Dockworker Power News Today

A local International Longshore and Warehouse Union effort builds on decades of support for Palestinian liberation.

The Western Illinois University 2023 Distinguished University Professor Peter Cole will deliver the Distinguished Faculty Lecture, The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19), at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 22 in the College of Fine Arts and Communication (COFAC) Recital Hall.

One often-overlooked aspect of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and career was his strong support of labor unions, calling them America’s first anti-poverty program.

NOTE: This show was originally released on June 28, 2020 “The origin of the word strike goes back to the port of London in 1768, when dock workers and sailors struck. When sailors stop work, they take down the sails of their ship and that’s called, nautically, striking your sail. And that term becomes the de facto word for all work stoppages.” Peter Cole, professor of history at Western Illinois University and author of two books on dockworkers, Wobblies on the Waterfront and Dockworker P...

Guest: Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University in Macomb and a research associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.  He is the author of the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area and  Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia.  He coedited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW...