In the Dec. 12 port shutdown campaign, the rank and file are leading organized labor, not the other way around

"We are disrupting for one day, but it is also a symbolic action to show that the workers are actually the ones with the power in this country." 

As Occupy Wall Street groups stretching from San Diego to Anchorage mobilizefor a multi-port shutdown of the North American West Coast, union members are finding the mobilization offers more than just support against union busting and unfair contracts. Activists and rank-and-file workers say the movement is teaching them what the bureaucratic infrastructure of organized labor has made them forget: collective power.

On Dec. 12, general assemblies (the decentralized governing bodies of OWS) in Los Angeles, Oakland, Calif., Tacoma, Wash., Santa Barbara, Calif., Portland, Ore., Seattle, Longview, Wash., San Diego, Anchorage, California’s Port Hueneme region, and dozens of smaller camps plan to blockade ports and halt commerce for a day. There is a combined Dallas-Houston effort to demonstrate at the port in Houston. Japanese rail workers, who are sympathetic to longshoremen, who work a partner company of Bunge — the company Occupy is protesting — will be demonstrating in Japan.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/09/occupy_vs_big_labor/

How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers — Occupy Protesters Plan to Shut Down West Coast Ports in Protest

http://www.alternet.org/economy/153393/how_goldman_sachs_and_other_companies_exploit_port_truck_drivers_

http://westcoastportshutdown.org/content/coordinated-port-blockade-actions-schedules

http://www.letsgosquidding.com/

Police Occupy Zuccotti = Bloomberg has done OWS a favor

Zuccotti Park, 

the space had been scrubbed down 

and repopulated with police and private-security types, 

up to 150 of them. 

Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists praised it or highlighted what they considered its bright side. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote that Bloomberg had done Occupy Wall Street a favor. After all, he argued, something dangerous or deadly was bound to happen at OWS sooner or later, especially with winter soon to arrive. Zuccotti Park, Klein added, “was cleared… in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.”

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/21/the_ows_victory_no_ones_talking_about/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://www.tomdispatch.com/