December 22, 2011
Occupy Oakland preps for next port protest
Occupy Oakland plans to embark on another effort to shut down a port. This time, though, rather than in the Bay Area, activists will head to Longview, Wash. in January to attempt to prevent a multinational grain exporting conglomerate from delivering a grain loader there.
“We need this to be a humungous and awesome occupation,” said Jack Heyman, a member of the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union, at an Occupy Oakland general assembly meeting on Wednesday, where activists voted 123 to 0 (with one abstention) to support the action.
While activists don’t know when the Export Grain Transporters, the company bringing the grain loader to Washington will be making the delivery, they suspect it will be sometime in January. When it makes its way up the Columbia River, they will get word from activists in Astoria, Oregon, and then will have about four days to make the trek to the port at Longview. EGT plans to use workers not affiliated with the ILWU.
Occupiers agreed to support the action that will be spearheaded by the ILWU, well regarded as the most radical labor union in the country, as well as Occupy Longview and Occupy Portland.
Even though the ILWU didn’t formally support the most recent port protest in Oakland, and other locations on the West Coast, Heyman said that was a union leadership decision and members did led their support.
“We voted with our feet and decided not to cross the picket line,” he said.
A map of the Port of Oakland that activists used to temporarily shut down the shipping center on December 12. (Photo by Susie Cagle)
Though Occupy Oakland won’t be leading the effort, as activists did here on December 12 and on November 2 at the Port of Oakland, they could prove instrumental to the cause. After all, as the two previous port shutdowns in the Bay Area proved, no one knows how to disrupt a port quite like Occupy Oakland.
“We call it the Wall Street of the waterfront,” Leo Ritz-Barr told me prior to the general assembly meeting about Occupy Oakland’s penchant for port protests. “It’s our easiest target in that it is the biggest effect we can have on teh global financial network.”
Ritz-Barr, a member of the Solidarity Committee, which was formerly known as the West Coast Port Shutdown Committee, was a key player in the two port protests here in the Bay Area.
“It’s the biggest economic engine around,” Ritz-Barr said.
Most major retailers, like Wal-Mart and Target, were hit hard by the recent port protests in Oakland, LA, Portland and Seattle, he said.
“Almost every big chain store has ties to the ports,” Ritz-Barr said. “And we hit them hard.”
According to the Oakland Tribune, $4 million in economic activity was either lost or delayed by on Oakland alone by the most recent port protest.
Ritz-Barr said it takes more than a thousand activists to close a port. But once the numbers are there, the rest is fairly easy.
There are three gates into the Port of Oakland. If several hundred can block each gate, longshoremen, the workers who unload freight from ships, will deem the picket lines unsafe to cross and will go home. Because they are in unions, they get paid the day. Truckers, who aren’t members of labor unions, aren’t so lucky.
“They push and shove,” Ritz-Barr said, noting that Code Pink and the Teamsters union have set up funds to pay the truckers for the wages they lose, but being an unorganized group, it is difficult to keep track of all of them.
But with each port shutdown, activists are getting a better understanding of how to compensate all of the people affected, making future efforts, such as the one on Longview in January, easier.
“What D12 (the Occupy shorthand for the December 12 port shutdown) brought was coordination,” he said. “Now people know how to do this.”
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