East and Gulf Coast dock workers are to go on strike at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, closed 36 ports from Maine to Texas that handle about half of U.S. ocean imports, threatening to reduce U.S. economic activity by $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion a week if the closures is extended.
And the International Longshoremen’s Association’s central demand is a total prohibition of automation involved cranes, gates, and the loading and unloading of freight containers—leaving American ports stuck in the last century while the rest of the world moves on.
Once again, a powerful union is trying to stifle innovation that would benefit everyone else: Robots can do most cargo work better, faster and cheaper.
The West Coast Longshoremen, represented by another union less strongly opposed to automation, won a 32% pay rise that averted a strike last September.
But West Coast ports cannot possibly handle an East Coast shutdown, especially when global shipping is already paralyzed by Houthi attacks in the Red Sea that force countless ships to spend extra weeks at sea, going around Africa to reach Atlantic ports.
The layoff of 85,000 ILA dock workers would hammer the U.S. economy just before the November election, adding extra inflationary pressure and potentially leaving store shelves empty before the holiday season, while delaying U.S. exports and risking damage to agriculture.
Which puts the Biden-Harris administration in a bind: It likely can’t get the United States Maritime Alliance, which runs the ports, to agree to never automate, while raising wages to bribe the ILA from its “no robots, ever” stance can be inflationary in itself.
But will the self-proclaimed “most pro-labor president ever” invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to end the strike, as President George W. Bush did after 11 days in 2002?
Heck, Biden’s pro-union bragging is a big reason the ILA is willing to walk out in the first place.
Maybe he should send in his vice president to end the conflict: If cheers and word salads don’t do the trick, surely the dock workers will bow when Kamala Harris tells them she grew up middle class?