Last Friday, in what organizers called the largest coordinated port action ever, dockworkers struck at 113 ports in 22 countries on five continents. Genoa’s community did, in fact, mobilize behind the nationwide strike: some 40,000 people filled Piazza De Ferrari, ANSA reported. At 9:30 a.m., militant dockworkers blocked Varco Albertazzi, one of the port’s main gates, with tires and smoke flares.
Genoese students came down from the university on Via Balbi and from Piazza Montano in Sampierdarena, where primary-school teacher and USB member Anna Pedemonte marched with them. “I found students who came to my class ten years ago,” she told me. At 11:35, the contingent of students and teachers joined the dockworkers under the Matitone tower. A field kitchen at the gate served pasta as protesters took a midday break from the march. At 2:40 p.m., some 10,000 to 15,000 people walked into the port.
“Dockworkers want their hands dirty with grease, not with blood,” said Nivoi, a Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) member and leader of the militant dockworkers' collective known as CALP. “So we have to block everything again.” Across the Mediterranean, about 3,000 dockworkers and seafarers walked out in Piraeus, Greece, and ships stayed moored in seven Greek ports. “We will not work for their wars, and we will not become fodder for their cannons,” said Apostolos Kypraios of the Greek marine engineers’ union. The strike also reached Valencia and Algeciras, Tangier Med, ports in Turkey, India’s Nhava Sheva and Oakland, where ILWU Local 10 joined. Stoppages ran from two hours in Morocco to a full day in Italy, France, Greece, Turkey and India. No Harbour for Genocide, a campaign of dockworkers and activists, claimed the action would hold up about 52,000 containers and $2.8 billion in cargo.
In Italy, USB called a general strike and held it, despite Transport Minister Matteo Salvini’s order against strike action in the transport sector. “We don’t care,” Nivoi said of the order. “He hasn’t understood that we’re going all the way now.” Salvini, Pedemonte told me, had ordered transport workers back to work “on a ridiculous pretext,” but “at this stage, every sector is realizing that only by joining forces can we really express, strongly and clearly, all the reasons that bring us into the streets.” USB claims 1.5 million people took part across the country, while the interior ministry counted more than 255,000. In Rome, police used water cannons and detained eight people as students tried to break through to Parliament. Meanwhile, in Turin, police charged and battered protestors.
Yesterday, USB held a national assembly beneath the Colosseum in Rome, after students, workers, and housing activists had camped for two nights on Via dei Fori Imperiali. “We have to decide on a moment, all together, when we come to Rome to say one precise thing,” USB’s national executive Guido Lutrario told reporters. USB has declared a national march against the cost of living, military rearmament, and the government to be held on December 12.
The government’s answer to these widening protests continues to be austerity. “Your government moves 5 percent of GDP into the military, and then you sit at a table with them and they tell you, we don’t have the money,” Nivoi told me. “There’s a fucking political problem. It’s not a union problem.”
Nivoi sailed on the Morgana with the Global Sumud Flotilla last autumn, and in the end, he was also intercepted and detained by Israel. Before he sailed, he helped organize the “blocchiamo tutto” campaign, a promise to block everything if Israeli forces stopped the flotilla. Then, from onboard the Morgana, he sustained the grassroots effort “with two phones, [and] 800 different chats,” he said, while “writing, steering the boat, fixing the engine, dodging drones.” He came back home with a question that shaped the October 30 mobilization: “Is it useful for me to go over there and play the white man bringing a package of pasta, or should I start raising hell in my own country, the same state that lets Israel carry out its aggression against the Palestinian people?” Even before the flotilla, though, Nivoi had become a central figure in the dockworkers’ militant revival.
CALP goes back to 1950, he said, but its militant traditions reach even further into the past. “We had fathers and grandfathers who passed down to us what we do today,” Nivoi said. “The first blockade of an arms ship here in Genoa was in 1919,” Nivoi claimed, during the Biennio Rosso, two years of mass strikes and factory occupations that followed World War I. In 1960, a general strike was organized from Genoa on June 30, and it helped to bring the Tambroni government down.
CALP's current collective was revived by a younger generation after October 15, 2011, when hundreds of thousands marched in Rome against former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s austerity, answering a call from Spain’s Indignados movement. CALP formed on the bus carrying 105 Genoese activists home from the demonstrations in Rome, according to Notes from Below. Among them was a group of dockworkers who no longer felt the CGIL represented them, journalist Anna Jikhareva reported.
When CALP was born, Nivoi said, its members tried to agitate inside the CGIL, Italy’s largest union confederation. “When we couldn’t, we left the CGIL and joined USB en bloc.” In Genoa, he said, “You need the union. Who’s going to declare the strike for you? You can’t do autonomy unless you do a kind of civil disobedience.” On October 3, about 600 people filled the CAP, a storied workers’ hall near the Genoese port, and then walked out and blocked a gate.
I asked Nivoi how the strike got built. “We saw that February 6 had worked” earlier this year, he said of a strike that held up Zim ships in several Italian ports. “So, on WhatsApp chats, we wrote to each other: let’s meet again with the organizers of February 6—in whatever city. Of course, everyone proposed their own city, and the Turks offered Istanbul. We call it, and we like the name, the ‘Third Dockworkers’ International.’ We hope there’ll be a fourth.” That meeting, in May, produced the Istanbul Declaration, which set the course for October 30. “We all said: autumn,” he went on. “Then each of us took it back into our own port,” through assemblies at work and in public.
In October, he said, the union saw social anger growing across the country: farmers in the south, fishermen in central Italy, Taranto’s steelworks, hundreds of school occupations. “We asked ourselves: maybe it’s time to build the general strike. We built it by reading what was happening, without shutting ourselves up in our little fort.” The dockworker, he added, “is at the center, but the strength is the citizens of those cities. Above all, the students.”
A union organizer, Nivoi said, should be “not a fucking bureaucrat, but a political militant who stands beside the workers. If there are clashes, he’s in the front row. When there’s a strike to declare, he’s the one who declares it. When someone has to get arrested, he gets arrested.” Later, he added, “The real question is, whose side are you on? If you’re on the bosses’ side, stop doing union work.”
Asked how CALP stops arms shipments, Nivoi said, “We don’t have a standard way of mobilizing, because it depends on what kind of weapon it is.”
In 2019, he said, “the dockworkers of Le Havre sent us the article” from the French outlet Disclose: a Bahri ship was coming through Genoa with arms for Saudi Arabia. “We had a full month.” On the quay, they found generators from the Italian firm Teknel bound for the Saudi National Guard, Internazionale later reported. “We blocked the port, we held a strike, we made the ship lose time,” he said.
In August 2025, an Oto Melara naval cannon sat on the quay waiting for another Bahri ship, bound for a warship being built in Abu Dhabi. “There was Mayor Salis saying ‘viva Palestina,’ but then not doing a damn thing,” he said. “So we played a double game,” filing a complaint with the prefect. “The prosecutors stepped in, inspected on board, and found explosives, plus American military vehicles.” The cannon was sent back to La Spezia.
Last year, Greek dockworkers at Piraeus refused to unload three containers of steel for Israel and warned Genoa the ship was coming. “We declared a strike across La Spezia and Genoa,” he said, “and the magic happened.” The shipping line announced it wouldn’t unload them. “You’re not even giving us the pleasure of the fight.”
I told him that, in the U.S., organizers often know what comes through the ports, but they can’t organize to stop it. “In Italy, it’s the opposite,” he said. “We don’t have the information. We workers have to rely on others.” There’s too much cargo moving through the ports, he said, and “either you block the ports completely, for months, for years, and then you literally block the war system, or you hold the international strike.”
Anna Pedemonte was born in Sampierdarena, the working-class district where she teaches 45 children across two primary school classes. About 500 people set out from Montano on October 30, she said, many from high schools that students had occupied earlier that week. “We walked the whole main street of Sampierdarena and reached the roundabout, where we met the dockworkers,” she said. “It was a truly, truly moving moment.”
She joined USB a year and a half ago. “Before, I had doubts. I didn’t have much trust in unions,” she said. With CALP, “there’s a common denominator, which is the reason to fight against war. But the reasons that bring dockworkers into the streets to strike are connected to schools, too—to other workers, and to students.”
The Education Ministry put strike participation among school staff at 7.57 percent. “The Ministry will certainly tend to lower the numbers,” Pedemonte said. “At my school, lots of us struck. Teachers who usually strike only when CGIL, CISL and UIL call it struck this time. Lots of nurseries closed, so there were teachers in the streets with their own children.”
The students had been building toward the strike for weeks, with occupations at the Gobetti, the Lanfranconi, the Klee-Barabino and the Montale. “We refuse to attend schools falling apart while billions are spent on weapons and wars,” the collectives wrote. On October 21, in Sampierdarena, students from the collective Osa occupied the Gastaldi technical institute. “We keep working in schools from 50 years ago, inadequate and falling apart,” Pedemonte said.
The student occupations came as the EU pushed for rearmament. Its 2025 Preparedness Union Strategy calls for “preparedness lessons” for crises, from armed conflict to natural disasters, and a European Parliament resolution that April called for teaching young people about defense and the armed forces. In 2024, police showed a class from a Genoese high school how to use a baton on a protester. “The armed forces present themselves as a model for the new generations,” Pedemonte said. “Just last week, a high school in Genoa got an email from the ministry proposing voluntary military service to the students. And this is only the beginning.”
“The conditions dockworkers are in are the same ones we’re in,” she said. “If teachers’ solidarity with the dockworkers was enough before, it isn’t enough anymore. What matters now is answering the dockworkers’ call into the streets, not separately but together.”
The dockworkers, she said, “are teaching us an enormous lesson. If we keep living this present passively, we’ll never get any change.” They act “with great courage, heads held high,” she added, and the job now is “to explain to all the precarious school workers that, at this stage, participation and unity really are strength.”
For Pedemonte, the lessons are also coming from the student occupations. “Right now, young people are showing us that they won’t put up with it anymore. We have to back them, be in the streets with them—in the assemblies. To change anything, we all have to be united,” she said. “They want to be protagonists of the present, but they also want to be protagonists of their future.”
Alex Colston is an independent journalist, editor, and organizer. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, but he prefers to be at sea.
