Occupy is back

Listen to Dave Ross Commentary: Occupy is back

OCCUPY is back… with the drums, and a new tactic, shut down West Coast ports — in solidarity with port workers.

Except when reporters talked to some of those workers:

“I think they’d be better off finding a candidate of their own, and getting involved in politics, than trying to take work away from good, honest people,” a trucker from Idaho told CBS.

Here’s a trucker from Utah.

“They’re not hurting these guys. They’re only hurting us.”

Another trucker said:

“What they don’t realize is the more they Occupy, the less money everybody makes.”

Not hearing a lot of solidarity among the truckers. As for the Longshoremen — some workers might observe the lines, but the union bosses hate this idea.

Jeff Smith runs the union’s operation on the Columbia River — he says “If I wanted to shut down the port, I could do it without Occupy.”

You see what’s going on — the Occupy message is that corporations make too much profit, and it’s time for workers to get a piece of that.

But the way the unions see it, there’s already a movement designed to force corporations to put money in worker’s pockets — it’s called the UNION.

Threatening to shut down a port is THEIR thing. When they do it, they do it on THEIR terms. That’s why the average longshore salary nationwide is $65,000. Average in Seattle $78,000. Average in the Bay Area $87,000. And when you add overtime — It might not put them in the 1 percent, but can be pretty comfortable.

And they figure they didn’t get there by drumming…or even tambourining.

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