Danny Glover

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist—it really doesn’t—to figure this out. We can talk about all kinds of statistics and strategies around profit, about all the theories around markets. But there is something in that discussion that cannot be reduced, that cannot be ignored. What cannot be reduced is those who don’t care about what happens to human beings, what happens to children, what happens to those who work all their lives and who then retire. We cannot be reduced to forgetting about that. No matter what the market strategies, whatever the market theories, whatever the current economic theories are, we cannot be reduced to believing that all of this is natural science. This is not natural science. This is about what human beings do and how human beings transform themselves or not transform themselves, how human beings themselves act and decide what is important. If life and the preservation of life is important, then that is what we have to elevate. Not the preservation of profits, not the preservation of evil-spiritedness, not the preservation of inhumanity. We have to hold on to the preservation of people. And unions do that. Unions talk about the people and they do that.”

Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer

“I want you to think about a convention hall like this that goes back a hundred years when our forefathers sat in a place like this fighting, struggling, bleeding and sometimes dying so that we could build a better country. Now they are trying to tear it all down. You see, the contradictions are stark and the damage to working families is deep. Quite frankly, when I look at it, I am ashamed of our country, what it’s doing to workers."

“Brothers and sisters, these atrocities didn’t just happen accidently. Neither God nor the mysterious hand of the marketplace is responsible. They are the result of a corporate war on working families, and it’s been going on for 25 years now. The wounds are raw and the wounds are visible and the effect that it is having on our country is more pronounced than it has ever been.”


David Cockroft, ITF General Secretary

“I arrived yesterday from Washington where I was briefing many U.S. affiliates of the ITF on our action program, just in time for the Blue Diamond march which showed very clearly that the ILWU is a fighting union, ready to take its demands onto the streets. I was very happy to be part of that rally—which we will be publicizing to unions around the world as part of our electronic online news service. I’m happy to see the close cooperation here in the beautiful city of Vancouver between two ITF affiliates—the ILWU and the Teamsters. And that in holding a rally outside Safeway you were demonstrating the importance of coordinating the entire supply chain—production, transportation and distribution—to making union solidarity effective in today’s globalized world."


Paddy Crumlin, Maritime Union of Australia, National Secretary

“As Einstein said, ‘there are only two things in the world that are infinite—the universe and humanity’s capacity for stupidity.’ And he wasn’t too sure about the first one."

“The length of the stupidity of these people, ironically elected to represent our interests, the interests of the public—that is the irony of it in countries like the U.S. and Australia and our wonderful constitution and the way our nations were born. These people were put in place to represent our interests. And the lengths of their stupidity are as dangerous as they are breathtaking."

“How do they achieve such high status? How do these people achieve such high station on such little decency and moral intelligence? They are bankrupt of it. Take for example, your mate, Miniace. What a genius. Locked you out, nearly destroyed the economy, prompted and promoted the strength of the labor movement through your wonderful struggle here on the docks, signed the contract, then got the sack."

“What a genius. You wouldn’t employ him to take the garbage out and have any hope it was going to get to the curb, much less let him run a dock on the West Coast of America."

“Or Bush and Howard and the ‘coalition of the willing.’ The willing what? The only thing they were willing to do was preserve the institutionalized greed and corruption of the global world incorporated, who paid for their neon-lit, sugar-coated, multi-colored lies and distortions of their election campaign—and also, no doubt, paid for some of those hanging chads on the voting cards in Jeb Bush’s state of Florida."

“Iraq is now a replay of Palestine or Northern Ireland, Serbia or Croatia, slaughter on slaughter in a wicked downward spiral of public corruption, insane revenge, and ruthless and unremitting murder and mayhem that will feed on itself and draw more and more innocents into the corruption and distortion of life there for generations."

“The final stupidity that is visited upon us in that war is that they have ensured that oil prices have soared. And, of course, who is going to pay the price?"

“The savage injustices and gross stupidities have been visited upon Iraq in the name of global economic expansion by political policy—neoconservatives, they will call them—political policymakers whose cunning matches their stupidity. We know the war was really about carving up the second largest oil producer in the world. Cheney and Bush’s campaign supporters were in there like rats up a drainpipe. Halliburton, Stevedoring Services of America, all in there for the carve-up, all in there for the gourmet meal. But the gourmet meal has become sour and fetid in their hungry mouths and guts and slowly poisoning the world for all of us.

“These policymakers do not reflect on provisions and qualities of democracy, freedom, justice or equality. They do not aspire to promote, admire, or reward honest work, honest labor, but seek to exploit and control. So their policies closer to our homes reflect the same values. They wrap their public pronunciations in invocations of good versus evil, as if they actually do have a sense of morality, distortions built on falsehoods, built on lies into a citadel, a Mt. Everest of political bullshit.”

Ah Quon McElrath

“Somebody said, it’s impossible to organize among immigrants. Well, you know, the ILWU did it in Hawaii. Do you realize that in 1944 we organized all of the sugar workers, all of the progeny of people who were brought to Hawaii under the Masters and Servants Act which was enacted in 1850. We organized the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Hawaiians, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Filipinos. Talk about immigrants. Yes we did it!”

To see full text of guest speeches visit www.ilwu.org/about/Convention/2006/index.cfm