Macrì worked inside the port for about 20 years until the terminal's operator, Medcenter Container Terminal (MCT), fired him in February 2023. He calls it a political dismissal, and he is challenging it in court. "They don't let you in," he said. "There's a turnstile system; the badge doesn't open, and you stay outside."
Since his firing, he continued to organize the port's workers from the outside. He showed me around the surroundings of the terminal without either of us setting foot inside its fences: the quay, the container stacks, the rail gate, the empty and undeveloped industrial zone, the remote beach, and the winding neighborhoods that stretch north to San Ferdinando. Afterward, he drove south to Reggio Calabria to help organize Friday’s strike with schools and other civil organizations.
Beneath the cranes, 17 containers of steel are somewhere among the terminal’s countless stacks. The containers are from India, the unions say, and they were initially bound for Israel. "We managed to intercept and block containers holding ballistic steel, dual-use steel," Macrì said, "and 17 of those containers are still held here inside the terminal."
"They're ordinary steel bars," said Peppe Marra, a leader of the rank-and-file union USB, the next day at the union's office in Reggio Calabria. "But we know that, at their destination, they would have become bullets."
The steel has not been seized. Customs, which has classified it as dual-use, is holding it while Italy's arms-export authority, UAMA, decides whether it can travel onwards. "It's true they're not seized," Marra said, "but it's also true they can't be loaded." Domenico Lucano, a member of the European Parliament, has asked authorities to seize all 17.
On Friday, dockworkers' unions at 113 ports in 22 countries and regions plan to strike or stop work against war and the militarization of ports, according to Ports in Action, the coalition helping to organize actions on October 30. Gioia Tauro is one of nine Italian ports on the list; ORSA Porti and USB have called a 24-hour strike there, and USB called a general strike across every sector.
"Today we can officially say it's the whole world," Macrì said, "because the fifth continent, the one that was missing, has joined." Having held up the 17 containers is part of why Gioia Tauro is joining, he said: it was the "first result" that showed what the unions were able to do.
In Livorno, as I reported this week, dockworkers have worked out a method for stopping war cargo: find out what is really on a ship, picket it, and strike if it tries to load. The method depends on knowing which box, which ship, is headed for a war. "Livorno and Genoa organize differently," Marra said, "because here it's exclusively transshipment."
Transshipment means a container comes off a big ship, waits in a customs zone, and goes out on a smaller one without ever formally entering Italy. In 2025, Gioia Tauro’s terminal moved a record 4.5 million standard 20-foot containers' worth of cargo—more than 12,000 a day.
"It's the sheer volume of goods that lets so-called dual-use material blend in," Macrì said. On the quay, dockworkers "often don't know what's in the containers, unless the markings outside match, and you have to check they haven't been faked," Marra said. "A simple worker can't know the contents."
At Gioia Tauro, like the workers and organizers, the information also comes from outside. In the case of the steel shipments bound for Israel, the tip came through what Marra called "the whole international solidarity network against the genocide of the Palestinian people."
"We got the information through that network and activated our dockworkers inside the port, who immediately checked what could be checked," he said. "When we had confirmation, we filed complaints, started parliamentary questions, press releases, and pickets outside the port."
The first suspect containers arrived in March. Campaigners traced the steel to RL Steels & Energy in Aurangabad, India; BDS Italia said it was headed to a plant run by IMI Systems, an ammunition maker owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. By March 18, eight containers were under inspection, and Marra brought MP Anna Laura Orrico to the port. The transit of such material to a country at war, he told LaC News24, was "absolutely forbidden by our law." Macrì told the same outlet: "As the Piana, we are not complicit."
BDS folded Gioia Tauro into a Block the Boat campaign, and MPs and Lucano came to the gates asking to inspect the containers. They were turned away. On May 29, the movement went to sea. Five boats from the Thousand Madleens to Gaza coalition and Global Intifada sailed out in front of the port as the MSC Manasvi, a ship of the company that owns the terminal, came in to load eight of the held containers. The ship stayed offshore for hours, then turned back without them, organizers told Middle East Eye. "The Mediterranean is not Israel's," said Roberto Panza of the Cosenza activist group La Base, who was aboard one of the boats. "It is ours." That afternoon, solidarity groups and USB held a sit-in at the port gates, and several smaller base unions called a 24-hour strike. This year, an Al Jazeera investigation found MSC shipping goods from Israeli settlements.
By September, the count had reached 17, according to a union statement. On September 7, ANSA reported that a technical assessment ordered by prosecutors in Palmi, the Guardia di Finanza, and customs had found nothing criminally relevant in eight of the containers, and that the cargo would continue to Israel. The news site Fanpage reported the next day that the other eight hadn’t been checked, and that the shipment was booked for Haifa on September 14.
Marra rejects the premise. Israel, he said, "is a country at war that violates human rights. Either one of those two elements would be enough, and Israel has both. We absolutely cannot allow even the simple transit of war material in that direction." The law, he added, "requires establishing the end user and the end use of those bars. If the bars are for a safe or a car, that's civilian use, but it has to be certain and certified, not a simple claim."
The containers never left. On September 9, Lucano said all 17 were still being held: customs had classified the steel as dual-use and placed it under a "catch-all" review pending a decision from UAMA. In October, UAMA told him the files were still under "careful study and verification," and on October 24 he asked the courts to seize them. USB wants them confiscated. "After working so hard to block them," Marra said, "we don't want them to take another trip."
For the dockworkers who load the ships, it isn't only a legal question. "You find out that what you moved and loaded onto a ship would, a few days later, have become children, women, and men killed," Marra said. "We now have many foreign workers, sometimes from those very territories, who discover they themselves moved weapons to those territories." A moment later he added: "It's something that touches you. And if it doesn't touch you, you're not human."
On Gaza, Macrì was blunt. "Right now, a genocide is still under way. It has never ended," he said. What troubles him most is that "the world's powerful" know what is happening: "They don't want to stop this genocide."
Livorno and Genoa are old port cities. Gioia Tauro's container terminal opened in 1995, on the plain below the hill. "There was nothing here; it was all desert," Macrì said. The dockworkers commute from all over Calabria. "There's no port community like in the other historic ports," he said. The port is "too young in terms of port experience to have the consciousness you find in the historic ports—Livorno, Genoa, Trieste. That's why we struggle so much." Macrì thinks the scattering was deliberate: "wherever there are port communities, consciousness is born." Marra agrees: "These practices have been carried out scientifically, precisely to stop the workforce from organizing."
"When you finish work, you go home," Macrì said. "You don't stop at the dockworkers' pub to talk about the job." Marra described the same isolation from the union's side. Workers get to know whoever is on their own shift, he said; "otherwise it's hard to have real moments of discussion, workers' assemblies. Unfortunately, there's a tendency to eliminate these spaces more and more." Many drive long distances home after a shift, which, he said, "prevents the very socializing that is the basis for strengthening bonds between workers, and so for building union organization and having an impact inside the port." Gioia Tauro, he added, "has always been a preview. Whatever they want to impose to cut rights, they do it at Gioia Tauro first."
The terminal is privately run, but it has relied upon public money. Since 2019, MCT has belonged entirely to MSC, the world's largest container line, and it’s managed by its port arm TIL. MSC is headquartered in Geneva and owned by the Aponte family. MSC founder Gianluigi Aponte is worth at least $37 billion. When the terminal shed about 400 jobs in 2017, the government earmarked €45 million in public funds for a labor agency to absorb the laid-off dockworkers. To the unions, that makes the port a contest over whose interests public investment serves. Leave the ports to a few shipping families, Macrì said, and you risk leaving "the investment of entire governments, of entire states" in their hands. "We're returning to the dictatorship of the private."
Speaking up at work also carries a price. Supervisors listen to the work radios, Macrì said, and complaints about shifts or work pace bring disciplinary charges, framed as safety violations. He laid out what the company fears as a chain of consequences: "If you talk, you organize; if you organize, you react; if you react, the port stops; and if the port stops, it becomes a problem." In February 2019, dockworkers blocked the port for more than a week over the terminal's crisis and job security. "I'm still paying for that with my dismissal," Macrì said. "It came years later."
The two unions try to hold onto assemblies anyway. Both say decisions start on the shop floor. "The assemblies are sovereign," Macrì said. "If the assembly gives the mandate, it gets done." A worker who joins ORSA, he said, "wants to know, informs himself, then acts," unlike unions that cut deals with the company and present them afterward. At USB, Marra said, "the decision doesn't go from the top down but from the bottom up," and there is no secretary: "We have executives, not men alone in command, precisely to avoid personalizing the leader." The two unions work together at the port. "Only the acronym is different," Macrì said. "The thinking is the same."
Before Friday, that means explaining the steel shipments to colleagues. "We're trying to give information that's as detailed, truthful, and transparent as possible—to explain it to all our fellow dockworkers," Macrì said. "It's a response we have to give to the powerful of the world, who are trying to use dockworkers as instruments of death." For him, it is also a defense of the port itself. "It's a civilian commercial port, not a war port," he said. "We don't have military work contracts. We're dockworkers who move civilian goods, so we have nothing to do with wars, and we don't want to."
The port is one of the best jobs in Calabria, Macrì noted, and that makes people cautious. "The port gives you real economic stability," he said. "And that's also the fear." But, he added, "the fear can't be so great that we become instruments of death. There has to be a surge of pride from the dockworkers. There was one once, and I think there'll be one again, on a bigger scale."
On October 27, Transport Minister Matteo Salvini signed an order requiring that the strike be postponed in the transport sectors, maritime transport among them; some outlets read it as covering the ports. USB called the order illegitimate and said the strike would go ahead. Workers who defy it could face fines of €500 to €1,000 each. Marra reads the order narrowly: dockworkers "work ashore, on container handling. They don't fall under this order."
If there are fines, USB says it won't leave strikers to fend for themselves. "When we decide to give up a day's pay, we don't do it to take a walk or bring the kids to a café. We do it to protest," Marra said. "Those who were ordered back and still strike will have every possible support from our organization." Macrì called a strike "an investment" in his children's future.
The strike is being built beyond the port. "You have to talk with other sectors, other groups, and speak their language," Macrì said. "So we bring together representatives, 20 or 30 people, and they bring people in [for the 30th]." On Friday, dockworkers will march through Reggio Calabria, from Piazza De Nava to Piazza Italia, with students joining them.
On Friday, the 17 containers will still be in the stacks, waiting for Rome to decide what they are and what to do with them. Macrì has decided what the port should be. "A dockworker wants to bring bread home and look his children in the face," he said, "thinking that on the other side of the world everyone else is doing the same. As long as the port is not an instrument of death."
