Around the country, Occupy activists moved to block ports, halting shipping and making their power felt among the 1%.
On Monday morning, about 500 activists with Occupy Oakland braved a predawn chill to blockade the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest container port in the United States. The protesters broke up into 3 which which blocked the entrances to several shipyards in the sprawling complex, leaving dozens of trucks idling in line. Police eventually moved in to force open the gates; Oakland Police interim Chief Howard Jordan said that two occupiers were arrested.
The shut-down was part of a coordinated day of action on the West Coast. Protesters also reportedly caused disruptions at ports in Vancouver, Portland and Seattle for at least part of the day (details are sketchy as of press time). Occupiers clashed with police in Long Beach, Seattle Houston and San Diego.
On Monday evening, a second wave of Occupy Oakland protesters, this time numbering around 2,000, again marched to the port. During an impromptu “General Assembly,” protesters agreed to keep their promise to extend the blockade into Tuesday if other occupations faced police violence.
Meanwhile, a solidarity action against Goldman Sachs in New York led to as many as 18 arrests. Goldman owns 51 percent of SSA Marine, a leading shipping company, and Shippers Transport Express, a trucking company.
The goal of the day’s actions was to raise public awareness of the plight faced by dock-workers and truckers. As AlterNet’s Tara Lohan wrote last week, “Between the dock where the cargo is unloaded and the shelf from which you pluck your treasure, there are several critical lynchpins.”
One of them is port truck drivers. These drivers (around 110,000 of them in the United States) are responsible for moving approximately 20 million containers a year from the ports to railway yards and warehouses. Drivers operating large trucks are expected to safely haul loads up to 80,000 pounds. It’s a job for professionals, only these professionals are earning poverty wages, sometimes even less than you’d make flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant. Once a middle-class profession, the port trucking (or drayage) industry has now been dubbed “sweatshops on wheels.”
The shutdowns had prompted some controversy among supporters of the Occupy Movement after Craig Merrilees, communications director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), told the Guardian that the action was “being promoted by a group of people who apparently think they can call general strikes and workplace shutdowns without talking to workers and without involving the unions.” On Monday, Merrilees took a softer stance during an interview with a local radio station, KALW, saying that ILWU had long supported progressive causes but couldn’t endorse the action without going through the union’s democratic process. Of the dozens of rank and file members who had participated in the shutdown, Merrilees said he was happy they were exercising their First Amendment rights.