Zim Ship Stranded In Oakland! The Labor Community Picket Against Zim Ship In The Port

Oakland police arrested a picketer who was marching to stop the ILWU longshore workers from crossing the picket line.

The Transport Workers Solidarity Committee is supporting the call by Palestinian unions for an international labor boycott of all shipping and transportation from Israel

The apartheid ship line Zim owned in part by the Israeli government has a stranded ship Piraeus in the Port of Oakland. Labor Community solidarity pickets have been respected by ILWU Local 10 and ILWU Local 34. This is a major blow to the Israeli shipping line and the apartheid regime in Israel. The Zim line was also involved in supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa where it delivered weapons and economic support for the racist regime.

The Israeli ship Piraeus is stranded at Pier 57 in the Port of Oakland after labor community picketers stopped ILWU Longshore workers from ILWU Local 10 and ILWU Local 34 refused to cross the lines.
Here is an article about the picket in the morning.




UNWELCOMING THE BOAT - DAY 3
Daniel Borgstrom


Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, Aug 17) the Israeli ship ZIM Piraeus entered the Port of Oakland, and some 200 people from the community set up picket lines which were honored by the longshoremen. And the ship did not get unloaded last night. So what about this (Monday) morning?


Somebody called for a picket line for this morning, and somebody else apparently called it off. (We're still trying to figure out what happened.) Anyway, we were out there at 5:30 a.m., a total of about 25 of us. Some may say we were only 20, but please don't undercount our number, I'm absolutely certain there were at least 25 of us out there picketing in the Port this morning, doing our best to cover the four gates of the SSA terminal where the Zionist ship was docked.


The police were there, giving us a bad time, telling us to stay on the sidewalk and making it practically impossible to walk picket lines in the entrances. It's the situation one might expect when there's a lack of critical mass. The cops arrested two people, charging them with obstructing a public thoroughfare or some such BS: George Cammarota whom they arrested, handcuffed, then cited and released. At another gate they arrested Russell Bates, hauled him off to the Washington street jail, then let him go, and it took him over an hour to get back to the port where he rejoined us in our efforts.


Meanwhile, the union told us that they would honor a community picket line. This was extremely frustrating because we simply didn't have enough people. 8 or 9 people at one gate, 4 or 5 at another, and the rest at the other gates were simply not enough to cover the wide entrances. And of course the police were hassling us. Actually, the police were doing a far better and more effective job of blocking the gates than we were.


Things went on like this for about two hours, in the pre-dawn darkness. No reinforcements arriving. A feeling of having been let down by whoever had tweeted that the picketing was off. Not sure what to do. Moving from gate to gate. Massive confusion. Intermittent rain. The only good news was an assurance from the dockworkers that they would not cross a community picket line.


Finally, concluding that we were getting nowhere, that our whole effort of this morning was a total, unmitigated failure, the picketers at one of the gates decided to leave, and set about gathering up our people from the widely dispersed gates. However, the picketers at another gate felt differently; they were waiting for the dockworkers to arrive to see what would happen. While we were discussing the matter of whether to stay or go home, an announcement came from the union that the longshoremen would not be coming in to unload the ship this morning.


We wondered how that had come to be. Could it have been because of our efforts? Or maybe it was despite our efforts? It's possible that the dockworkers felt that the large police presence made for unsafe working conditions -- they may remember April 7, 2003 when police fired "less lethal" munitions at peaceful protesters and also at uninvolved longshoremen who were waiting to go to work. Several of the longshoremen were injured by the police that day. Another consideration is that the ILWU contract expired on July 1st of this year and the longshoremen are now working without one. In any case, for whatever reason, they did not go to work this morning. Meanwhile, the Israeli ship sits at the dock, still unloaded.


So we won, by default maybe, but we did win. We're declaring victory.



DANIEL BORGSTRÖM

http://danielborgstrom.blogspot.com/

danielfortyone [at] gmail.com


Steve Gilmartin contributed to this article.