Ship of Shame, and a union to be proud of

Published Monday April 28th, 2008

I was born in Nova Scotia - which means I have a pro union streak that runs blood deep. Or perhaps I better say pro co-op movement.

The Antigonish Movement evolved from the pioneering work of Rev. Dr. Moses Coady and Rev. Jimmy Tompkins in the 1920s. The local community development movement originated as a response to the poverty afflicting farmers, fishers, miners and other disadvantaged groups in Eastern Canada. They wanted to offer practical education and empowerment to allow individuals to make a difference in their world.

Coady once wrote: "you are poor enough to want it and smart enough to do it."

If you think about it, unions, in one form or another, are directly responsible for the Social Credit movement, for Caisse Populaires and the Credit Union, even for welfare and medicare. One of the great advocates of unions in his day was Dr. Norman Bethune, controversial though his political opinions were; he pretty much founded the Red Cross and blood transfusion services that have kept someone related to anyone who reads this alive.

I am just trying to declare a bias right up front -- I have always believed in unions; while maintaining a fair dose of realism around the fact that no system works all of the time. There have certainly been union abuses, and Jimmy Hoffa might argue against them if he showed up. . . Dockworkers unions seem especially fraught with fear -- especially in their Hollywoodized version in which the dockyards are a front for the seedy underbelly of organized crime.

The news this last week, however, redeems the idea of the dockworkers union completely. There is this ship, and the African press has dubbed it the "Ship of Shame" which is essentially a freighter from China trying to deliver weapons to Africa -- specifically weapons ordered by Robert Mugabe before the election results were tabulated in Zimbabwe; or the cynic might claim after he realized it would take force to reclaim the throne.

For the record the actual ship in question is the An Yue Jiang -- registered in China and one of 600 vessels owned by the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO); and here is what happened: The ship was denied entrance to Durban, South Africa by the collective efforts of a news magazine editor, Martin Welz, who warned of the ship's impending arrival, industrial action by members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, who said they would not unload the cargo, and the Southern African Litigation Centre, which obtained a High Court order on April 18, prohibiting passage of the weapons across South African soil.

This movement then became a union effort, spreading across the port cities of Southern Africa, in which every single dockworker refused to unload or refuel the Ship of Shame.

Can you imagine this -- the union flexing its muscle for social justice; it almost brings back the heady days of farmer co-ops during the Depression. These are the good things that are possible with organized labour -- a value based understanding of what they do.

Don't get me wrong, I understand how unions have resorted to violence on occasion; I understand that as management you may well be forced by your parent company to implement staff decisions that a union opposes, perhaps unions might even force you to dangerously undercut your bottom line -- and even lose the ability to employ those same unionized workers.

Hear me when I say I am talking about a perfect world -- and I am talking about a reality when unions band workers together to make a difference in the world -- that is when the ideal of a united front becomes a powerful force of change and is something to take pride in.

I was once deep in the rainforests of Guatemala drinking tepid Tecate beer with a representative of the Canadian Autoworkers Union. It was a fairly surreal experience, made crazier by the fact that we ordered seafood chowder in the middle of a jungle, having become incredibly tired of black beans and corn tortillas, and both of us almost died of food poisoning. Here we were, however, in the rainforest helping to organize a repatriation of indigenous peasants from exile in Mexico to the jungles of Guatemala. The CAW took the plight of the Mayan Indians of Central America seriously enough to put some muscle behind doing the right thing.

Which is as it should be; would that more of us could band together, work together, care enough about the things that are going wrong to try and make a difference.

All Africa News has reported that Lloyds of London has declared the ship "lost"; a blanket coverage term to indicate that the insured purpose of the trip is no longer possible. It would be nice to believe that this is enough incentive for COSCO to turn their ship around and head home -- they have after all been paid for their cargo through an insurance claim. Perhaps they will. Perhaps increased media coverage as the Western news picks this up will force a happy conclusion. Perhaps China will even stop transporting weapons to Africa.

Whatever becomes of it; the dockworkers have taken a stand -- the right one. Too few people seem willing to stand up for what they believe in, and when we find those that do, they should be celebrated.