proud we are when we get together and show our solidarity, and we express it in a meaningful way, as we are doing here today.

In ports across the country, longshore workers and teamsters are standing together to demand waterfront justice, to demand that the shipping and stevedore companies negotiate a fair contract with the ILWU, that guarantees our healthcare benefits and our pensions, and to demand that they recognize the efforts of port truckers to unionize with teamsters.

Here in Oakland, we also stand with SEIU 790, port workers whose contract also expires Monday, and who are also facing cutbacks and outsourcing. And we have with us today representatives from dockworkers unions around the world, pledging their support for our struggle. This is a great show of workers’ solidarity, it is the kind of solidarity we need all the time, but even more when we face difficult contract negotiations.

We know what they have in mind for us. We’ve seen it before, at other times in other places. First they try to separate the community from the union, planting stories in the media that the unions have special interests, interests separate and different from the community. Then they start to outsource our jobs to weaken our position, and then they try to pick us off one at a time.

But it’s not going to happen this time. This time the community is not going to fall for the bosses’ propaganda. And this time the unions are going to stick together. But this time there’s a new twist. Ever since 9/11, the government and the employers have been using the excuse of national security to attack workers and unions.

When we exercise our rights to collectively bargain new contracts, with better wages and conditions, when we enforce those rights by collectively withdrawing labour, then they claim we are unpatriotic. But these are legal rights. There’s nothing unpatriotic about American workers insisting on their rights under the American law.

Because of the effects of the 9/11 attacks, there’s a weakened economy, the government and the employers say that the economy is disrupted by labour disputes. By workers demanding our rights, they say we are aiding terrorists.

But the real measure of a prosperous economy is whether the workers have a good standard of living, whether we have health care, whether we live in communities with clean air, and good schools, and housing. We’re not the terrorists, and we’re not aiding the terrorist attacks.

We demand a share of the wealth we produce every day. Waterfront workers are facing these terrorist accusations, not just as we negotiate our contracts. There’s legislation in Congress right now, the Maritime and Port Security Act, that treats every port worker like a terrorist suspect. Everyone will have to pass an FBI background check, to be able to keep their job.

Many of the crimes listed in the legislation that will cause workers to lose their jobs, have nothing to do with terrorism, and there’s no reason to believe any port worker would blow up his job and the community.

But the government and the ILWU employers, who are mostly foreign shipping companies, are trying to say that the American workers, the same workers who produced the economic boom in the 1990’s and kept international trade moving, should now be viewed as the enemy.

At the same time, these foreign companies are fighting any legal requirements to examine the real security risk in our ports. The thousands of containers that arrive every day from overseas.

The employers don’t want to take the time to check those containers to see if they carry terrorists or terrorist bombs, because it would cost them money. There is no clearer example of what this national security game is really all about. Destroy American unions so that big business can make more profits.

We are here today to say we won’t stand for that. We demand real national security, the security of our jobs and livelihoods, the security of our healthcare for everyone, the security of our communities’ environment. And we will settle for nothing less.

Let us go in solidarity, let us tell the world and show the world that the dockers of America, the dockers and the labour of America and the world, stand together to show everyone that an injury to one, is clearly an injury to all.

Jim Spinosa and Curt Cunningham - retired Local 19 member
FTAA Protest Rally - Blaine, Washington 2001