25,000 U.S. Port Workers Protest The Iraq War

We spoke out about the Vietnam War and were one of the first ones to do it. We refused to load scrap to Japan just prior to the Second World War. We refused to load cargo destined for South Africa during the apartheid of that country, and so forth and so on.

Not only is the Iraq War killing a large number of America’s young soldiers, it’s also killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and it’s literally bankrupting this country.

At this point it has the consequence of perhaps eliminating what little safety net we have left in this country, in terms of the ability to take care of health care, retired people, the infrastructure and so forth. It’s being ignored in order to print money to pay for the war. That impacts our members and our members are angry about it.

They don’t see anything being done by the politicians, so we decided to lay our tools down for a day to see whether people would take notice.

We have about 25,000 workers on the West Coast, working both days and nights. We stood down in every port on the West Coast – 29 ports. We report that our entire membership stood down. Our employer group, The Pacific Maritime Association, is trying to spin it with low numbers, saying only 6,000 stepped down. That's just like happens with any kind of a demonstration.

Most of the comments that are coming in to our office are “Congratulations, we’re glad you did it.” People came down to where we were demonstrating with pies and American flags. We’ve had very little negative responses.