JOC Staff | Dec 20, 2012 11:38AM EST
Dockworkers at Charleston refused to unload a ship for about two hours in support of an Occupy Wall Street protest of working conditions at apparel factories like the one where more than 100 Bangladeshi workers died in a fire last month.
“It’s the cargo on the ship. We’ve got a concern about workers around the world,” Leonard Riley of International Longshoreman’s Association Local 1422 told the Charleston Post & Courier.
Gates at the South Carolina Ports Authority’s Wando Welch Terminal opened at 8:30 following the protest, a port spokeswoman said.
The protest was organized by Occupy Wall Street activists who claimed the container ship Carolina Maersk carried clothes destined for Wal-Mart and made at the same factory that was the site of last month’s deadly fire.
The group held a similar protest when the ship was at Port Newark on Tuesday, but port authority police isolated the demonstration at a site where it did not disrupt operations.