THE USE AND MISUSE OF A "CAN"

THE USE AND MISUSE OF A "CAN"
Photographs by David Bacon

Shipping containers have deep meaning for the working people of the San Francisco Bay Area.  First and foremost, they're the material basis of the work of the longshore.  From miles away, you can see the container cranes on the Oakland waterfront.  The unions for the waterside workers, Locals 10 and 34 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, just won a long battle to keep one of San Francisco's legendary, or notorious, famiies, the Fishers (think, The Gap) from turning the Oakland waterfront into a huge condo development with a ballpark on the side.  The union and its allies argue that without room for the containers and cranes, the waterfront would die, and with it, the economic life of the city.

The containers have historic meaning as well, which makes the workers' defense of them a kind of bitter irony.  In the days before the containers and cranes, cargo was loaded and unloaded using many, many workers for each ship.  Even today the union's symbol is the cargo hook, used then to catch the cargo net and swing it into place.  In the 1960s, however, the union agreed that the containerization of the waterfront couldn't be stopped, and that it had no choice but to bargain for the terms under which it would take place.  Workers got a pay guarantee, and they still are so important to the movement of cargo that if they stop, the whole shipping system shudders to a halt.  But the price was jobs.  The container meant that only a tenth of the workers who worked the docks then, now work them today.

With so many containers, or cans, as the workers call them, floating through the Bay Area, it didn't take long to see them put to other purposes as well.  A lawyer friend has his office in a pile of containers not far from the port, welded together to make a building.  Around the corner from my house is the home of an architect couple, who put two containers in  their back yard for their home office.  When I visited longshore workers in Basra not long after the U.S. occupation started, I saw containers used by workers for housing in the wake of the enormous destruction.  Containers for housing is an idea floated in this country too, as a way to give shelter to people living on the sidewalk.

This year Berkeley administrators of the University of California gave the shipping container an entirely new meaning - the wall.  Two years ago the community in and around People's Park had repulsed the University's previous attempt to expel the public and grab back the city block on which the Park stands.  But activists pushed down a chain link fence, and then disabled the huge construction vehicles brought in to reduce trees and structures to dirt and rubble.  This year the University would not be defeated so easily.  On January 4, in the dead of night, police reoccupied People's Park.  After the people living in the park were removed, trucks brought in dozens of cans, and a wall of containers, stacked double high, was erected around the park.

Perhaps the University can name the wall the James Rector Memorial.  Or since they say they intend to build student housing on the site, it can be called the James Rector Dormitory.  Either way, the University can acknowledge, for the first time, that the price of taking the land away from the community 55 years ago was Rector's death.  On May 15, 1969, cops from the state and surrounding cities fought students and community activists who wanted the land for a park.  As tear gas filled Telegraph Avenue in the heart of the student ghetto, Alameda County Sheriff Deputies fired shotguns at people demonstrating.  A cop then trained his sights on Rector, as he stood on a building's roof watching the battle going on below.  The cop fired, and Rector died.  Alan Blanchard was permanently blinded by buckshot, and 128 others were wounded.  The city was occupied by the National Guard, on orders of then-Governor Ronald Reagan.  "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with," he said later.

There is no James Rector Hall at UC Berkeley.  But today there are many buildings on the campus named after rich people and those who serve them well.  Giannini Hall memorializes AP Giannini, California's premier financier and founder of the Bank of America, while the Hearst Memorial Mining Building honors the ultra-wealthy newspaper owner.  According to author Tony Platt, former UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler argued for suppressing the birthrate of "inferior" peoples - his name now graces Wheeler Hall.  The Lawrence laboratory, where research helped produce the first atom bomb, is named for the scientist who headed that catastrophic project.  Gordon Sproul, as UC President, oversaw the McCarthy loyalty oath purge that led to firing 40 professors.  That got his name attached to Sproul Hall, where 800 students (myself among them) were arrested in 1964's Free Speech Movement.  

Since the university's reoccupation of People's Park, a group of active opponents marches from a local junior high school to the container wall every week.  Seeing their banners beneath the towering cans, the marchers can seem small by comparison.  But out in the port, where the containers have their true value and usage, people moving them also seem small.  Yet there is a power in work and protest that comes from human endeavor, which can bend a container to its will.  The marchers may yet overcome the scandalous use UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ has put to these objects, whose tradition and dignity she has ignored.

The People's Park Council (https://www.peoplespark.org/wp/) "calls on the University to honor the recognition of People's Park as a nationally significant site, included on the National Register of Historic Places [and] to acknowledge the cultural and environmental importance of the park, returning it to the community that maintains it ... People's Park stands as a beacon of
community empowerment, environmental stewardship, and social justice. To fight climate chaos, we need all the green space we can find."