By Peter Eavis
For the first time in nearly 50 years, longshoremen on the East and Gulf coasts went on strike Tuesday, a move that will cut off most trade through some of the busiest U.S. ports and could send a chill through the economy.
Members of the International Longshoremen’s Association union, which represents roughly 45,000 workers, started setting up pickets after eleventh-hour talks failed to avert a work stoppage.
“Nothing’s going to move without us — nothing,” said Harold J. Daggett, the president of the union, addressing picketers outside a port terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in a video posted early Tuesday to a union Facebook account.
The United States Maritime Alliance, which represents port employers, declined to comment early Tuesday. The two sides were not able to agree on wage increases, and the use of new technology in the ports was a sticking point for the union.
“We think they’re lowballing intentionally,” Leonard Riley, a longshoreman at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina, said Tuesday. “We are going to be out until we have something to chew on.”
Businesses now face a period of uncertainty. Trade experts say that a short strike would cause little lasting damage but that a weekslong stoppage could lead to shortages, higher prices and even layoffs.
“When we talk about a two- to three-week strike,” said J. Bruce Chan, a transportation analyst at Stifel, a Wall Street firm, “that’s when the problem starts to get exponentially worse.”
The prospect of significant economic damage from a strike puts President Joe Biden in a quandary five weeks before national elections. Before the strike, he said he was not going to use a federal labor law to force an end to a port shutdown — something President George W. Bush did in 2002 — but some labor experts said he might use that power if the strike started to weigh on the economy. White House officials had pressed both sides to reach a deal before the strike.
Longshoremen move containers off ships, sort them and put them on trucks or trains, and handle bulk cargo, too. Around 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 third busiest in the country, and fast-growing ports in Virginia, Georgia and Texas.
A strike will also stop the shipment of cars and heavy machinery through the Port of Baltimore, where operations were curtailed for most of the spring after a container ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Automakers said that they were monitoring the strike but that it was too early to say how it would hit them.
Cruise ship operations are unaffected by the strike, and military shipments will continue. Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said Monday that around 100,000 containers would be stored at the port during the strike and that 35 ships arriving over the next week would 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 sought to calm consumers, saying shortages of food and pharmaceutical products were not expected.
For bringing large amounts of goods in and out of the country, there is no practical alternative to ports. And ports cannot operate without longshoremen, giving them strong leverage in labor negotiations.
West Coast ports are open. Longshoremen there belong to a different union and agreed last year on a new contract that includes a significant increase in wages.
Under the contract that expired Monday, longshoremen on the East and Gulf coasts earned a top rate of $39 an hour. The ILA wants a $5-an-hour raise in each of the six years of a new agreement, giving it a 77% raise over the life of the contract.
The two sides had barely communicated for months before the walkout. But in recent days, the Maritime Alliance said Monday, it had “traded counteroffers related to wages” with the ILA and offered to extend the contract. The alliance also said its latest offer to the union would raise pay “nearly 50%” over the course of the contract.
In a statement Tuesday morning, the ILA said that the alliance’s offer “fell far short” of the demands of its members.
With overtime and shift work, many longshoremen earn well over $100,000 a year, putting them ahead of other workers without a college degree. But they say they put in far more hours than workers in other jobs earning similar amounts, and do so in often harsh or dangerous conditions.
The high inflation of the last few years has reduced their wages’ purchasing power. And longshoremen contend that they have a right to a slice of the increased profits that their employers — some of which are large global shipping lines — made during the pandemic trade boom in 2021 and 2022.
“They want to make their billion-dollar profits at United States ports, and off the backs of American ILA longshore workers, and take those earnings out of this country,” Daggett, the union’s president, said Monday in a statement.
Knowing that a strike was possible, many companies rushed in merchandise before Tuesday, including most of the durable consumer goods that they intend to sell during the holiday sales period. But even a short strike could hurt importers of perishable goods like fruit.
You'll be kept on edge by the compelling mystery in that's not my neighbor. The strange behavior of your neighbor is the first sign of something much more serious.