Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are supporting economic extortion, to help a powerful, high-paid union get a 77% pay raise, rather than the 50% pay raise it was offered. That union is blocking automation needed to modernize America’s ports, which lag behind many overseas ports in efficiency, including Chinese, European, North African, Asian, South American, and Middle Eastern ports. (None of the top 50 globally-ranked container ports are American).
“As the South works to recover from Hurricane Helene, a strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at East and Gulf Coast ports is” adding “to the economic damage. President Biden wants unions to have extortionary bargaining power,” and the strike is “a demonstration of” that power, notes the Wall Street Journal:
The 50,000-member ILA walked off the job Monday at midnight after the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), the coalition of employers at East and Gulf ports, didn’t meet its costly demands. “We’ll shut them down,” ILA president Harold Daggett declared, and that’s what the union is doing. The strike at these ports is the first since 1977 and could cost the U.S. economy as much as $4.5 billion a day….
Market Watch reported that “in a video posted by the union,” the ILA chief negotiator boasted that a dockworkers strike would “cripple” the U.S. economy, blocking the import of everything from cars and clothes to construction materials as well as raw materials needed for U.S. factories to keep operating.
As the Wall Street Journal observes,
Businesses last week urged the Administration to intervene to head off a strike, but Biden officials took the side of the longshoremen….Most workers would jump at the 50% pay increase that USMX has offered over six years. But the ILA is demanding a 77% pay raise to $69 an hour—which is more than West Coast longshoremen, who earn roughly $233,000 a year on average in wages and overtime, plus $99,474 in benefits.
The ILA is also demanding bigger “container royalties,” which is a union welfare program that pays longshoremen regardless of whether they work. About half of the union’s members work on any given day owing to technology that has improved port efficiency. The ILA is also demanding a wholesale ban on automation.
American ports are less efficient than most in the world owing to union work rules and restrictions on automation….consumers foot the bill for higher port labor costs and reduced efficiency. So much for the Administration’s boasts about fighting inflation and bolstering supply chains.
Mr. Biden could invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to force a cooling-off period for more negotiations, as George W. Bush did in 2002 to end an 11-day walkout at West Coast ports. But President Biden said Sunday “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.”
“Harold Daggett, the ILA boss who pledged to ‘cripple’ the United States, owns a 76-foot yacht, a Bentley, and gets paid over $900,000. He was acquitted on RICO charges after the main witness against him, mobster Lawrence Ricci, was found decomposing in a car trunk in New Jersey,” notes journalist Max Meyer.
Vice President Harris “supports the port strike threatening to cripple our supply chain …all while the southeast desperately needs help recovering from Hurricane Helene,” notes John Hasson. Harris claims the “strike is about fairness,” but a lawmaker points out that “the average dock worker” who is now on strike already “makes $147,000 per year and about $35,000 per year in employer-paid health care.” And these workers were already offered a 50% pay raise.
The refusal of Biden and Harris to protect America’s supply chain from this strike contrasts with the Biden administration’s willingness to block mergers in the name of protecting the supply chain, even when economists testify that those mergers will actually strengthen the supply chain. “The FTC will vigorously use the antitrust laws to attack ‘supply chain vulnerabilities’ so long as they involve Costco, Walmart, Target, Amazon or prevent a Little Tech acquisition,” but not when it comes to an ILA official saying “I will cripple” the economy if his demands are not met, a former FTC Commissioner notes.
