Strike News

OCU 1L Megan Neaves could not chow down to her weekly pad thai dinner with boyfriend Zeke and cat Jiji (right), without sharing with me their curiosity about the International  Longshoremen’s Union strike on the East Coast. Would their supply of rice noodles and tamarind juice be affected should the ports shut down? Would Jiji have to make do with cheap domestic toys rather than the trinkets and baubles made redolent with the exotic catnip he orders imported from the dark web?

The threatened strike of the longshoremen could have caused major economic ripple effects on the eve of a Presidential election. A lengthy longshoremen’s strike would have affected supply chains for perishable goods, like bananas. I hadn’t realized just how crucial the banana supply is to our economy, but for some reason, all the reporting mentions bananas. The Daily Show reported that people responded to the strike by panic-buying toilet paper, perhaps just feeling nostalgia for the early days of the pandemic. But we produce our own toilet paper here in the USA, so there really is no reason to hoard it. I’m not judging, but I wish people would stop threatening to shiv me for just browsing in the paper-supply aisle at Costco.

I’m not sure how much of The Daily Show‘s reporting on this topic is accurate, but it does give a good taste of the issues, starting at around 1:30 in the clip below.

At the heart of the longshoremen’s negotiations with management is the thing that might threaten our way of life more than the success of either candidate in the Presidential election: AI. Workers are concerned that their numbers will be reduced due to automation. Happily for us, as Peter Eavis reports in The New York Times, after a three-day work stoppage, the 45,000 union members have returned to the bargaining table, extending their existing contract through January 15th. So this may be one headache that the next President may inherit, or it may be another thing that the current President quietly attended to and for which he will get no credit.

I have seen people on Twitter likening dockworkers to elevator operators. The implication is that only corrupt union power is standing between us more cost-efficient ports. I doubt that the people who write such things know much about what it takes to unload a container ship, but then, neither do I. I do know that people on Twitter also suggest that professors can be replaced with automated learning and that all of education should move online with automated content, in the form of either AI-generated material or pre-recorded lectures that could have medium-to-long shelf lives. That day may come, but if our experience during COVID is any indication, it is still a long way off.

It looks like the parties have agreed to a 62 percent wage increase over the next six years. This would bring their wages more or less in line with those of West Coast longshoremen, who are represented by a different union. As indicated, automation is a key issue that still remains to be worked out. The union will not have won much of a victory if pay rises, but one-half to three-quarters of current workers are laid off due to automation. Industry-side advocates point out that union workers are already very well-paid, estimating that nearly 60% made over $100,000 in 2019-20, but I can’t make the math work. The current high end of pay for the workers is $39/hour, so if they work 40-hour weeks that still has the top-paid workers making less than $80,000, assuming two weeks off. Perhaps they work a lot of overtime for higher pay, but if that is the case, we need more longshoremen, not fewer.

Meanwhile, as indicated in The Daily Show report above, the union has a colorful leader  in Harold Daggett. As the prolific Peter Eavis reports in The New York Times here, Daggett has been dogged by allegations of ties to the mob but also by allegations that he has not gotten good results for the workers. Now aged 78, it seems like he wants to capstone his career with a big union victory, and it seems like he will manage to do so.

As The Daily Show’s reporting indicates, Mr. Daggett seems to reside in a Tony Soprano-style McMansion in Tony Soprano’s home state. However, The Times reports the source of his income, a lavish union salary. I am not a fan of paying executives many multiples of what ordinary workers get, but Mr. Daggett’s salary is far closer to those of the workers he represents than is the compensation of the corporate CEOs with whom he is negotiating. As Roman Roy put it, “First they came for the pjs, and I said nothing . . . ” But here it is the opposite. We do nothing about the obscene amount of pay that corporate executives earn. On the contrary, when a court recently called into question Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package from Tesla, stockholders voted to award him $45 billion, notwithstanding evidence that the association of the company with Musk has harmed the company’s brand. Why do we get so bent out of shape that a union executive is also well compensated?

In other union news, OCU 1L Vanessa Mendoza (left) alerted me to a strike on the West Coast. As Bill Kaczaraba reports for MyNorthwest.com, 33,000 Boeing  machinists have been on strike for nearly a month. It seems that workers were seeking a 40% wage increase over four years. Boeing has come up from 25% to 30%, but the talks have now stalled, it appears.

While the longshoremen have leverage in the form of the potential impact of their work-stoppage on the national economy, the effects of the machinists’ strike may not be felt for some time. It may result in delays in the delivery of new aircraft, especially Boeing’s strongest selling 737-MAX jets. But the impact on the workers is much more immediate. According to the work of Reuters reporters Allison Lampert and David Shepardson, available on USA Today, Boeing has cut off the workers’ health insurance and benefits as of September 30. The union is trying to raise funds here to tide workers over  until a new contract can be negotiated.