by Samuel Messidor
45,000 longshoremen organized under the International Longshoremen Association (ILA) began hitting the picket lines midnight October 1 across the East Coast, at 36 ports stretching from Maine to Texas. Three days later, they returned to work following a tentative agreement between the union and the port companies.
Contract negotiations between the union and the monopoly port conglomerate the US Maritime Alliance dragged on for 13 months before the contract expired, allowing the union to strike legally. The union demanded pay raises following years of stagnating raises amidst windfall profits for the Alliance monopolies in the last few years. This was the first strike by the ILA since 1977.
The new tentative agreement lasts until mid-January, at which point the workers may strike again—making it the next president’s problem and conveniently minimizing contradictions around the elections. The TA promises a wage increase, reported by monopoly media to be 62% over six years, splitting the difference between the union’s demands and the monopoly group’s offers.
The major point of contention remains the threat of automation. Monopolies tend to use their massive financial power to automate production, introducing time and labor-saving machinery, driving workers into the ranks of the unemployed, and depressing wages, while increasing the exploitation and drudgery of those workers who remain. The ILA had for a time suspended the contract talks in June with the Maritime Alliance in protest over automation recently enacted at a series of ports which the union alleged breached the existing contract protections.
Both the ILA, based on the East Coast, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) on the West Coast have contract language supposedly protecting against automation of port work. Automation and increased work tempo, however, have been the name of the game for the shipping monopolies for decades in their incessant drive for profits, with the move to larger freight containers, more consolidated operations, and automation and mechanization of many tasks of moving and sorting cargo.
Even before the strike was cut short, the ILA said in a press release that they would honor their pledge, made during the First Imperialist World War, to exempt American military goods from any strike action. ILA President Daggett said in a union press release that “Dating back to World War 1, the ILA was always proud to note that ‘ILA Also Means [I] Love America’ when it came to its ‘No Strike Pledge’ in handling U.S. military cargo at all its ports,” with the press release continuing to quote the ILA’s military consultant: “The U.S. Government representatives I have been engaging with are very happy and satisfied with the ILA who have always been there in tough situations, and always successfully accomplished the mission,” in other words, weakening their brief strike and any future strike in order to allow the imperialists to make a killing off of their killings.
In contrast to the ILA, the ILWU was historically a militant union with roots in the Communist Party on the West Coast, having broken from the ILA in the 1930s. In recent years it has participated in “hot cargo” strikes and slowdowns, where it refused to handle military equipment destined for the Zionist regime of Israel to genocide the Palestinian people, even in the face of massive fines for conducting illegal work stoppages. The ILA bureaucrats, on the other hand, have pledged to leave holes in their picket lines big enough to allow through the US imperialist military arsenal.
Despite monopoly media claims that Biden and Harris support the dock workers, Biden said that the strike was a “man-made disaster”, echoing Florida Governor DeSantis’ false claims that the dockworkers were harming Hurricane Helene relief efforts. The claim was repudiated by the FEMA director of public affairs. Nevertheless, DeSantis used these claims—echoed by Biden—to threaten to send in the national guard to break the strike.
The Biden administration said it pressured both the ILA and the Alliance to reach a swift agreement, with Biden saying he did not “believe in” using the Taft-Hartley Act to shut down the strike as Bush Jr. did in 2002 against the ILWU strike on the West Coast. However, an analyst for monopoly shippers, quoted by monopoly media, argued that forcing the ILA members back to work would be ineffective from the monopolists’ perspective anyway, due to the potential for the workers to engage in severe slowdowns in retaliation.
The port strike cost capitalists an estimated $4.5 billion in revenue per day according to JPMorgan, and the 2-day strike already caused a weeks-long backlog of cargo ships at East Coast and Gulf ports.
Widespread shut-downs of ports—bottlenecks in the economy—would cause severe disruption and the hemorrhaging of profits for the capitalists who, despite windfall profits in the last few years, are under the increasing strain of a crisis of overproduction. Hence the automation, increased workloads, faster work tempos, and cutting corners in production and safety, all of this leading to injuries and fatalities in logistics, heavy industry and beyond.
The union bureaucrats also benefit from the higher rate of exploitation. The ILA union and workers both receive a “container royalty” based on tonnage of goods passing through the ports under the ILA contract. This chalks up to a piece-rate “bonus” system from which the union bureaucrats reap many times more funding than they do from workers’ dues, chalking up to a nice pay check from tempo and volume increases for the union bureaucrats. ILA President Daggett has made roughly $7 million from his union post over the last 10 years.
