The International Dockworkers’ Council (IDC) is an autonomous international organization of dockworker unions founded in 2000 to provide an alternative organizing body for dockworkers in response to the perceived failures of existing national and international dockworker organizations during the well-known labor dispute in Liverpool in the late 1990’s. Thirteen years later, the Barcelona-based IDC, representing 90,000 dockworkers in 30 countries, has become a significant player in international dockworker activism, with a well-developed organizational structure in Europe.
This paper, based on in-depth interviews with IDC leaders and rank-and-file activists in Europe, provides an account of the IDC’s experience building an independent organization to foster non-bureaucratic and militant international solidarity among dockworkers unions. I examine some of the major challenges the organization has faced, including resource constraints, maintaining group cohesion in the absence of a bureaucracy and divergent national climates for organizing. Additionally, the paper examines some of the major organizational and tactical innovations that the IDC has developed, including decision-making through annual regional assemblies, the use of regional working groups to handle day-to-day issues and multi-country, coordinated industrial action to support affiliates during labor disputes.
