Solidarity Forever?

Jake Alimahomed-Wilson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. His research interests are in the areas of logistics, racism and labour, and workers' struggles. He is the author of Solidarity Forever? Race, Gender, and Unionism in the Ports of Southern California (Lexington Books, 2016), co-author of Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2008) and the editor of Choke Points (Pluto, 2018). Immanuel Ness is Professor of Political Science at City University of New York. He is author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto, 2015), co-editor of Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (Pluto, 2018) and editor of the International Encyclopaedia of Revolution and Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) remains one of the best examples of a labor union that traces its origins to radical anti-racist principles. Today, very few mainstream unions remain that were founded on militant, radical, and anti-racist principles. The ILWU remains the strongest port union in the United States, and its members are among the highest paid blue-collar union workers in the world. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival oral histories research, and ethnographic observation, Solidarity Forever? highlights the struggle of a key group of Black and women leaders who fought for racial and gender equality in the ports of Southern California. The book argues that institutional and cultural forms of racial and gender inequality are embedded within US trade union locals leading to the following deleterious consequences for unions: (1) a proliferation of internal discrimination lawsuits within unions, which can cost the union International, or union local, potentially millions of dollars in legal fees and financial settlements thereby redistributing precious financial resources that could be spent on key activities related to making unions stronger from outside attacks; (2) an erosion of trust and solidarity among workers, the key values of any successful union, which ultimately undermines the radical democratic potential of unions and rank-and-file participation in union politics; and (3) the undermining of workers of color and women workers as full and equal participants in the labor movement. The future of organized labor in the United States could very well be determined by the ability of the labor movement, and labor unions in particular, to listen to those workers who have been relegated to the margins of the global economy workers of color, immigrant workers, women workers, and all workers in the Global South."