Zim ship sits unloaded at Port of Oakland

Here's a press release from the union about yesterday:

[quote=ILWU Coast Longshore Division]Volatile atmosphere at Gaza demonstration prevents Longshoremen from entering Port of Oakland terminal
Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union were unable to report to work Sunday night at SSA Marine’s terminal in Oakland, Calif., due to volatility associated with a large demonstration and significant police presence at the gates of the facility. In 2005 [it was actually 2003 -- EL], Oakland police fired rubber bullets in similar circumstances, wounding several longshoremen who were trying to report to work.

The demonstration at the Oakland International Container Terminal was in protest of Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and was directed at the calling of a Zim Integrated Shipping Services vessel associated with the State of Israel.

The ILWU has taken no position on the issue associated with the demonstration, but in cases when unsafe circumstances arise at the point of entry, the union must protect the safety of its members in the workplace. When it was ascertained that last night’s demonstration and associated police presence created an unsafe environment, dispatched ILWU-represented Longshoremen and Clerks that arrived at the SSA gate to work stood by instead at a safe location away from the demonstration point.

SSA, after recognizing the safety situation associated with ingress to their gates, released all ILWU manpower at 7:30 p.m.

– ILWU Coast Longshore Division news release[/quote]

It's an interesting development, because without a contract -- and hence the arbitrator chosen my both the union and management -- the workers have more leeway in choosing whether to cross the "community picket" or not.

NEWS UPDATE (Monday, August 18, 2014, 12 noon) : unconfirmed reports are saying that longshore shifts dispatched to work the ship have been sent home by SSA today as well, making it the 2nd day of the effective boycott of the ship, Zim Piraeus, owned by an Israeli firm.

The rhetoric often devolves into hyperbole that gets so convoluted that it crosses the line into being disingenuous.

Examples of patently false statement by activismists are:

• "mass shutdown of West Coast ports." This is factually untrue because it's a boycott action specifically targeting Zim ships; it has nothing to do with shutting down the ports, which would involve over a dozen work sectors and tens of thousands of workers around those nodes along global supply chains

• "Zim offloads at the Oakland port every Saturday, carrying goods that are made on confiscated Palestinian land — both in settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and within present-day Israel." Again, simply untrue. These Zim ships making calls on the U.S. West Coast, either operated themselves or in carrier alliances with partners like Taiwan-based Evergreen, are shuttling intermodal cargo containers between China and the U.S., or go from Canada, Jamaica, Central America, the U.S., Russia, South Korea, and China -- and back in a circuit -- and have nothing to do with goods from Israel, Palestine or anywhere else in the Middle East.

Hard to call this a victory, even by default, but the effect is still the same.

Daniel Borgström

UNWELCOMING THE BOAT - DAY 3

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

Chilli Sauce

Maybe, on the ground, longshoremen are involved and this is a bit of wink-and-nod happening. Anyway, I get not all this can be disclosed on a public forum, but I'd be curious to hear a bit more about the relationship between the community activists and the port workers.

During the whole series of actions at the Port of Oakland during Occupy, there were never more than 2 or 3 active rank-and-file members of ILWU involved. At these recent pro-Palestine events, there was never more than 1 active union member involved (along with a couple of retired ILWU members).

Many of the activismists involved in actions like these have politics that might be described as anarcho-Leninist-subsitutionism, which sees class struggle as coming from outside. This ideology dismisses working class agency (meaning the self activity of the class), especially rank-and-file strikes, as impossible or improbable. Hence they only find success in actions like blockades, not worker-led stoppages.

Despite it's obvious militant tradition, this is reinforced by ILWU bureaucrats unwillingness to fight back to defend gains won in actions like the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, then the 1,399 strikes -- both legal and illegal -- to defend those gains from 1934 until 1948.

See Robert Brenner and Suzi Weissman's "When Unions Used to Strike" for a decent account of this history.

NEWS UPDATE (19-August-2014 6:45 a.m.)

The Zim ship remains docked at the Port of Oakland, but no longshore workers were dispatched to it this morning. A picket had been set up, but with no workers arriving, it was pulled down when that became clear.

Despite claims of a "major victory," the Zim Piraeus feigned an exodus this afternoon, then did a u-turn under the Golden Gate Bridge and returned to the Ports America Terminal in the Outer Harbor. Without the assorted picketers, the 30 or so who could make it there in time, posing a "health and safety" concern (as judged by the union itself), the longshore shift proceeded past them and went to work unloading the ship.

Since Israelis are only minority shareholders in the Zim Line, following the activismist logic it's only it a 32% victory for Gaza -- since that's how much Israelis own and it was only a 3-day delay. This has been a summer of congestion for carriers, so a 3-day delay is simply part of doing business. The Port of Rotterdam is so busy now that ships -- and goods -- are being diverted to Antwerp. The Port of Vancouver in Canada has been turning away ships that have any goods destined for the U.S. Since all shippers are facing near-universal delays in moving goods across supply chains and through nodes across the globe, it's hard to see how this delay in Oakland is anything other than a slight inconvenience.

Since the cost to not only Israeli firms, but also to the Israeli state, is negligible, it calls to question the point of these meaningless pageants, since even at the symbolic level they're nothing more than pandering to the bourgeois media.

Khawaga

But can you enlighten me as to why there is such a delay everywhere? Is it a port capacity issue or labour shortage? Or congestion beyond the ports? From what I read there is labour shortage on the West Coast, but is that the cause?

We interviewed a recently retired railroad worker last weekend. His assessment, which we agree with, is that in addition to this summer's bumper crops of soy, corn and wheat, the shipments of Bakken shale across North America have taken off exponentially, massively congesting railroads in the U.S. and Canada. And these shipments are, in many cases, being given priority on rail routes.

From talking to truckers, the crisis is due to chassis (the trailers that are attached to and used to haul intermodal cargo containers) shortages, exacerbated by carriers (in this case, steamship lines) no longer owning them and dumping them onto ownership "pools" in each port. And often chassis pile up in one logistics node, without being "backhauled' to the ports.

Longshore workers, conversely, blame the carriers for relying more and more on super-post-Panamax ships, like the "Triple-E" ones run by Maersk. These mega ships can carry as many as 18,000 twenty-foot-equivalents (TEUs, the measurement standard for containers). The maximum size for the present Panama Canal is 4,500 TEUs, with the typical West Coast ship size being between 8,000 to 12,000 TEUs. This has created a situation where a single ship offloads an amount equivalent to what used to be carried by several over a period of weeks. Hence ports simply can't handle so many containers at once, leading to consolidation of many terminals into fewer, larger ones (the Port of Oakland went from 11 a decade ago to 5 today).

As for the West Coast labor shortage, with truckers it's because many of them are leaving the industry because of the miserably low pay. They are forced to endure hours-long waits in port terminals, but work piece-rate and at times don't even earn enough to cover their own expenses (since being classified with the legal fiction of "independent contractor," all the maintenance, fuel and insurance costs have been externalized onto them). For longshore, the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex is a perfect example because there are currently 14,000 fully unionized dockers as well as 14,000 casualized ones. Management at the ports refuses to allow more of the casuals to be brought into the permanent unionized labor force, obviously because of the high pay and "Cadillac" health benefits. They simply don't want to pay for a sufficient number of longshore workers.

The congestion in Europe is for different reasons, including spikes in traffic and labor shortages. But in some cases is also ports reaching their capacity and not having proper contingency plans for overflow.