Hey! Why Are The Dockworkers Striking?

A Wonksplainer!

International Longshoremen’s Association

As of midnight last night, 45,000 dockworkers down the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast are on strike — the first International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike to affect all of those ports since 1977. As it stands, the strike could cost the American economy billions of dollars a day, which is why some are asking Joe Biden to step in and Taft-Hartley Act that whole situation in order to stop the strike before it can cause any harm.

Biden, to his great credit, says he will not do that, because he believes in collective bargaining. But given the impact that this could have on the economy and our daily lives (stock up on bananas, which reportedly will be the first things affected), it’s understandable that people are nervous. It also doesn’t help that there is a lot of misinformation going around about how much the workers are currently making and what have you.

So let’s talk about what’s really going on.

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What Are The Longshoremen’s Demands?

They want the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents the ocean carriers that employ them, to guarantee a $5 an hour increase every year for the next six-year contract — which would mean a 77 percent increase over the next six years — and a stronger promise to not automate the ports.

The USMX is currently offering a 50 percent increase over the next six years and for the language in the Master Contract dealing with automation and semi-automation to remain the same.

Why Do They Think They Deserve So Much?

Longshoremen worked throughout COVID — as “essential workers” — and because of that, shipping companies made bank. The workers are just asking for their fair share of the money that would not have been made had it not been for their hard work.

“USMX must face the reality that those years of spotty yearly increases of a dollar are now part of history,” ILA President Harold Daggett said. “Since USMX would rather leak our wage demands to the media, instead of reporting on the record billion-dollar profits of their member companies, I can say ‘yes, we are looking for a much higher percent increase in our wages’. Our ILA members never stopped working during the Covid pandemic, even with ILA longshore workers dying or becoming gravely ill. The companies that employ ILA pay their executives billion-dollar bonus while our longshore workers work all year, around the clock, in brutal conditions of freezing cold and scorching heat. Why shouldn’t we ask for a $10 an hour increase? The ILA longshore worker deserves it, and the companies have the money to pay it.”

But Aren’t They All Making $150,000 A Year?

Uh, no. No they are not. The starting wage for an ILA dockworker is $20 an hour. The last Master Contract they had got them a wage increase of a dollar an hour each year for the six-year term of the contract.

Here is a graph direct from the Master Contract itself showing the actual pay scales, with those at the very top earning an hourly wage of $39 an hour, which translates to $81,000 a year for absolutely backbreaking work. Workers can earn more than that through overtime and taking shifts that pay more, but the “Oh, they’re all making six figures already!” thing is absolute nonsense.

They are now asking for a $5 increase per hour, per year, due to cost of living increases and because they deserve their share of the incredible profits the shipping industry has been raking in. That’s fair! It’s at least a fair starting point, and it does seem that they are more flexible about that than they are about automation.

Let’s Talk About Automation!

One of the ways that the USMX has been working to turn sentiment against the dockworkers is by portraying their demand to limit automation as an unreasonable bulwark against progress — progress that would lower costs for you, the consumer.

But if you will notice, automation and robots and AI don’t always mean lower prices for consumers, just as cheap labor and even slave labor do not mean lower prices for consumers. As deeply as some may want to believe it, companies don’t actually fuck over workers and pass the savings on to you, the consumer. They don’t. They pass the profits onto their shareholders, as they are obligated to do. They are obligated to charge you the most they can get away with charging you, so that they can then give that money to those who have invested in their company.

You may notice that some people are complaining that, for instance, the port in Rotterdam in the Netherlands is fully automated, wondering why we can’t have that. One reason is that it was incredibly expensive to build, another is that we have a very different economic system than the Dutch. Their poverty rate is half of ours, due to their robust social safety net. While workers certainly did protest the automation of the port in Rotterdam, they were not completely fucked by it to the degree workers here would be.

If you’re in the Netherlands and you lose your job, the government will give you 75 percent of your pay and help you find a new job, and in the meantime you don’t have to worry about losing your healthcare. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly less precarious.

OK, But Why Can’t They Wait Until After The Election?

Because their contract expired last night at midnight. That is how these things work.

I’ve seen more than a few people pointing out that this is going to hurt Kamala Harris’s chances, because it will increase inflation and this will be blamed on the current administration. I’ve seen a few others suggest that ILA President Harold Daggett is in cahoots with Trump and is doing this to throw the election to him, or that they are being ungrateful to Biden, who has been the most pro-union president in decades.

But the fact is, they have six-year contracts that ended last night at midnight. There wasn’t a lot of wiggle-room for time. It was either strike now or accept a contract they didn’t feel was good enough and wait another six years to strike.

Two things can be true. It can be true that dockworkers deserve better than what is being proposed and have good reason to strike, and Daggett can be friendly with Trump in a way that makes a lot of us uncomfortable. (Including me! I certainly do not like it! But I care more about the rank and file workers who still deserve good pay and a secure job.)

We cannot feasibly have that kind of mass automation until we have some kind of a plan in place for how to take care of everyone or even simply function in a nation where there is less work that needs to be done. We don’t have that. We don’t have the things they have in the Netherlands or in most other places.

Maybe if we get on that, we can have things like automation.

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The fact is, if these workers going on strike can do the damage some are saying it could do, it seems like they are necessary enough and “essential” enough to demand more. Hopefully the USMX will realize that and give them what they deserve, before any damage is done.

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