For the primary time in nearly 50 years, longshoremen on the East and Gulf Coasts went on strike Tuesday, a move that can cut off most trade through a number of the busiest U.S. ports and will slow the economy.
“Without us, nothing will move – nothing,” Harold J. Daggett, president of the International Longshoremen's Association, told picketers outside a port terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, early Tuesday.
The United States Maritime Alliance, which represents port employers, didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
Companies are currently facing a period of uncertainty. Trade experts say a brief strike would do little lasting damage, but a weeks-long strike could lead on to shortages, higher prices and even layoffs.
“If we're talking about a two- to three-week strike,” said J. Bruce Chan, transportation analyst at Stifel, a Wall Street firm, “then the problem starts to get exponentially worse.”
The prospect of great economic damage from a strike puts President Joe Biden in a bind five weeks before the national election. Before the strike, he said he wouldn’t use federal labor to force an end to a port closure – something President George W. Bush did in 2002 – but some labor experts said he could use that power if the strike began to strain Business.
Dock staff move containers from ships, sort them and cargo them onto trucks or trains, and likewise transport bulk cargo. About three-fifths of the nation's container shipments go through ports on the East and Gulf Coasts, including the Port of New York and New Jersey, the nation's third-largest, and fast-growing ports in Virginia, Georgia and Texas.
A strike can even halt the movement of cars and heavy machinery through the Port of Baltimore, where operations were limited for a lot of the spring after a container ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Automakers said they were monitoring the strike but it surely was too early to say how it could affect them.
Cruise ship operations will not be affected by the strike and military deliveries will proceed. Rick Cotton, the manager director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said Monday that about 100,000 containers can be stored on the port throughout the strike and that 35 ships arriving next week can be anchored offshore.
“The stakes are very high,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said at a news conference Monday. “The potential for disruption is significant.“But she also tried to reassure consumers by saying that food and medicine shortages were not expected.
There is no practical alternative to ports for transporting large quantities of goods in and out of the country. And ports cannot operate without longshoremen, giving them powerful leverage in labor negotiations.
The ports on the west coast are open. Dock workers there belong to a different union and agreed to a new contract last year that includes a significant wage increase.
Under the contract, which expires Monday, longshoremen on the East and Gulf Coasts earned a top wage of $39 an hour. The ILA wants a salary increase of $5 an hour in each of the six years of a new agreement, a 77% increase over the life of the agreement. On Monday, Allianz said its latest offer to the union would increase wages by “nearly 50%” over the lifetime of the contract.
With time beyond regulation and shift work, many longshoremen earn well over $100,000 a 12 months, putting them ahead of other staff and not using a college degree. But they are saying they work many more hours than staff in other jobs with similar incomes, often in harsh or dangerous conditions.
The high inflation of recent years has reduced the purchasing power of their wages. And longshoremen claim they’ve a right to a share of the increased profits that their employers – including some major global shipping firms – made throughout the pandemic trade boom in 2021 and 2022.
Knowing that a strike was possible, many firms began shipping in goods before Tuesday, including a lot of the consumer durables they planned to sell throughout the holiday shopping season. But even a brief strike could hurt importers of perishable goods like fruit.
Daniel J. Barabino, chief operating officer at Top Banana, a fruit retailer based on the Hunts Point Produce Market within the New York City borough of the Bronx, said a strike could cause it to find yourself running out of bananas, its important product, next week . “Everyone in the region will be affected, all banana importers – no one will have fruit,” he said.
Barabino added that transporting fruit by air is just too costly. And he said he couldn't make up the deficit by selling products aside from bananas. “They pay the coffee bill, maybe the bottled water bill,” he said, “but they don’t pay the electric bill, the rent, the truck leases or employee salaries.”
The last time the ILA invaded all ports on the East and Gulf Coasts was in 1977, bringing container shipping to a standstill for greater than six weeks. The agreement that ended the strike included wage increases well above employers' proposals, increased contributions to pension plans and steps to handle ILA concerns that recent technologies could lead on to job losses.
The ILA remains to be fighting against automation. It broke off talks with the Maritime Alliance in June, saying a port in Mobile, Alabama, was checking trucks using technology not permitted under its employment contract. (The technology has been in use because the port opened in 2008, a source aware of the operation said.)
Under the expired contract, port operators were allowed to make use of “semi-automated” technology, but not equipment that works “without human interaction.” The Maritime Alliance said it had offered in recent discussions to translate that commitment right into a recent contract.
Recently, other unions have gotten much of what they asked for in collective bargaining, and labor experts said the ILA hopes to capitalize on that victory.
“The union has shown that it is fighting hard,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor emerita on the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on labor and trade. “The employers’ association is also clear that the strikes have broadly helped the unions over the last year or so.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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