Commentary
The Port of Oakland in California’s San Francisco Bay is America’s ninth-busiest container port, handling more than 2.4 million 20-foot shipping containers a year. All last week, though, its docks were piled high with unloaded containers, and an armada of freighters stacked with still more containers sat idling in the bay—thanks to a week-long strike by the state’s independent truckers who used their vehicles to block road access to the port.
Only on July 26, after a week in which the port effectively shut down, did the 1,000 or so truckers involved lift their blockade—partly because they were under threat of being arrested and having their rigs impounded….