The First East Coast Longshore Strike in Half a Century Is On
After a monthslong impasse between the longshore workers’ union and its employers, 47,000 ILA workers from docks along the East and Gulf coasts have struck. Billions of dollars’ worth of goods won’t move until they return to work.
ILA dockworkers strike at of the Port of Newark, New Jersey, on Tuesday morning. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
The last time members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) shut down ports up and down the East and Gulf coasts, it was 1977, and dockworkers wanted higher wages and greater job security. New technology — specifically containerization, which transformed the industry — introduced uncertainty into the craft, and the longshoremen who handled freight wanted to be sure that any disruptions introduced by the shifting mechanisms on the ports wouldn’t lead to their permanent displacement.
Trade was only 16 percent of the US economy back then, well below today’s 27 percent. Yet the work stoppage, which lasted forty-five days, was earth-shattering. Shippers said some $4 billion worth of cargo piled up at the thirty affected docks. Other businesses and trucking companies laid workers off as the slowdown reverberated throughout the economy. In Puerto Rico, which relies on imports for the vast majority of its food, importers began bringing groceries in by air. The union proved largely victorious, winning increases in wages and benefits as well as greater job security.
Nearly half a century later, wages and job security are once again at the center of a port shutdown that will snarl supply chains and send shockwaves through the US economy, costing anywhere from hundreds of millions to several billion dollars per day.
In the week prior to the strike by ILA members, which began at 12:01 a.m. this morning, some $14 billion in trade arrived at ports covered by the union’s master agreement. From produce and seafood to pharmaceuticals and cars, these ports handle about half of all goods shipped in and out of the United States. Their closure, the blame for which the union has pinned firmly on shipping companies that are enjoying profits the likes of which have rarely been seen in the industry’s modern era, has exploded like a bomb a mere month before the presidential election.
Speaking outside a port terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, early Tuesday, moments after the union’s six-year contract expired, ILA international president and chief negotiator Harold Daggett told picketers, “Nothing is going to move without us — nothing.”
The ILA, which has roughly forty-seven thousand members covered by agreement at thirty-six ports up and down the East and Gulf coasts from Searsport, Maine, to Brownsville, Texas, initially proposed $5 hourly raises for each year of the new contract, citing the need for members’ incomes to catch up with inflation and the sky-high profits shipping companies have enjoyed in recent years.
The union has emphasized that ILA members worked through the pandemic, risking their own health while delivering critical medical supplies. During the same period, shipping rates soared. Analysts estimate the industry raked in more than $400 billion in profit from 2020 to 2023, more than it had previously made in total since the start of the containerization revolution in the late 1950s.
ILA members’ pay varies, but the current top rate for members is $39 an hour after six years on the job, well below the $54.85 an hour earned by their West Coast counterparts in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a rate that will rise to $60.85 in 2027, the final year of their current contract. ILWU members secured that contract in June 2023, winning a 32 percent pay increase over the life of the agreement. The ILA’s initial wage proposal would bring members’ pay more in line with that of their counterparts on the West Coast.
“We have it where you can get a thirty-year mortgage in this country for a first-time homebuyer, but what happens when my six-year contract, when that comes to an end, and you say, I got automation taking your job — where does my mortgage go?” ILA foreman Wade Foster told CBS News. “I have no job to pay the mortgage. Now I’ve got more people unemployed, which makes the top officials in this country look like they haven’t done their job. When they’ve done their job, it’s [the employers] that have failed us.”
The ILA is also seeking a ban on automated cranes, gates, and trucks. ILA members load and unload cargo at ports as well as operate the cranes that move containers on and off cargo ships, and the union wants to ensure that automation won’t be used to replace workers as it has on the West Coast, with devastating effects for members and their communities. This has proven the union’s most controversial stance, provoking outrage among those who argue that restrictions on automation will make US ports uncompetitive, even as the evidence of automation’s contribution to productivity remains mixed.
The United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), the negotiating body representing container carriers and port operators including Maersk, APM Terminals, and SSA Marine, has called the ILA’s demands unreasonable. While the two sides’ bargaining proposals are not public, USMX has said it offered a wage hike that amounts to “near 50 percent.” In a statement late Monday, the employer group claimed to have traded counteroffers with the union in the previous twenty-four hours, including an offer to triple employer contributions to employee retirement plans — a major area of concern for members — and strengthen health care options.
USMX has previously said it offered to maintain provisions in the current contract barring fully automated terminals while also banning use of semiautomated equipment in a new labor agreement. But without seeing the proposal language, it is hard to say how far apart the two sides are on automation, a subject on which the ILA has been particularly steadfast for decades.
Official talks between the two sides broke off in June after the ILA said it discovered a partially automated gate in Mobile, Alabama, which the union said violates the terms of the contract. Last week, USMX filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), accusing the union of bargaining in bad faith and seeking immediate injunctive relief that would force the resumption of bargaining.
“We remain prepared to bargain at any time, but both sides must come to the table if we are going to reach a deal, and there is no indication that the ILA is interested in negotiating at this time,” the group said in a statement ahead of the strike.
The ILA dismissed USMX’s ULP filing as a publicity stunt and has stated that, despite the lack of official negotiating sessions, the two sides have communicated multiple times in recent weeks, with the union blaming the stalemate on USMX’s “unacceptable wage increase package.”
“The ILA regards the suit as another publicity stunt by the employer group, and countered that foreign-owned companies, represented by USMX, set up shop at American ports, earn billions of dollars in revenues and profits, take those profits out of country, and fail to adequately compensate the ILA longshore workforce for their labor are engaging in a real ‘unfair labor practice’ and have been getting away with for decades,” the union said in a statement.
“The blame for a coast-wide strike in a week that will shut down all ports on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts falls squarely on the shoulders of USMX,” ILA president Daggett said ahead of the strike.
Billions, With a B
Some three-fifths of the United States’ container shipments pass through ILA members’ hands, giving the union immense economic leverage. The volume of freight moving through ILA ports was higher than usual in recent weeks as companies moved product off the docks in advance of the strike; the ILA’s rhetoric has been building toward a stoppage for months, allowing larger companies ample lead time to ensure the strike wouldn’t impact holiday sales.
Yet by all accounts, the work stoppage will be enormously consequential: affected ports handle more than 68 percent of all containerized exports in the United States and 56 percent of containerized imports, according to industry data. Analysts believe a one-week strike could cost the US economy $3.78 billion, causing supply chain disruptions through November. It typically takes about a week to clear out the backlog from a one-day port shutdown; should the shutdown drag on for weeks, the pileup will multiply.
The strike could not come at a more politically explosive time, with the presidential election a mere five weeks away, raising panic among Democrats that the strike could hamper efforts to control inflation, adversely affecting Kamala Harris. Should the work stoppage drag on, corporations could pass on the rising expenses to consumers (gasoline prices will not be affected, as ships carrying oil and gas are served by separate, non-struck facilities).
USMX, along with some two hundred business groups including the National Retail Federation and the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as congressional Republicans, have all lobbied Joe Biden’s administration to intervene in the strike by invoking the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, a suite of anti-labor legislation that includes a provision allowing the president to intervene in a strike that threatens national security or safety by enforcing an eighty-day cooling-off period in which workers would return to the docks and negotiations would resume. Biden has said that he is not considering doing so, telling reporters on Sunday that he “does not believe in Taft-Hartley.” The administration has instead urged both sides to negotiate in good faith.
“We’ve never invoked Taft-Hartley to break a strike and are not considering doing so now,” an administration official said in a statement ahead of the contract expiration.
Were ILA members forced to return to work, they could also make use of myriad means at their disposal to slow the flow of freight. Daggett has said as much in videos to members, noting that a work slowdown would be all but certain.
Nationalism hangs over all of this. The Democrats may not want to risk giving the impression of intervening against American workers on the side of the ocean carriers, all of which are foreign owned. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s vows to raise tariffs have almost certainly struck a sour note among those employers, downgrading carriers’ view of the United States as a business partner.
The language of nationalism colors the ILA’s rhetoric too. Union leadership is prone to stating that “ILA” also stands for “I Love America,” a formulation first fashioned during World War I. The union excludes military cargo from its strikes and is doing so once again this time. Members will also continue to work with passenger cruise vessels so as not to “inconvenience or disappoint” families’ vacations.
“The ocean carriers represented by USMX want to enjoy rich billion-dollar profits that they are making in 2024, while they offer ILA longshore workers an unacceptable wage package that we reject,” the union said in a statement Monday.
ILA longshore workers deserve to be compensated for the important work they do keeping American commerce moving and growing. It’s disgraceful that most of these foreign-owned shipping companies are engaged in a “Make and Take” operation: 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 and into the pockets of foreign conglomerates. Meanwhile, ILA dedicated longshore workers continue to be crippled by inflation due to USMX’s unfair wage packages.
A Quick Victory?
Expect solidarity across a labor movement that wants to see a quick victory for the ILA.
“From coast to coast, the ILWU and the ILA remain militant and resolute in our fight against automation,” ILWU international president Willie Adams wrote to the ILA’s Daggett on Friday. Many ILA locals exist as islands of labor organization in a sea of employer control — the Gulf Coast, for instance, was the birthplace of the open-shop movement and remains vehemently hostile to unions — but union members will travel far and wide to reinforce picket lines.
Ahead of the strike, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), which has a sizable number of freight members who work on the ports, stated that they won’t cross ILA picket lines for the duration of the strike.
“The ocean carriers are on strike against themselves after failing to negotiate a contract that recognizes the value of these workers,” IBT president Sean O’Brien said in a statement. “The U.S. government should stay the f**k out of this fight and allow union workers to withhold their labor for the wages and benefits they have earned. Any workers — on the road, in the ports, in the air — should be able to fight for a better life free of government interference. Corporations for too long have been able to rely on political puppets to help them strip working people of their inherent leverage.”
Recent public attention has been on new unionization drives at the likes of Starbucks and Amazon, and when one hears of dockworkers’ struggles discussed on the Left, it usually concerns the ILWU, a union that is fiercely independent (it is not a member of the AFL-CIO) and politically left-wing. Radical labor leader Harry Bridges founded the ILWU in 1937, when Pacific Coast longshoremen voted to secede from the American Federation of Labor–affiliated ILA following a 1934 waterfront strike that lasted three months and culminated in a four-day general strike in San Francisco. The union affiliated with the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations shortly thereafter.
That legacy of radicalism remains, albeit in diminished form: in the 1980s, ILWU members refused to handle cargo bound for apartheid South Africa, and in more recent years have seen some members particularly outspoken in solidarity with Palestinians and against police brutality.
The ILA, by contrast, was born of an earlier era, on terrain far more hostile to labor. The union traces its origins to the Association of Lumber Handlers, the first local of which was formed by Dan Keefe, an Irish tugboat worker from Chicago, at a time when the city’s industrialists reigned supreme. (At a meeting of delegates in Detroit in 1895, the name was officially changed to the ILA.) Over time, the union’s center of power shifted east, but its roots in the more conservative Great Lakes region — and enduring membership in the AFL — continued to influence the its approach to collective bargaining as well as its relations to the broader labor movement.
The union’s checkered past is no secret, with ILA ties to organized crime (real and imagined) providing grist for cinema: the matter features prominently in both On the Waterfront and season two of The Wire. The union has somewhat reformed, though Daggett, who has headed the ILA since 2011, has been accused by the Department of Justice of being an “associate” of the Genovese crime family, accusations of which he has thus far been acquitted. While the ILA has its share of committed union militants, rank-and-file control of the union is far from even. It’s a dynamic palpable in Daggett’s language: the union leader is prone to speaking of “my members” rather than collective power. Whether this will affect the union’s ability to keep ports shut down in less organized locals remains to be seen.
For now, the ports are shuttered, with tens of thousands of dockworkers using their strongest weapon to extract gains from employers flush with more cash than the industry has ever seen in the modern era. Despite all the complaints about the strike’s timing, the whining about it being unfair that a pro-union president is facing such a delicate strike (in fact, a president who won’t break your strike presents precisely the ideal conditions for launching one), there is one way for USMX to end all of this: meet the ILA’s demands.