Just weeks before last Christmas, a Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) delegate was sacked from the Victoria International Container Terminal (VICT) facility in the Port of Melbourne. Unionists and community members responded with a nineteen day around the clock picket that stopped all container movements in and out of the VICT terminal. Now unions are being sued by the company for up to AU$100 million (US$75-80 million).

On June 5, Spanish dockworkers began the first of a series of strikes that will see eight days of strike action over three weeks. These strikes have been called in response to the conservative government’s new Royal Decree Law that targets the country’s port labor system, and the stevedoring companies’ refusal to protect the jobs of 6,150 currently employed dockers.

The conservative government of Spain has set in motion plans to scrap the current port labor system, which would force over six thousand dockworkers to be laid off over four years. In response, Spanish dockworkers’ unions have launched a round of strikes that will begin on March 10. That day will also see international union federations hold an international day of strike action in solidarity with their Spanish colleagues.

The Swedish Dockworkers’ Union (SDU), or Svenska Hamnarbetarförbundet (HAMN) in Swedish, has been shaped by decades of rank and file dockworkers’ rebellion, bureaucratic expulsions from a general transport union and a long history of international solidarity.

This incredible work of art is part of a magnificent photographic installation by dockworkers in Le Havre and the artist known as JR.

The dispute that began on the night of August 6, 2015, when Hutchison Ports Australia (HPA) sacked 97 dockworkers (“wharfies”) by text message and email, has come to an end. So what was the end result of the dispute that some described as ‘the biggest confrontation on the Australian waterfront since the 1998 Patrick lock-out’?