On 30 October, dockworkers at 113 ports in 22 countries and regions joined an international day of action against militarisation and war. From Gioia Tauro to Genoa, from Oakland to Hamburg and Veracruz, workers withdrew the labour that keeps the war machine moving.

The mobilisation grew out of the Istanbul Declaration agreed by Mediterranean port unions in May. Its reach is now global. In Italy, workers at nine ports took action, and the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) called a general strike across every sector. In France, the largest dockworkers’ union said that nearly all maritime shipping capacity in the country was affected.

The workers’ demands reach beyond Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They call for stopping all movements of arms through civilian ports; ending the use of ports as bases for NATO, US, and EU militaries; halting European rearmament; and raising the wages of the workers who keep the ports running.

The 30 October action ranks among the largest anti-war labor strikes in post-World War II history. It is significant not only for its scale, but also for its novel strategy. The mobilization is uniting workers across the Global North and the South. It is explicitly challenging the terms on which imperialism wages war, which depends on the control of transnational logistics chains that cannot be disrupted in any single territory in isolation. By matching the scale of mobilisation to the scale of imperialism’s logistics apparatus, dockworkers have demonstrated that it is possible to mount a challenge to war.

Over the past week, journalist Alex Colston has been on the ground in Italy to speak with workers and report from the mobilisations. His reporting — published as an exclusive in collaboration with independent media across our Wire network — documented how dockworkers in Italy joined hands with popular movements in a series of actions building towards the day of action on 30 October.

In Livorno, Colston reported on the action against the Sunaid X, a container ship identified by local unions as a supplier to the NATO military base at Sigonella. Global Sumud Flotilla sailboats held the harbor entrance while USB and the autonomous dockworkers’ collective GAP picketed the terminal gate. When the ship docked, dockworkers on the night shift refused to service it. The morning shift did the same.

That coordination rests on a methodology developed over a year of struggle. “Information, pickets, strike,” Giovanni Ceraolo of USB told Colston. “That’s the only method we have for now, and it’s working, on and off.” Workers identify the cargo; movements and unions organise outside the gates; and dockworkers withdraw their labour inside. “In practice, there are only two ways to block this traffic: with pickets and blockades, and with the strike,” Ceraolo said. “When we’ve managed to do both, we’ve pulled it off.”

For Simone D’Aversa, a Livorno dockworker who helped found GAP, the struggle began with the recognition that his own labour had become “extremely involved in war.” “It made me commit: to try to find a way to become something that disturbs this machine from the inside,” he said.

These actions remind us that working people who service the war machine hold singular capacity to stop it. “It’s true that governments are complicit in what happened,” D’Aversa said. “But I think the act that most challenges our privilege is admitting that we are complicit with our governments, if we don’t do [on October 30] what we did in September and October.”

In Gioia Tauro, the same strategy was deployed at Italy’s largest transshipment port. Seventeen containers of dual-use steel, initially bound for Israel, remain held inside the terminal after unions and solidarity movements traced the cargo, filed complaints, organised pickets and mobilised at sea. “They’re ordinary steel bars,” the USB’s Peppe Marra said. “But we know that, at their destination, they would have become bullets.”

For the workers asked to load that cargo, the question holds moral weight. “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.” He added: “It’s something that touches you. And if it doesn’t touch you, you’re not human.”

The mobilisation also confronts the isolation and discipline imposed inside the port. Domenico “Mimmo” Macrì of ORSA Porti described the company’s fear of worker organisation 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.”

The 30 October strike sought to break that isolation between shifts, between workplaces and between ports. It asserted that the terminals through which world trade passes should not belong to military alliances or serve their wars. “It’s a civilian commercial port, not a war port,” Macrì 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.”

This action carries risks: lost pay, retaliation and, for some Italian transport workers, the threat of fines after Transport Minister Matteo Salvini ordered strike action postponed. But the workers are refusing to bear the cost of war while being denied the power to stop it. “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.”

The lesson from Livorno and Gioia Tauro is that even a delay can reverberate through the machinery of war. “If a ship is delayed by one day, the delays pile up, and a logistics mechanism breaks,” Ceraolo said. “It’s a political signal, but also economic damage. Both things together. So, for us, beyond everything, it’s a historic day.”

The 30 October mobilization offers a critical lesson in the power of labor to shape the conditions of our lives — including by exercising their power over questions of war and peace, which are normally reserved to the managers of global capital. The task of our generation to is turn that lesson into durable political power for working people.

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