By Sean Higgins
Friday, October 04, 2024
Thursday’s announcement that the International
Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) was ending its strike at east coast and Gulf of Mexico
ports after just three days was a surprise given the union’s earlier bluster
regarding the walkout. The ILA seems to have switched gears in response to
popular backlash against the strike. The union was surprised to learn that
bringing the entire nation’s economy to a screeching halt to boost the pay of
guys already making $150,000 a year wasn’t more popular with the broader
public.
The ILA accepted a deal for a 62 percent raise when they
had requested 77 percent. The more telling detail is that the union apparently
did not receive a concession on one of its key asks: no further automation of
the ports. If they did, it hasn’t been mentioned in news reports or by the
union. Instead, the ILA said it would return to the bargaining table on January
15 to “to negotiate all other outstanding issues.” Translation: they got
nothing.
ILA President Harold Daggett had earlier made a point of
saying that this week’s strike was mainly about automation. He had been critical of the deal brokered by the Biden
administration between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and west
coast ports back in 2021 because it didn’t include any such guarantee regarding
automation. Daggett saw this strike as his opportunity to get such a deal by
essentially threatening the entire national economy.
In a Sept 5 YouTube video made for ILA members, Daggett gleefully
boasted of the consequences of the strike: “Guys who sell cars can’t sell
cars because the cars ain’t coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third
week, malls start closing down. They can’t get the goods from China. They can’t
sell clothes. They can’t do this. Everything in the United States comes on a
ship. They go out of business. Construction workers get laid off because the
materials aren’t coming in… I will cripple you, and you have no idea what that
means. Nobody does.”
Daggett is an old-school labor boss who is used to only
getting attention from his members and others in the maritime industry. He
apparently didn’t foresee that his comments would go viral after the strike
began this week or that his approach was setting himself up as the bad guy in
an ongoing saga of “Wait, why are store shelves empty and prices suddenly
spiking?” The fact that Daggett makes an estimated $900,000 annually didn’t help to endear him or his cause to
the broader public.
Blowback against ILA in many quarters of social media was
harsh. “Sources close to the union told gCaptain early this morning that
the vitriol came as a shock to union leaders,” reported gCaptain, a maritime industry news and commentary
website.
“[T]he ILA leader could not imagine the hate and threats
of violence against him and other top ILA leaders as attempts to end the
current two-day strike,” the ILA itself said in a Tuesday press release. Daggett was particularly incensed
that the NY Post published photos of his New Jersey mansion, claiming it had
resulted in death threats against him. Elon Musk mocked Daggett, tweeting, “Dude has more yachts than me!” The ILA also made
its X/Twitter account private, an unusual move given that the union should have
been using social media to make its case to the public. The deluge of negative
reactions was apparently that bad.
The lesson here for other unions is that you lose the
ability to present yourself as the little guy struggling against rich elites in
these types of contract disputes if you’re already doing well and your actions
threaten the economy as a whole. That’s especially true if you boast of putting
other hardworking people out of a job.
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