Samuel Messidor
The deadline for contract negotiations between the port workers’ union and the US Maritime Alliance (USMX) conglomerate of port monopolies is approaching, with the workers possibly striking January 15 if a new contract is not approved between the International Longshoremen Association (ILA) and USMX.
45,000 longshoremen are organized under the ILA at ports from Maine to Texas. The ILA does not hold strike votes; instead, the power to call the strike rests entirely with ILA’s bureaucracy. The ILA workers went on strike at the beginning of October 2024 but returned to work only 3 days later, with workers speculating that the Biden administration pressured the union to end the strike early without achieving the union’s demands. Despite the early termination, the three-day strike still hit monopolists hard, with billions of dollars lost each day and massive back-logs of cargo taking weeks to sort out, showing the potential of a longer strike.
The strike won a contract extension that gave a compromised pay raise to the workers but did not resolve the main issue of automation. Automated scanners and robotic cranes, instituted already across many ports internationally, are a sticking point for the union. Both the ILA and the West Coast longshoremen—organized under the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)—have contract language limiting automation of their jobs, but the port monopolies are arguing that further automation is necessary to remain profitable.
The port operators’ profits are sky-high and climbing since the economic crisis exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Overcapacity is threatening these profits, however, as part of the general economic crisis of imperialism, and the shipping monopolies are increasing capacity, chasing profitability.
The Red Sea blockade by Ansarallah in support of the Palestinian national struggle is masking or postponing the effects of this overcapacity, according to monopoly media economics commentators. Global shipping capacity was marked to grow by 10.6% in 2024 and 31% in the Asia-Europe theater, though the actual flow only increased by 8.8% capacity. This is a temporary reprieve from overproduction in shipping, with idle ships and plummeting profit rates around the bend, leading to the drive to automate and attempts to speed up the recycling (destruction) of old shipping capacity from the monopolists, and to the natural conflict developing between the port workers and the shippers.
ILA president Harold Daggett has spoken about the greed of the monopolists putting profits before the workers, while still noting the “No strike pledge” of the union, dating back to the imperialist First World War, to handle military cargo for the imperialists during any work stoppage.
President Donald Trump said in December that he supports the ILA in their struggle against automation, saying machines cost more in the long run than workers do and blaming the struggle at the ports on foreign shippers. Daggett responded, saying that “[Trump] has stood up for us in his strong statement against the foreign-owned ocean carriers pushing automation on American ports and then taking their billion-dollar profits back home with them”.
With these forgeries, Trump and Daggett misdirect the workers’ struggle against the monopolists to the “foreign” scapegoat, expressing an America-First populist approach toward the workers and blaming the effects of the economic crisis on “un-American” actors rather than its actual root in the imperialist system.
Photo: ILA rally. Retrieved from ILA website.
