What You Need to Know About the Port Strike

Starting early this morning, port workers on the East Coast represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) labor union walked out on strike, halting operations at 36 ports from Texas to Maine. The strike will likely prove a case study in the need for the Taft-Hartley consensus labor policies that conservatives have endorsed since 1946, as any protracted work stoppage would cause serious harms to American consumers and workers not involved in the particular disputes between port management and the ILA.

I’m Not Walmart; Does This Affect Me?

The effects of the port strike will be determined by how long it lasts. In comments to the Wall Street Journal, retail associations and big-box stores put on brave faces, stating that they had prepared for disruption to the holiday shopping season by rescheduling shipments and moving shipments to the West Coast, where dockworkers are not on strike.

But not all shipments can be rescheduled or moved. Perishable foods may rise in price or become unavailable relatively soon. An asparagus importer told the Journal that he “is having to fly in vegetables that would usually arrive by containership. He is adding about 50 cents a pound to the prices he charges stores to cover the higher airfreight costs.” And the longer the port strike goes on, the more items will see disrupted supplies.

Those broad disruptions are what ILA president Harold Daggett (total salary and expenses for 2023: $855,261) wants. In an increasingly viral interview clip, Daggett said, “I will cripple you, and you have no idea what that means. Nobody does” and asserted that his walkout would lead to widespread layoffs in car sales, retail, and construction if management does not immediately capitulate to the ILA’s demands.

Okay, I’m Sure the Union’s Demands Are Reasonable, Right?

The ILA is demanding substantial raises—77 percent over six years even to begin negotiations, according to Maritime Executive, with the port managers already having agreed to almost 50 percent. Subsequent reporting indicated the ILA might have come down to 61.5 percent. These would be raises for jobs that often pay upward of six-figures (after considering overtime) and are totally exempt from the technological-economic dynamics with which every other worker in the American economy must deal.

The wage demands will lead headlines, but the real fight between the union and the world is over automation and ancillary fees. The ancillary fees have not received much notice because they are completely and unbelievably absurd. Maritime journalist John Konrad explains “touch fees,” crane-use fees that pay off the union and lead to America’s roads and bridges taking more abuse from heavy truck loads than roads in Europe (also a high-wage, high-regulatory jurisdiction). Konrad’s conclusion is simple: “So it’s somehow cheaper to truck containers hundreds of miles and let taxpayers foot the road repair bill than let the union *touch* it two more times for short sea shipping to work. Only in America.”

More intelligible is the ILA’s demand not to automate port operations, even if it is a demand to exempt a certain class of labor aristocracy from productivity-improving developments. These developments have affected workers in other industries and dockworkers in other high-wage, high-regulation countries. How insistent is the ILA that no automation whatsoever occur?

The port of Mobile, Alabama, installed a truck gate that does not require a unionized attendant to open the gate; the ILA has held that out as a bogeyman and demands no further such gates be installed. The consequences to consumers and other businesses from these demands are clear: U.S. ports are hideously inefficient, raising costs to shippers, businesses, and consumers alike.

Wait, Why Do You Keep Specifying East Coast? What about the West Coast?

American port workers (known as longshoremen) are represented by two unions divided by geography and history. The East Coast ports are represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association, a classical trade union with a history of corruption and racketeering immortalized back in the 1950s by the Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront. It is on strike.

West Coast ports are represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which is the “red union” to the ILA’s historically “bent union.” The ILWU’s longtime leader, Harry Bridges, was at least for a time a member, possibly a senior member (depending on how one interprets declassified Soviet archival data), of the Communist Party USA. The ILWU and the West Coast ports reached a contract agreement in 2023, avoiding a strike at those ports.

Thanks to the provision of the Taft-Hartley Act barring “secondary boycotts,” the ILWU cannot formally take strike action to increase the economic damage caused by the ILA strike. And port managers on the West Coast do not expect disruption from this labor action, even if the West Coast union expresses support for East Coast unionists and their demands.

So What Can Be Done About This?

Precedent and federal law give the Biden administration the power to reopen the ports. A procedure under the Taft-Hartley Act empowers the President to enjoin the strike for an 80-day “cooling-off period” for additional negotiations with the aid and supervision of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service if a strike threatens “national health or safety,” which Daggett’s aggressive statements suggest this strike does. Recall that the third principle underlying the Taft-Hartley Act, informed by the fallout from the 1946 strike wave, was that a proper end of public policy is to protect the public and economy from other people’s labor disputes.

In the early years of the Taft-Hartley reforms, such cooling-off periods were imposed by presidents of both parties, including Harry Truman who had vetoed the act. (At least one recollection claims the veto was explicitly an act of unprincipled political opportunism.) The most recent major use of the Taft-Hartley cooling-off period was in 2002, when President George W. Bush ended an 11-day stoppage at the West Coast ports by invoking the provision.

The problem for the public and the economy is that President Joe Biden has gone farther than even President Truman did, explicitly disclaiming the Taft-Hartley powers on the grounds that “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley”—an honest position given the PRO Act legislation he has explicitly endorsed.

Conclusion

With President Biden vowing to sit the ILA strike out, the public and the economy are back at square one. We are hostages to the ILA, except to the extent that the West Coast ports can maximize capacity—ports that are open only because of the Taft-Hartley ban on secondary striking. The port strike’s effects will depend entirely on how long Daggett, who has vowed to “cripple” the American economy, can keep the ILA on strike.

In his viral interview, Daggett warned that people today “don’t know what a strike is.” In that he is probably correct, frankly. But as Daggett fools around thinking he can get whatever he wants, he may find out that the consequences of the public finding out “what a strike is” might end up revitalizing an increasingly strained Taft-Hartley consensus. That was the consequence of a railway strike in 1946, which led President Truman to denounce it as akin to the Pearl Harbor attacks. When air traffic controllers tried to hold the economy hostage by striking contrary to law, it cost them their jobs at no obvious political cost to then-President Ronald Reagan.

Unionists like to tout that unions are relatively popular, even as the number of Americans who are members of unions or routinely interact with unionized workforces (outside of receiving the mail) has fallen. I for one suspect that union popularity is a consequence of the unfamiliarity. Unions might sound nice, but the reality of dues, grubby internal and external politics, and economic disruptions is less nice. Daggett says he will put that suspicion to the test; we will see who is right.