Annie Mulligan/AP Photo
Cranes usually running day and night are shut down during a strike by ILA members at the Bayport Container Terminal in Houston, October 1, 2024.
Historically, it’s not the union of the East and Gulf Coast longshore workers (the International Longshoremen’s Association, or ILA) that goes on strike. It’s the West Coast longshore workers (represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, or ILWU). The ILA hasn’t struck since 1977, while the ILWU has not only struck multiple times since then but also engaged in countless daylong or weeklong work stoppages to protest various reactionary world developments at odds with the union’s progressive politics.
This time, though, it’s the ILA that’s on the picket lines right now, as its contract with port owners lapsed at midnight and as the two sides remain far apart on the terms of a new contract. The workers’ demands—which to many doubtless seem almost incomprehensibly excessive—are actually quite reasonable. The effects of a prolonged strike, however, could diminish Kamala Harris’s prospects of victory next month.
Let’s look at those workers’ demands. In general, the unionized longshore workers on all our coasts are the highest-paid blue-collar workers in the country, routinely making over $100,000 a year. That’s because, more than 60 years ago, the leadership of the ILWU agreed to a monumental change in the transport, loading, and unloading of goods that crossed the seas. Instead of having those goods stowed in ships’ hulls, put there and extricated by lots of guys hoisting them in nets, the ILWU agreed to containerization, in which the goods were inside containers that could be moved by rail and trucks, and placed in and taken out of ships by cranes. This shift greatly reduced the need for workers, sometimes by as much as 90 percent.
The ILWU, then as now, was a militant union that could close down a port without a single member crossing the picket line. As its leaders, Harry Bridges and Lou Goldblatt, completely understood, that gave the union major leverage in a deal that shifted the industry to containerization. What they won in return was a contract in which the remaining members, who’d operate those cranes, would see their wages rise in tandem with the increased revenues the shipping companies made. As Bridges legendarily (or apocryphally) once said, “There may come a day when the entire port of San Francisco is operated by one guy pushing a button, but he’ll be a union member and the highest paid SOB in the world.”
Today’s longshore workers aren’t the highest paid SOBs in the world, but the current ILWU contract will have its members making an hourly wage of $60.85 in 2027. The ILA’s contracts historically lag the ILWU’s, so this time it is demanding roughly comparable pay, which would require an increase of 77 percent over their current wage by 2030, the final year of the new contract.
Crazy, right? Well, no. For one thing, since the just-expired contract came into effect in 2018, the shipping companies have made “record profits totaling hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal. Some of those hundreds of billions, as the Prospect has documented, came during the pandemic, when shipping companies, responding to the increased sales in goods, raised their prices to unprecedented levels.
More fundamentally, however, the contracts for longshore workers basically mirror those of many American workers during the period when the tax and labor policies of the New Deal were still in place. Between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has famously documented, the median wages of American workers rose at the identical rate that productivity rose. Since then, as the rate of unionization declined and as companies shifted more revenues to profits and less to wages, that has ceased to be the case. As a 2020 study from the RAND Corporation (co-authored by its chief mathematician) has documented, had the trends in personal income in the years following 1975 matched those in the preceding three decades, the annual income of the median-paid American worker would be doubled—from roughly $50,000 to roughly $100,000.
The reasons why the only blue-collar American workers able to maintain wage increases commensurate with productivity increases following 1975 were the longshore workers were those of exceptional union power—on the West Coast—but the ILA, even though not as strong as the ILWU, still had enough clout to secure their own version of wages that matched productivity gains.
So, there’s nothing remotely crazy in the economic proposals that the ILA has put forth. That doesn’t mean that its members, given their pay scales, will win the kind of public sympathy that other striking workers may sometimes elicit. Indeed, if the strike goes on for more than a week, it may cause supply chain backups that could increase some prices, which would become a huge political problem for the Harris campaign, since under the terms of the Taft-Hartley Act, the president has the power to order such strikers to go back to work—as George W. Bush did in 2002 when the ILWU was on strike. Trump and the Republicans would surely assail Biden and Harris for causing prices to rise if they didn’t invoke Taft-Hartley (which no Democratic president has ever done), just as Harris is focusing chiefly on the price-reducing planks of her platform. (Tim Walz will likely be asked about all this in tonight’s debate.)
Economically, then, the ILA is more than justified in its demands and its strike. Politically, alas, the consequences could be dire unless the strike is settled quickly.
