By the mid-nineties there was but one port in England operating under a collective bargaining agreement, and that was Liverpool. But in 1995 the Mersey Docks and Harbor Company fired 500 men there when they refused to cross a picket line set up by their workmates, some of whom had been fired for opposing employer attempts to sabotage a labor agreement. The Liverpool workers did an extraordinary job of alerting longshore unions around the world to what was going on, as was attested by what happened to the Neptune Jade after the I.L.W.U. workers refused to cross the line to handle its cargo. The ship plowed north to Vancouver and met the same refusal. It then headed west across the Pacific, only to face adamant dockers first in Yokohama and then in Kobe.
International solidarity is a longshore tradition.
In the seventies and eighties the I.L.W.U. participated in protests against General Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile. In 1990, when Nelson Mandela visited the United States, he made a particular point of thanking I.L.W.U. workers for their vigorous support of the A.N.C. across the years. The court cases involving the port of Oakland are only the latest in an effort by the P.M.A. to let longshore workers know that almost any action inhibiting the capacity to move cargo as swiftly and cheaply as possible will be met with unending lawsuits, any one of which could, if the verdict went the wrong way, bankrupt the union. The I.L.W.U. is one of the few unions that still believe in job actions at the point of production as a means of concentrating employers' minds on the issue in contention. These workers are also among the best-paid in America as a consequence of such historic militancy.