Early on the morning of Nov. 24, the White House (!) announced a tentative agreement in the labor dispute between shippers and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) workers at 29 West Coast ports. After an 11 day lockout of ILWU workers by the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the trade association negotiating on behalf of shippers, President Bush had in early October ordered the docks reopened to workers by invoking, for the first time in 30 years, the Taft-Hartley Act. For American labor, Taft-Hartley is easily the most loathed piece of law in a legal system heavily stacked against workers' right to collective bargaining. Its use by one of the most virulently anti-union presidents in memory, combined with the aggressive lockout tactics and belligerent bargaining of the PMA, led many dockworkers and other union activists to charge that the PMA's goal was to break the ILWU's grip on West Coast ports--in effect, to bust the union itself. There was plenty of evidence to support this charge.

Given the trajectory of negotiations, the PMA's lockout, and Bush's use of Taft-Hartley, the general expectation within the ILWU was that as soon as Taft-Hartley's mandatory 80-day "cooling off" period expired--just after Christmas and the busy retail season--the lockout would be promptly reinstated, with either scab workers or the military or national guard brought in to replace locked out union members. Since Taft-Hartley became law a half-century ago, it has been used only about a dozen times, and in almost every case nothing happened during the 80 days except the hardening of positions on both sides. So the settlement was a surprise, and a welcome one.

Both sides came out yesterday proclaiming themselves satisfied that they got a good portion of what they wanted.

As has been a pattern with recent labor confrontation in industries impacted by globalization, worker demands for job security were, in the end, bought off by money. The PMA got the ability to incorporate new technology on the waterfront that will displace some ILWU workers (guaranteed, under the new contract, retraining and reassignment). The ILWU won a massive increase in pension fund contributions, and a wage increase for its members as well. Most importantly, at least for the next six years, the union survives intact, having beaten back what it still believes to be a concerted and carefully plotted attack on its very existence.

The ILWU ranks as one of the most democratic and militant unions in the AFL-CIO; ever since its birth in the general strikes and waterfront wars in Oakland and other West Coast ports during the Depression, it has had a long history of solidarity both with other unions and with broader social justice issues. The ILWU has shut down West Coast ports in protest of everything from Vietnam to South African apartheid to the World Trade Organization's 1999 meetings in Seattle. So it's sobering to look at last week's settlement (pending ILWU member ratification), and to contrast the issues, tactics, and how they played out with the labor struggles wracking Europe at exactly the same time.

The day after the ILWU settlement was announced, tens of thousands of French government employees rallied to protest the privatization of a wide array of French government programs and elimination of public services. The same day saw transportation workers--railroad conductors, bus and subway workers, air traffic controllers, and others--began what was to be a one-day strike for higher wages and benefits.

When air traffic controllers stayed off the job, all air travel in France stopped for the week. And up to half of France Telecom's workers--some 75,000--rallied on the same day at the Finance Ministry to, again, protest privatization and job cuts.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 25, French truckers erected blockades around the country to demand higher pay, including a common European benefit called a 13th month of pay--in effect, an annual bonus. (In Europe, annual bonuses can be a twelfth of one's annual salary; in America, it's a $25 gift certificate or a plaque.)

That was just one country. In Britain, firefighters have been striking for weeks, The "Labor" government of Tony Blair is threatening a crackdown, and the firefighter union's president is calling for Blair's ouster. (Can you imagine John Sweeney taking on Bill Clinton in such a way?) Britain's teachers were also on strike. Strikes also ravaged Italy, and labor protests were taking place in several Central and Eastern European countries.

And so it goes across the continent, three years after Seattle's historic N30 protests. Those protests guaranteed--among other things--that it'll be a cold day in hell before Sweeney's AFL-CIO ever sponsors a major public demonstration again. Meanwhile, workers in virtually every other industrialized country are playing not only defense--against the global trend, pushed hard by the United States and global institutions like the WTO, World Bank, and IMF, to privatize and scale back government services--but also offense, demanding a continuation of the struggles for reasonable pay and working conditions that have gone on for two centuries. The economy matters, too; European workers are demanding that in the economic downturn that their jobs be the last things affected in recessionary times by the companies which are made possible by their labor.

In the United States, where CEOs continue to inflate their obscene paychecks while laying off workers during a recession, unions are notably weaker than their European counterparts. It's hard to sort out cause from effect. One of the reasons they're stronger in Europe is that they're less timid (and therefore more effective in advocating members' self interests), and one of the reasons they're less timid is that they're stronger. But it's startling to contrast the desperate defense played by the ILWU--one of the strongest and most socially radical unions in the United States--with the routine workers' advocacy practiced in Europe, Canada, and, increasingly, in Latin America and parts of Asia.

In all of these places, unions are using the fight against privatization and American-style corporate dominance of public policy to argue that they are battling not just for the self-interest of their members, but for their companies' prosperity and their country's well-being as well--and, indeed, for the very ability of their country to make its own social and economic policies. The contrast could not be clearer, again, with American unions--which, rightly or wrongly, are rarely viewed as looking out for anything other than themselves, let alone their members.

Part of the dilemma for American unions is the lack of powerful political voices that share their viewpoints or concerns. Historically, unions in this country have been tied to the Democrats; even as many Democrats have distanced themselves, the AFL-CIO has stuck with the party because it has nowhere else to go. The result, with a labor movement that has been in varying degrees of decline for decades, is that labor leaders have become so ineffective that neither their members nor political policy makers pay much attention to their views.

How to get around it? The ILWU and any number of reform advocates in other unions have the right idea: greater democracy within the union and more emphasis, as John Sweeney's AFL-CIO tenure has preached but only sporadically practiced, upon organizing in non-traditional sectors. Beyond that, labor and community activists need to cut out moribund union bureaucracies and go straight for the public policymaking process itself.

The point isn't unions for the sake of unions; it's unions to improve the welfare of all workers, and that means changing not only the practices of bosses, but the ability of bosses to hire the politicians to write laws that overwhelmingly favor the boss and screw the rest of us.

Such advocacy isn't simple selfishness; it's an attempt to improve our country by pulling the pendulum back from the class warfare and extreme corporatism now dominating every facet of our economic and political policy. In Europe, enough people understand that labor struggles benefit everyone that the inconvenience of strikes and public actions is tolerated or supported as part of the price of a better society. We need to make that case here--and then hit the streets with the same sort of militancy.