Longshoremen Strike

Unless anything changes between writing this post last night and this going up this morning, the International Longshoremen’s Association will be going on strike, closing all the ports on the east coast and the Gulf. The reasons are complex–this is a kind of unionism you don’t see a lot anymore. These are very highly paid workers. But a long time ago, the two longshoremen’s unions (the ILWU on the West Coast has a contract and is not striking; those ports will remain open) made a deal with the companies that they’d accept automation to an extent but in exchange, the remaining workers would be paid–a lot. And so they are, workers in this industry can make up to $200,000 a year. But understand that this is dangerous labor–the ILA had nothing to do with the ship out of Baltimore that hit the bridge except for loading it, but you can see from that just how dangerous that work remains.

But the companies decided to introduce some additional job-stealing automation without talking to the ILA in the Mobile port and this started us down this road, The operators who run these companies–and there a lot of them, this is not some oligopoly, so they have a representative group do the negotiations–clearly want to end most work and are not bargaining in good faith. The workers know they have a tremendous about of leverage in the global economy and they aren’t surrendering either. So here we are.

I’ve talked to a couple reporters about all this and the real angle they want to take is how this impacts the presidential election. I don’t think it does. The Biden administration is not going to invoke Taft-Hartley to force the workers back on the job, certainly not until after the election. To do so would decimate support for Harris among already somewhat shaky unionists. In 2022, Biden took the risk to invoke the Railway Labor Act to stop the railroad brotherhood from going on strike and while that has continued to lead to grumbling from leftists, there was no additional inflationary pressure and so Democrats overperformed the polls. But because railroads tend to move goods after they’ve been imported, there is more potential short-term pressure there. Moreover, companies have been preparing for this and so shortages or higher prices are likely to take some time to happen, quite possibly we won’t see much until after the election anyway. Finally, the administration is going to be working around the clock to end this strike and get to a good deal for all.

So right now, I don’t necessarily think this is a huge deal, but it’s obviously something we need to keep a close eye on.