Posted on October 7, 2024
So President Biden’s top aides swooped in with their renowned mediation skills, and saved the average American from a Christmas season of empty shelves and (even) higher prices stemming from a long dockworkers strike.
That’s the narrative the White House is peddling about its role in ending the three-day walkout.
Not so fast: Biden strong-armed the ports into a bad deal that in the long run will push up prices — and harm organized labor.
Last Tuesday, the 50,000-strong International Longshoremen’s Association (shouldn’t we call them longshorepeople?) struck against East Coast ports, including Port Authority of New York and New Jersey facilities, logjamming container shipments.
The ILA wanted a 77% raise over six years, and a freeze on automation of tasks. The ports, under the US Maritime Alliance, had proposed a 50% wage increase, and want more flexibility on automation.
So the deal Biden achieved last week — 62% raises — is a nice compromise, right?
No: Biden achieved the deal through coercion — coercion his administration is proud of.
On the strike’s third morning, the Washington Post reported, Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients, with the support of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Labor Secretary Julie Su, ended a call with port employers by telling them “he was going to tell Biden in about an hour that they had agreed to propose a new offer to the union … [T]he shipping executives had agreed to do no such thing.”
This was a barely veiled threat: I’m telling the president you already did this, so you’d better do it.
Unsurprisingly, the wage offer that the ports made under this duress is generous.
Yes, it’s reasonable for dockworkers to expect employers to make up for years of Biden-era inflation.
But this deal does more than that.
In 2018, before the last contract, a dockworker made $35 an hour. Today the hourly pay is $39; to keep up with inflation, it would need to be $44.
Assuming inflation remains around 2% annually — isn’t Kamala Harris saying that Biden beat inflation? — this $44 wage would be $50 by 2030.
Instead, dockworker pay will spike to $63 an hour. (Thanks to overtime and bonuses for working irregular schedules, more than half of New York-area dockworkers earn more than $150,000 a year.)
Port operators might agree to an above-inflation deal in return for concessions: particularly, a union giveback on automation so that our ports operate more efficiently, like Europe’s do.
Maybe the operators and union would agree to automation that doesn’t involve job losses for anyone already employed — lowering port costs, and consumer prices, in the long run.
But the deal that Biden forced the operators to make leaves all that to be negotiated over the next few months.
With the dockworkers already having secured the good part of the deal — the $63 base pay — what gives them an incentive to offer anything in return?
Biden could have stopped the strike, and created an environment for fairer negotiations, by using the tool Congress gave him: the Taft-Hartley Act, which allows him to suspend a strike for 60 days if that strike will affect the nation’s health or safety.
Taft-Hartley, passed in 1947, is not anti-union.
Congress wisely determined in that era of increasingly powerful private-sector unions that if Americans were to maintain support for organized labor, unions couldn’t take the public hostage by refusing to perform critical tasks.
Biden insists he’s pro-union, but he’s eroding a law that protects unions against themselves — and protects union members from irresponsible union leaders.
The Biden administration thinks it will get political credit not just for averting new supply-chain disruptions, but for being pro-worker.
“By bluntly and unmistakably declaring he would not seek an injunction under Taft-Hartley, the president created space for collective bargaining,” Seth Harris, a former Biden adviser, told the Washington Post.
It’s the opposite: Both sides knew that Taft-Hartley is the law, and is thus the framework under which bargaining should occur.
Biden circumvented bargaining by making it clear which side he was on, and disregarding the law to help that side.
But favoring the ILA — with its history of Mafia ties and no-show and sweetheart jobs — is hardly a good example of enlightened worker advocacy.
The unchecked power of unions like the ILA is why people stopped liking unions around the 1970s.
