Jackheyman

ILWU Longshore union activist (retired). I've been involved in solidarity actions since the 1984 longshore boycott of a ship from South Africa to protest apartheid. I've helped organize solidarity actions for dockworkers from Liverpool, England to Charleston, South Carolina to Australia and Hong Kong. The ILWU, along with a thousand demonstrators protested the Iraq War in the port of Oakland. Then-mayor Jerry Brown ordered in riot police who attacked the peaceful protesters sending scores of them and longshoremen to the hospital. I've worked with the ACLU in exposing and challenging government surveillance of protesters exercising their first amendment rights, including the government's port security measures to shackle port workers with special ID's and cameras throughout the port. On May Day 2008, the longshore union shut down all ports on the West Coast to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could be considered an act of revenge for the police attack on anti-war protesters at the start of the war in 2003. It was the first ever labor strike in the U.S. against imperialist war. In 2010, longshoremen refused to cross a picket line of mainly Arab, Muslim and anti-Zionist protesters in the port to protest the Israeli army attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza, following an example set by black South African dockers earlier. I work with the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee to defend workers and immigrant rights, civil liberties and civil rights and against imperialist war.