POLITICS: Make-work is not the future of work

If you have time, I suggest watching this interview with Harold J. Daggett, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association:

In case you haven’t yet heard, the ILA — the union that controls the dockworkers along the entire East and Gulf Coasts of the United States — has just gone on strike, threatening to paralyze much of the U.S. economy by cutting off a substantial percentage of imports. If a deal isn’t reached soon, inflation could come roaring back, and lots of Americans could lose their jobs at the same time. Here’s how Daggett describes the potential impact of his union’s strike in the interview above:

When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port locked down. You know what’s going to happen? I’ll tell you. First week, be all over the news every night, boom, boom, second week. 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 are 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. The steel’s not coming in. The lumber’s not coming in. They lose their job. Everybody’s hating the longshoremen now because now they realize how important our jobs are.

We should all be thinking very hard about whether it’s wise to have a labor system that can allow that sort of thing to happen. Is it right that the livelihoods of millions of Americans should hang on the whims of 50,000 dockworkers? Is it smart to give a single union the power to shut down a large portion of America’s critical infrastructure? Collective bargaining is important, but there should be limits on how destructive we allow that bargaining process to be.

President Biden doesn’t see it that way. He has refused to use the powers of the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike on national emergency grounds, declaring that “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.”1 But although the ILA may win their fight in the short term, I don’t think they’re going to come off looking very good as a result of this strike. Belligerently threatening the livelihoods of millions of Americans while proudly declaring that “everyone hates the longshoremen” is not a good look, especially if you’re a guy who makes around $900,000 a year (three times as much as other big union leaders), once owned a giant yacht, and has been indicted (though acquitted) by the U.S. government twice for racketeering.2

If the ILA’s strike ends up inflicting even a fraction of the economic damage Daggett is threatening, it will reflect very badly on the whole labor movement, whose nascent revival is already struggling to overcome the obstacles inherent in the U.S. system. It may also alienate the labor movement’s key political allies — Democrats and progressives. The timing — five weeks before a presidential election — is extremely unhelpful for Kamala Harris’ election bid, and Daggett has been photographed hanging out with Donald Trump.

But the worst thing about this strike is the nature of the ILA’s demands. Usually we think of strikes as being about higher wages, and maybe about better working conditions. The ILA’s wage demands are actually pretty close to being met. But the union is also demanding a complete ban on automation at the ports it controls. In fact, port automation is already heavily discouraged, both by the ILA’s existing contract, and by Department of Transportation Rules that stipulate that automation is never allowed to reduce the number or quality of jobs. But now the ILA wants to ban automation completely.

See also

Politics

·10/04/2024·0

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