A Global Port Strike Could Freeze $2 Billion in Freight

In a global labor action of record scale, dockworkers in 22 countries will strike on Friday to protest the use of their ports for arms exports. Organizers say that the strike, organized by an international coalition of dockworkers’ unions, could disrupt as much as 40 percent of marine cargo moving through the Mediterranean and bring more than $2 billion worth of freight to a standstill.

The strike, planned since May, has its epicenter in the Mediterranean: It was originally called for by unions in Italy, France, Greece, Spain’s Basque Country, Turkey, and Morocco.

Since then, port workers in Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, and Australia have joined, supported by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. No national US-based unions have signed on to the strike, but groups of dockworkers in Oakland and San Francisco plan to participate.

The dockworkers’ demands, according to a statement released in May, include “an immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state,” and an end to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones,” the unions wrote. At an October 15 press conference, representatives of participating unions estimated that even a single day’s shipping delay could result in $43 million in lost profit.

The people who load and unload cargo ships make up a class of workers with unusual power over foreign affairs and trade. Ships carry some 80 percent of all international trade by volume, and wars cannot continue without raw material—bullets, armaments, bombs, and fuel. Much of that cargo moves by sea, as it can be dangerous to ship by air, as analyst Francesco Vignarca of the Italian Peace and Disarmament Network told the Spanish publication El Diario this week. Europe has invested heavily in weapons over the past five years, and now imports a third of the world’s arms.

But, Vignarca said, “There is also a heightened awareness among workers—dockworkers, and others—which has led to more frequent protests, blockades, and a clear desire to put an end to this phenomenon.”

The history of dockworkers’ strikes is long, and studded with strikes like this one, which at times aim not only to increase workers’ wages or decrease their working hours, but to end wars.

Past dockworkers’ strikes in the United States have won bread-and-butter gains, like the 1913 longshoremen’s strike in Philadelphia, which shut down one of the busiest ports in the United States and won wage increases and better working conditions. Other strikes have disrupted the supply chains of war. In 1984, dockworkers in San Francisco refused to unload cargo originating from apartheid South Africa. And in 2008, 25,000 unionized longshoremen and warehouse workers shut down shipping along the West Coast of the United States as a protest against the war in Iraq.

Though activists in the United States have also attempted to target ports and stop weapons shipments since Israel began bombarding Gaza in October 2023, those efforts—which rarely involve the people who work in those shipping hubs—have seen limited success.

But internationally, port truckers, metalworkers, and dockworkers have found some strategies to stop arms shipments. Workers across Europe successfully coordinated actions to stop weapons shipments to Saudi Arabia in 2019, as that country was bombing Yemen; in 2024, dockworkers in Greece’s port of Piraeus stopped a shipment carrying arms to Israel.

“We will not let the port become an outpost of the US, NATO or the EU,” Markos Bekris, president of the Greek port’s container handling workers’ union, said at the time. “Our goal is to block the unloading in practice and prevent the transport of this deadly cargo. We will not stain our hands with blood.”