Since dockworkers operate at a crucial “choke point” in the military supply chain to Israel, their boycotts are a powerful form of solidarity with Gaza.
( Waging Nonviolence ) – In the weeks leading up to the latest ceasefire, protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza widened and deepened across the world. In early October, in some of the largest demonstrations in the two years since the war began, millions took to the streets in Amsterdam, Istanbul, Rome, Jakarta, Tokyo, London, Athens, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Paris, Chicago, Berlin, Stockholm and Santiago.
The Global Sumud Flotilla, an attempt to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, particularly captivated global attention. In September, roughly 500 people from 47 countries set sail from Barcelona on 50 vessels carrying humanitarian aid. Flotilla participants included humanitarian aid workers, clergy, elected officials, veterans, doctors, lawyers and artists — Greta Thunberg among them.
Labor activists — in particular, dockworkers who load and unload the cargo that makes the world economy go round — played an increasingly visible role in this wave of solidarity with Gaza.
“If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades, even for just 20 minutes, we will block all of Europe,” declared an unnamed dockworker, who stood before a large crowd in Genoa, Italy’s busiest port, in a widely shared video. “Together with our union, together with all the dockworkers who stand with us, together with the whole city of Genoa … from this region 13,000 to 14,000 containers leave every year for Israel, not a single nail will leave anymore.”
This bold stance by Genoa dockworkers came on the heels of their recent refusal to load military supplies to Israel. In doing so, they joined a growing list of dockworkers boycotting cargo intended for Israel, including those in Spain, Morocco, Sweden, Greece and France.
The Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, or PGFTU, had repeatedly called upon workers and unions to do just that. In July, for instance, the PGFTU called on workers to “organize days of rage and global solidarity in factories and workshops, in ports and airports, in the streets and public squares, in support of Palestine and its brave people.”
In response to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, the declaration of the Genoese dockworkers, and Israel’s interception of the flotilla attempting to break Israel’s blockade, sparked several single-day general strikes. In Spanish cities and especially across Italy, an estimated two million workers participated. Inspired by Genoese dockworkers, people deployed work stoppages in solidarity with Palestine.
The Genoese dockworkers had inserted themselves into the globe’s most contentious political issue using the best tool in every worker’s toolbox: stopping work. Call it a boycott, call it direct action, call it a strike. When workers stop working, employers pay attention. And when workers interfere with the prerogatives of business and governments, for instance in refusing to move cargo, ordinary people perk up because it has become so rare for them to prove they can shape the world we live in.
A long history of boycotts
It’s nothing new to say that workers’ greatest power is their ability to put down their tools and walk off their job. More than a hundred years ago, “Big” Bill Haywood, a legendary leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, observed, “If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.”
Yet not all workers have the same amount of power. First and foremost, a strike needs all workers to stand or to walk out together, which requires they already be organized; that’s why it’s called “organized labor.” One need not necessarily have a union in place to strike, but workers must be organized, formally or informally, to pull off something like a strike. Dockworkers, notably, remain among the most likely sorts of workers to belong to a trade union. They also possess one of the most robust global networks of any group of workers via the International Transport Workers Federation — the oldest industry-specific labor organization in the world — and the International Dockworkers Council.
Ideally, workers declare a strike at a time-sensitive moment and to inflict maximum material impact. Workers who transport cargo, also called logistics, fully appreciate Benjamin Franklin’s famous dictum, “time is money.” Especially in industries where both wages and other costs are paid by the hour, stopping or even “simply” slowing down can quickly hit a boss’s pocketbook.
Shipping is a component for about 90 percent of all goods consumed (raw materials and finished products) the world over. It remains as central to the global economy in the 21st century as it was in the 15th or 18th. Don’t forget the maritime version of Franklin’s saying: “the ship must sail on time.”
The most important parts of the supply chain have recently become known as “choke points” — in other words, the supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In this context, “weakness” refers not only to companies’ vulnerabilities but also to the points where workers can break the chain. Thus, when a few thousand dockworkers in a particular port are organized into a union, they can shut down the movement of goods — which is to say, the economy.
Yet organization and strategic location alone do not explain why dockworkers downed their tools in solidarity with Palestine — that requires having political views. Prior to the container revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, loading and unloading cargo ships required large numbers of workers who toiled together. These dockworkers interacted with people from around the world and were daily exposed to new people, ideas and information. This meant that many dockworkers developed knowledge and views about international affairs in ways that most others did not. Hearing stories about war and political repression, personally experiencing poverty (since the trade historically paid poorly), and working collectively together led to many dockworkers developing both anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspectives.
Among the first of these political actions happened in 1935, after fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, when dockworkers in Durban, Cape Town, and Lüderitz, Namibia (then called Southwest Africa and a South African “mandate,” just like how Palestine was a British mandate), refused to load food and other cargo aboard Italian ships. This action was among the very first political boycotts by dockworkers. It was also the first one documented by African workers — and it was even more tantalizing since it was in solidarity with Ethiopians, fellow Africans, fighting fascist, imperialist invaders.
Similarly, around May Day in 1936, San Francisco longshoremen first boycotted cargo to protest Italy’s invasion. These dockworkers soon helped form the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, or ILWU. Two years later, in 1938, in solidarity with local Chinese picketers, ILWU members in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle refused to load cargo for fascist Japan, which had expanded its invasion of China; they continued doing so dozens of times in the next few years.
Similarly, on hundreds of occasions in the second half of the 1940s, maritime and other union workers in Sydney and other Australian port cities refused to be complicit — as their government was — in helping the Netherlands attempt to recolonize Indonesia, which had declared independence in 1945. Australia’s union dockworkers (called wharfies) refused to work Dutch ships, thereby providing mighty assistance to the Indonesian struggle against imperialist-driven war.
Given this history and considering that so many Palestinians and allies are looking for hope, it comes as little surprise that a Genoese dockworker’s fiery speech and recent spate of dockworker boycotts has ignited tremendous excitement. Nor is it surprising that Palestinians and their allies in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, campaign have adopted many strategies of the global movement to end apartheid in South Africa.
Just as the African National Congress called upon people around the world to boycott South Africa, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions has repeatedly called upon workers and unions to boycott Israel. This summer, the PGFTU’s “Cry Before Death” missive read: “Our union comrades, we await your role in delivering the cry of the children and workers of Gaza to decision-makers and to the streets.”
For the last two years, a growing number of people around the world have watched two million humans be bombed and starved in Gaza. Countless people have wondered, while watching with horror, how they could help the long-suffering Palestinians. When governments, at best, issue press releases but refuse to act on the side of peace and justice, where can ordinary people of conscience turn? As Archbishop Desmond Tutu declared, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Recent dockworker boycotts generated excitement, among other reasons, because they reveal (again) that ordinary people have power to do an “end run” around governments whose inaction should be understood as complicity.
Because unions have been decimated around the world due to decades of corporate pushback with the active support of governmental policies, far too many people have forgotten — or never knew — that organized workers have incredible potential and power.
Dockworkers have long paid close attention to international affairs, as have other maritime workers. Due to the nature of the shipping industry, they have greater access to information from around the world than most of us (even in the internet age). Across centuries, they have built and operated networks to communicate and organize, to resist and rebel. They, too, use WhatsApp and other apps to communicate and plan.
Dockworkers also have been among the most effective at deploying boycotts. Occasionally, they refused to work cargo from — or to a ship registered in — a certain country to promote a political agenda, such as support for the struggle against apartheid in South Africa or Italian fascist invaders in Ethiopia.
Today, a growing number of people who support the Palestinian cause are looking to organized workers generally and dockworkers particularly. The Palestinian Youth Movement’s Mask Off Maersk Campaign is one such effort to convince this mega shipping corporation to stop shipping U.S. weapons and all military supplies to Israel.
Photo by Nikolaj Habib on Unsplash
Since Israel intercepted the flotilla on Oct. 2 and arrested hundreds of activists aboard those boats, Italian workers declared another one-day nationwide general strike. Just prior, the Genoese had upped the ante by threatening to lead a continent-wide strike against all Israeli shipping if it interfered with the latest peaceful flotilla trying to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. Workers in Athens and Spain joined them. Meanwhile, the phrase “block everything” (adapted from the Genoa dockworkers’ slogan “If they attack the Flotilla, we will block everything”) trended across European protests.
Even if the recent tenuous ceasefire (which Israel has already repeatedly violated) holds, the struggle for Palestinian liberation is far from over. What Genoa’s dockworkers are now discussing with their fellow workers in Marseilles, Barcelona, Tangier, and elsewhere remains hidden in encrypted chats, at least for now.
Yet so long as shipping remains the pivotal industry of global capitalism — and humans haven’t been replaced by machines — dockworkers can and will occasionally flex their muscles in solidarity with people resisting imperialism and war. No doubt, dockworkers possess a long history of shaping global politics due to their organization, politics and position at choke points in the global supply chain.
There are other choke points that workers can exploit — when organized, educated and committed. Following the lead of the Palestinian labor movement, similar to how international workers followed the ANC’s call for boycotts, Genoese dockworkers demonstrated what allies can do in solidarity with liberation movements.
The dockworkers also reminded people worldwide of the potential power of workers, just as “Big” Bill Haywood declared more than a century ago. While the future is unwritten, two things are certain: there will be no shortage of injustices perpetrated and, therefore, freedom struggles to wage.
Via Waging Nonviolence )
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