"Mediterranean dockworkers launch historic international strike"

On February 6, dockworkers in more than 20 Mediterranean ports went on strike against war, militarization, and port privatization.

Dockworkers in more than 20 ports across the Mediterranean marked a historic moment today as they launched an international day of strike and protest against war and rearmament. Dockers also protested the privatization and militarization of port infrastructure.

Unionists involved in preparing the action described it as the result of a long and complex process, built on dockworkers’ solidarity with Palestine and their struggles for dignified working conditions at home.

The impact of the strike was felt even before it fully unfolded on February 6, as reports emerged of ships – vessels that regularly transport military cargo to Israel – disrupting their itineraries due to the actions.

“Ports are places of sweat, not blood”

Demonstrations began in the morning in the Greek ports of Piraeus and Elefsina, in Türkiye’s Mersin, and in Bilbao and Pasaia in the Basque Country. The trade union Liman-İş Sendikası rallied hundreds of its members to send a message against genocide and in solidarity with Palestine, echoing similar dispatches by their comrades from LAB in the Basque Country.

In Greece, dockworkers highlighted the contradiction between massive European investments in rearmament and the imposition of austerity on public services and infrastructure, which is leading to increasingly unsafe working conditions. “We won’t accept work without rights,” said Damianos Voudigaris of the Greek union ENEDEP later in the day. “Development should mean going home alive. Ports are places of work, not war. They are places of sweat, not blood.”

Some of the largest mobilizations of the day took place in Italy. [...]

“Today it’s the ports, tomorrow it will be the entire logistics sector”

While uniting around shared demands – to prevent the militarization of ports, reject rearmament, and stop a war economy from stifling all other priorities – striking workers also raised local concerns. Dockworkers in Trieste warned against port privatization. Elsewhere, including in Bari and Ravenna, workers and students described how port infrastructure was being used, sometimes covertly, to transport military and dual-use materials to Israel. “Everyone here has had enough of that,” one activist in Ravenna said. [...]

The international dockworkers’ strike, however, is not the end of the road, workers emphasized. “Today it’s the ports, tomorrow it will be the entire logistics sector, and then it will be all workers,” strikers in Ravenna concluded. [...]