Port Strike Halts: Now What?

Rumors that the port strike could end quickly had been flying around Shipping Twitter since members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) walked off the job last Tuesday. And then it ended, with a tentative wage agreement and disputes over automation and fees punted to January. Ironically, given the Biden administration’s adamancy that a Taft-Hartley Act cooling-off period should not be invoked, the parties practically agreed to a cooling-off period themselves.

So what happened, and what does it mean for labor relations policy?

The Reality of a “Real Strike”

ILA president Harold Daggett went into the work stoppage with the air of a Mafioso (appropriate, given the ILA’s not-so-recent and recent history of labor racketeering). In an interview that went viral, he vowed that he could call a strike that would “cripple” the U.S. economy and lead to mass layoffs as goods stopped moving. The union vowed that it would not go back to the negotiating table unless the port management association USMX agreed to a 77 percent pay increase over the six-year contract term. Everything was set up for a damaging, extortionate, and protracted labor stoppage, especially given how popular issue polls say labor unions are these days.

Part of that apparent popularity as I have suspected is an effect of unfamiliarity with the reality of labor unionism. But Daggett vowed a “real strike” in an era largely defined by the Taft-Hartley consensus principle that protecting the public from other people’s labor disputes is a proper end of public policy—teachers unions’ ability to inflict years of learning loss on students during COVID-19 is the glaring exception. This threat was fundamentally different from job actions like the Hollywood strikes or the UAW strikes last year. With Daggett vowing to inflict real pain, shoppers beginning to hoard supermarket goods in case of shortages, and online chatter focusing on Daggett’s Mob-like tactics, the popular support did not materialize like it had for the 2023 strikes that narrowly targeted their disruptions. In fact, public sentiment became outright hostile toward the ILA’s extortionate strategy.

Two History Lessons

If labor unionists considered labor history as something more than source of propaganda for labor unionism, they could have seen this coming. Americans can tolerate if not support industrial action that is targeted toward a single employer. If a grocery store goes on strike, the pain is felt by the owner of the store and the workers who are disputing, and shoppers can shop elsewhere. Simple and straightforward.

The public does not tolerate industrial action that tries to hold economic choke points hostage to inflict widespread economic damage to third parties. Just ask the railroad brotherhoods, who attempted to extort the Truman administration in 1946 by shutting down the national transportation network. Their miscalculation led President Truman, a Democrat and usual labor ally, to denounce them as akin to the Imperial Japanese Navy that bombed Pearl Harbor and to threaten to draft strikers into the military while using the Army to break the strike.

One could also ask the air traffic controllers’ union that sought to extort the Reagan administration (which it had endorsed for election in 1980). Instead of capitulating to Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), President Ronald Reagan dusted off plans that prepared in previous administrations to use the military to replace strikers and exercised his power under federal government worker labor-relations law to fire striking controllers.

The firing was unusual. Statutory prohibitions on government worker strikes are often difficult to enforce since the public tends to find teachers, police, firemen, and so forth more sympathetic than government agencies. But the public found Reagan’s response to PATCO’s attempted national extortion acceptable, and the military and other nonunion controllers who replaced the PATCO strikers kept American airspace open until new civilian controllers could be trained. In his declaration that he would use Florida National Guard troops to process cargo at his state’s ports as long as the ILA kept striking, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) was clearly channeling Reagan’s gambit (though he’s probably secretly happy that Daggett didn’t put its effectiveness to the test).

What’s Next?

The port management association and the ILA provisionally agreed to a 62 percent pay hike over the length of the contract; that was the easy part. The hard part was punted to January 15 of next year: what to do about container-handling fees and especially productivity-enhancing automation. Given the union’s incentive to make stopping all automation a ride-or-die issue and Daggett’s adamancy against automation—he denounced the increasingly common E-Z Pass automated toll collection system for costing toll-booth operator jobs—the country could find itself back in the same position in three months, facing extortionate strike action.

Even a new contract agreement, if it does not fundamentally address American port uncompetitiveness, would prove to be only a six-year punt. Legislation has been introduced to move port workers from the main National Labor Relations Act governance structure that applies to most private-sector workers to the Railway Labor Act, which governs the railroad and airline industries. This change would give Congress and the administration more power to impose a negotiated settlement and prevent strikes, but the idea has been batted around for nearly a decade. The current Congress is unlikely to pass such legislation, especially because Daggett removed the urgency to act by calling off the strike before it really began to bite into broader American life.