Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Containers stacked at the Port of Long Beach, October 1, 2021
Gridlock ‘R’ Us. And while President Biden has yet to eliminate the choke points (Manchin, Sinema) blocking the flow of crucial legislation on Capitol Hill, he did manage to bull through another choke point yesterday: the Port of Los Angeles, through which, along with its adjacent Port of Long Beach, roughly 40 percent of all America’s imports flow. He brokered a deal with Local 13 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in which its members agreed to work 24/7 to clear up the backlog of the many thousands of containers now sitting at the port.
Just goes to show that it’s easier to reach a deal with one of America’s leftmost unions than it is with a couple of nominally Democratic and deeply narcissistic senators.
But the longshore workers are just one small link in the global supply chain. A particular choke point at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach is the truckers. It was relatively easy to strike a deal with the longshore workers because they belong to a small-d democratic union that has massive credibility with its members, for whom it regularly negotiates the best contracts in blue-collar America. Thanks to the far-sightedness of its long-ago, legendary president, Communist fellow traveler Harry Bridges, who agreed to the switch from unloading individual products to unloading massive containers so long as his members pocketed the gains in productivity, ILWU members routinely make more than $100,000 a year, and a good deal more with the overtime that they’ll now be putting in for.
But no such deal can be reached with the truckers, because their employers—trucking and logistics companies—insist they’re not their employees but, rather, independent contractors, and thus unable to form a union. As such, the truckers are both too many (they sit in long lines waiting to pick up and drop off the containers) and too few (with low pay and no benefits, there are not enough of them to cope with the regular number, much less the backlog, of containers).
On Monday, two days before Biden reached his deal with the longshore workers, a federal judge ruled that one L.A. port logistics company, XPO Logistics, had violated the law by paying 784 drivers who’d brought a class action suit against the company less than the minimum wage and refusing to cover their trucking expenses—both the result of XPO’s insistence that those drivers were independent contractors rather than its employees. The judge directed XPO to pay those drivers $30 million. (For aficionados of labor law inside ball, the ruling confirmed their belief that the workers’ attorney, Julie Gutman Dickinson—who when working for the NLRB had once persuaded a court to order a company that had decamped to Mexico to return to the U.S. or face ruinous penalties—may well be the best worker-side litigator in the land.)
At a time when workers are fleeing crummy jobs in record numbers (4.3 million quit in August, an all-time record), it’s clear that one link that’s missing from our now slo-mo supply chain is the presence of industries in which employment is sufficiently attractive that it’s fully up and running. Ending worker misclassification would help remedy that, though measures more drastic may be required to deal with the choke point of Manchin and Sinema.
