https://iclfi.org/pubs/bh/27/unions
If you want to fight for black liberation, it is necessary to strengthen and expand the labor unions in order to have the necessary force required to fight back against this racist capitalist system. The very concept of a union means collective action: the workers are stronger together against the boss than they can ever be separately. Union militants must strive to combat all divisions that keep the workers movement on its knees, especially right now when Trump has made it clear that he will restore U.S. dominance on the backs of the workers and the oppressed.
The capitalists’ main weapon to weaken their wage slaves is racial oppression, caused by the forcible segregation of black people, which divides workers and cripples collective struggle. Another weapon is the division of workers with seniority against the new hires, who suffer lower wages and benefits. This inequality is commonly referred to as the “tiers” system, where black people are often allocated to the bottom rungs, reflecting their position in society.
These obstacles to working-class unity are just as important today as they were when we first published, in 2024, the articles below about the East and Gulf Coast International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). These two unions offer some of the best jobs open to black people, and both unions have a significant black membership.
In the ILA, the carving up of locals by race and craft cripples the union’s power to stand up against the bosses and against government attacks. The need to fuse the separate locals at each port was sharply posed at the time of the ILA’s October 2024 strike. This class battle could have been a game changer for all labor, galvanizing port and other workers to join in and win a decisive victory. But instead of organizing the strike to maximize the unity and strength of longshore workers and their working-class allies, the union tops did the very opposite, partnering with the Biden administration behind the scenes to end the strike early. Later, in collaboration with Trump, they cooked up a contract that keeps the divisions among longshore workers intact.
Our article offers a blueprint for forging a new class-struggle leadership in the ILA committed to merging the segregated locals. Forging this new leadership requires a strategy that fights for jobs for all at no loss in weekly pay, and that ensures black workers will not be second-class citizens in an integrated local. The latter is a real concern for black longshoremen who have witnessed rampant discrimination in nominally “integrated” unions and one racist “anti-DEI” purge after another in the government sector.
Meanwhile on the West Coast, ILWU bottom-tier workers receive inferior wages, no health benefits and are not even allowed to be full voting members of the ILWU until years after they start working on the docks! The militant reputation of this union as one which fights for black rights is belied by its leadership’s enforcement of the tier system, which, as this article explains, overlaps and reinforces the racial divisions which the capitalist class uses to sap the power of the entire class.
The Committee to End Tier Segregation was founded in 2024 in the majority-black ILWU Local 10 to fight for full wages, benefits and union membership for all longshoremen. Many ILWUers look at the entrenched tiers system—enforced by the ILWU leadership going back to Harry Bridges, who agreed to the first tier in the 1959 contract—as impossible to dislodge. It will indeed take a major coast-wide fight and confrontation with the shipping bosses to abolish the tiers, which save them millions every year. But the road to forging a new union leadership committed to unleashing the considerable social power of the ILWU lies through the fight to abolish the tiers.
