US dockers liable in Soviet boycott

The strongly anticommunist AFL-CIO's International Longshoremen's Association faces the payment of heavy damages to employers affected by an ILA boycott of grain shipments to the Soviet Union to protest that country's policies in Afghanistan, Poland, and elsewhere.

Monitor correspondent Ed Townsend reports the US Supreme Court ruled the action was an illegal secondary boycott which had devastating financial effects on companies not involved in a labor dispute with the union. The court held that the ILA, no matter how strongly it might feel about Soviet human rights policies , cannot legally refuse to load grain and other shipments to or from the USSR.