"We will keep on fighting until all the charges are dropped!" said Ken Riley, president of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) Local 1422, to the 100 participants at the March 9 meeting. Several members of the embattled local, including Elijah Ford and Charles Brave, two of the workers facing felony charges, joined Riley at the event. Ford, Brave, and the other three unionists under indictment have been under house arrest for more than a year.

Riley underlined the importance of this fight for all working people. South Carolina is the least organized state in the country, resulting in the low wages and benefits that attract companies to the area from all over the world.

Riley said the demonstration last year of some 50,000 people in Columbia, South Carolina, demanding the state government remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol played a role in the dockworkers' fight. Prior to the mass rally the ILA organized picket lines on the waterfront in Charleston to protest "vessel calls" by ships owned by the Nordana lines.

After 23 years of hiring union members to work its ships, the company began hiring nonunion workers. In response to the union's pickets, government authorities convened a law enforcement summit, Riley said, to mobilize police and a wide assortment of "antiriot" equipment, including armored personnel carriers, gunboats, and rubber bullets.

"The next ship was due in port just as the state flag demonstration occurred, which involved many dockworkers and other unionists," Riley said. "So port authorities were instructed to hold the ship outside the harbor a few days until things settled down." A large union picket line put up when the ship did come to port was assaulted by police. The state subsequently filed felony charges against the five workers, and the shipping company is pressing civil lawsuits against the union.

Speakers from the Atlanta Labor Council promised to send buses to South Carolina as soon as a trial date is set. Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, also spoke.

After the speeches, the ILA Gospel Singers performed while the crowd mingled and shook hands with the fighters from Charleston.

Elijah Ford said that during his house arrest, the authorities don't "even give you permission to take your kids out." He and the others expressed appreciation for the support they had received across the nation. "This is 2001," Ford said. "We're supposed to be moving ahead, not backwards. We need to get rid of the flag. I don't want my kids to live like it was in the 1930s."

Supporters of the longshoremen's struggle were fired up by the rally. Jason Joye, a youth who grew up in South Carolina and is a member of the Atlanta Mutual Aid Collective, looked forward to riding the buses. Leonard Turner, a retired auto worker, agreed.

Union members at the Hormel plant in Atlanta are supporting the struggle as well. One worker, Sabrina Williams, has been getting out information about the dockworkers' fight to her co-workers and plans to keep building union support in her local. "It's all about unity," she said. "When we stick together, there's nothing we can't do."

Jeff Rogers is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1996 at Hormel, in Atlanta.  
 
 
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