ILWU 10 Meeting On Mumia & Report From Trip To South Africa

ILWU 10 meeting for Mumia with presentation on ILWU Local 10 delegation to South Africa and Durban Commemoration conference on 50th anniversary of Duban working class uprising about apartheid.

Resolution of this trade union Celebration of the 1973 mass strikes in Durban, South Africa, 29 January 2023
This conference of trade unions, workers and supporters of the labour movement resolves as follows:
We celebrate the massive solidarity of Black workers in 1973 which started the social revolution in South Africa which is still burning. Freedom has not resolved the deepest inequality, unemployment and poverty of the world which continues in South Africa as workers live in conditions of privatization, casualization, mass unemployment, homelessness and destitution.
The mass unions which were built in the 1970s need to be reborn in the original spirit of workers democracy and the strongest commitment to socialism.
We celebrate the women who led in the 1973 strikes and beyond including June Rose Nala, Jabu Ndlovu, Thembi Mpisi and dedicate ourselves to researching and highlighting the role of women labour leaders in South Africa.
We salute the generation of resistance of 1973 captured in photos, we acknowledge the marvelous work of workers themselves as well as Barney Dladla who gave everything to the movement, we resolve to spread this heritage throughout South Africa, Southern Africa and the world.
We salute the South African transport workers who, in April 2008, refused to offload the ZIM vessel carrying arms from China to Zimbabwe.



Whereas we refer to ILWU San Francisco Local 10 resolution: Free Innocent and Framed Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal (attached).
We warn workers of the war against trade unions that foreign investment is waging on workers, particularly miners. We give full solidarity with Namibian Rossing miners who have been fired for fighting to safeguard trade union rights and now find that all labour has been out- sourced.
On March 28, 2023 we support labour community actions worldwide at all Chinese embassies and consulates demanding that they reinstate the dismissed mineworkers in their jobs.
We resolve to rebuild the dock workers international combine to mobilize practical solidarity to achieve union hiring halls in all ports around the world. We will end labour broking once and for all! There should be practical union-union support in exchanges, education, and on-going discussion of our priorities.
We resolve to oppose privatization of our jurisdiction, jobs, and dock workers by all means necessary. Privatization can take many forms; formal contracts, internal plunder and private appropriation without formal out-sourcing, out-sourcing of essential activities (without any public review), and the sale of dock land to billionaires. All this we refuse to accept and will resist by local and international action.
The ports should be overseen by workers themselves to be safe, have good working conditions, be productive in the interests of all workers and every part of public property must be secured.
We also call on Transnet immediately to provide recognition to RETUSA and to stop all privatization of ports and rail.
We resolve to stop all present and future police terror in US and internationally. We want justice for comrade Tyre Nichols whom was brutally beaten and murdered by American police after being stopped for reckless driving by five police in Memphis, Tennessee.
We resolve to fight against the utter destruction of our world by rapacious capitalism which is failing to break its links to fossil fuel. Instead, it is utterly committed to massive profits in gas, oil and every

destructive source of energy. We stand in solidarity with the peasants and workers of Pakistan which have had their lives devastated by floods of climate change. We have solidarity with those made homeless by vastly destructive floods in Durban in 2022.
We resolve to build a socialist world meeting the needs of all by the full development of renewable sources of energy such as the sun and the wind. The world needs scientists and engineers to dedicate themselves to building such energy sources and provide energy free to mankind.
We are appalled to see rival imperialisms arming themselves to the teeth in the Ukrainian war. The taxes from working people in the US, EU and Russia are now being diverted from redressing the devastation of climate change and impoverishment to the means of death and destruction. We call on workers in the US, EU, in Russia and China to organize to stop the mobilization for war which will end all our futures.
We call for the release of all itrade unionists and workers internationally. We note the imprisonment of independent trade unionists such as Hennadz (Gennadyi) Fiadynich, leader of the electrical workers union, REP, in Belarus. We call on the Belarusian regime to release him immediately before he succumbs to chronic illness and all other trade unionists who are political prisoners.
We support a worldwide labour action against Israeli ships and trade, including against the ZIM shipping line and a global labour boycott of Israel in support of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
We call on all unions to build trade unions on the basis of workers’ independence from alliances of all types. We have heard evidence in South Africa and elsewhere of the vast destruction of industry and jobs that has come about by parties which represent capitalist interests even as they firmly deny this.

We also call on the Durban Municipality, the African National Congress, COSATU and all trade unionists and parties to make plaques to commemorate the resistance of the stevedores housed at Southampton Road who ignited the 1973 strikes, the Bambatha prisoners of war who built the northern pier and harbour and developed the Umgeni quarry, and the thousands of railway workers housed in barbaric conditions in the SARH barracks in Camperdown Road. This must be done by May Day 2023.
We dedicate ourselves to energize organic working-class intellectuals and leaders.
We call for the opening the books of the AFL-CIO to hold them accountable for their financial support of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and we call for compensation to be paid to the families of those many thousands who were killed by the IFP.We call for an end to the funding of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Centre by the National Endowment Fund.
We call on all workers in every country to take up the struggle for mass workers’ parties to represent workers interests, to construct an economy without destroying our universe, to provide good quality work for all, and to guarantee a future for our children.
ILWU Local 10 resolution: Free Innocent and Framed Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal
Whereas, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been imprisoned in Pennsylvania for 41 years, 29 of those years on death row, and

Whereas, in 2002, during contract negotiations he wrote articles from prison supporting the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) when President Bush threatened to send troops into the ports and invoked the slave labor Taft-Hartley Act against our union when we were locked out by PMA, and
Whereas, he is being defended by the Vermont AFL-CIO, the Portland Painters’ Union Local 10, the International Dockworkers Council, ILWU Local 10, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), that country’s largest union, whose letter to the governor of Pennsylvania stated that Mumia is being treated like imprisoned freedom fighters in apartheid South Africa who when they became sick were left to die, and
Whereas, 6 boxes of files on Mumia’s case were mysteriously “discovered” in the Philadelphia District Attorney Krasner’s office in 2019. In it a hand-written message to D.A. McGill from the star witness, Robert Chobert, at his trial was found demanding money owed him for his perjured testimony. And
Whereas, Judge Wendell Griffen of the Sixth Judicial Circuit of Arkansas declared that this evidence was illegally withheld from Mumia’s defense attorneys and that Blacks were unconstitutionally excluded from the jury, that Mumia should be released and is entitled to a new trial, and
Whereas, Judge Lucretia Clemons on December 16 ordered the prosecution to give access to the defense to all 200 boxes of documents on Mumia’s case and she gave the defense and prosecution 60 days to examine them, and
Whereas, D.A. Krasner’s intransigent opposition to Judge Tucker’s ruling that Mumia has a right to an appeal shows that there is no justice

in the racist, capitalist courts for Black Panthers and working class political prisoners,
Therefore Be It Resolved that this dockworkers conference in Durban, South Africa calls for international labor actions to free Mumia on February 16 – the end of the judge’s 60 days – to free Mumia.
Adopted by the Organizing Committee and those present at the Workers and Trade Union Conference including:
Joseph Dube, General Secretary of the Revolutionary Transport Union of South Africa (RETUSA)
The International Longshoreman and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU) Local 10
Jabu Nala-Hartley, daughter of June Rose, Labour councilor in Oxford and socialist
Workers’ International Network, a world-wide network of labour activists fighting for socialism
David Hemson, trade unionist, socialist and social historian Steve Zeltzer, labour journalist, WorkWeek
Carol Lang, history professor, New York UFCLP
United Front Committee For A Labor Party
Hoshino Defense Committee and International Labor Solidarity Committee of Doro-Chiba
Labor United Educational League (LUEL)

URGENT: Please table this resolution at your trade union or labour movement branch and notify us of endorsements; send to David Hemson dhemson [at] gmail.com and info [at] ufclp.org