Labor
The all-Latina members of an East Oakland cleaning cooperative enjoy financial security and business-ownership with the help of Bay Area micro-enterprise development firms.
As protesters trickled out of the Port of Oakland Wednesday night, after Occupy Oakland demonstrations shut down business at the port, scores filed into a retrofitted former AC Transit bus for free rides back to the encampments in downtown Oakland.
A day during which thousands of people attended protests and marched through Oakland wound up this evening with as many as 10,000 protesters marching across the Highway 880 ramp and shutting down the Port of Oakland.
All 22 teachers from the Bridges Academy at Melrose elementary school, plus six parents, one infant and one middle-schooler, represented their school as they marched in support of Occupy Oakland’s general strike on Wednesday morning. Toting protest signs, tambourines, maracas, and a giant banner they walked from their school, near 53rd Avenue and International Boulevard, to downtown Oakland.
Occupy Oakland activists launched the first of three rallies at 14th and Broadway Wednesday morning, with Angela Davis and others speaking. Occupy Oakland, along with out-of-towners and employees from local unions, will meet at the intersection again Wednesday evening to converge on the Port of Oakland and attempt to shut it down.
Since Occupy Oakland protesters announced they would hold a general strike on November 2, unions from across the city and the state have sent a flurry of endorsements in support of what they are referring to as a “day of action,” rather than a strike. In the final moments before Wednesday’s events, union organizers have been working to encourage members to participate.
On Saturday, at the Oakland Zoo’s Snow Building, families reunited with the doctors and nurses who cared for their premature babies at the Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Heated confrontations between Oakland police and over 500 Occupy Oakland demonstrators during a march against police brutality on Saturday night threatened to turn into a repeat of Tuesday night’s violence, but the tension dissipated as the march moved away from OPD headquarters and into West Oakland. The night ended peacefully and without arrests.
Members of the Occupy Oakland general assembly discussed more details of the proposed general strike in the early evening Friday, agreeing after much fanfare to march on the Port of Oakland on Wednesday, November 2— the day of the proposed general strike— at 5 p.m.