CV NEWS FEED // Tens of thousands of dockworkers in the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) labor union went on strike this week, affecting three dozen ports on the country’s Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
The Associated Press (AP) reported that dockworkers “at ports from Maine to Texas began walking picket lines early Tuesday in a strike over wages and automation.”
The strike has the potential to spark “inflation and cause shortages of goods if it goes on more than a few weeks,” the AP added.
The New York Times similarly indicated that, because of the strike, “Businesses now face a period of uncertainty” and that, according to trade experts, “a weekslong stoppage could lead to shortages, higher prices and even layoffs.”
The move marks the first time ILA, which represents around 45,000 workers, has gone on strike since 1977.
The AP’s report noted that during a part of the strike in Philadelphia, ILA “had message boards on the side of a truck reading: ‘Automation Hurts Families: ILA Stands For Job Protection.’”
While on the picket line with the striking workers, controversial ILA President Harold Daggett was approached by a reporter who asked him if he was “worried that this strike is going to hurt the everyday American.”
“Now you start to realize who the longshoremen are,” the union leader replied. “People never gave a s*** about us until now, when they finally realized that the chain is being broke now. Cars won’t come in, food won’t come in, clothing won’t come in.”
“You know how many people depend on our jobs?” Daggett asked. “Half the world!”
“And it’s time for them and time for Washington – to put so much pressure on them to take care of us, because we took care of them,” Daggett said. “And we’re here 135 years and brought them where they are today and they don’t want to share!”
The ILA boss is a steadfast critic of the Biden-Harris administration. He has led the union since 2011. However, since even before he attained this position he has been dogged by rumors that he has ties to organized crime.
The Bush administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2005 “accused Daggett of being an ‘associate’ of the Genovese crime family – one of the ‘Five Families’ of the US Mafia,” The New York Post reported.
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In addition, many critics point out that Daggett is considerably wealthy while at the same time casting himself as a champion of the working class.
“Fiery union boss Harold Daggett has long cast himself as a staunch advocate for blue-collar workers, even as he has lived in luxury, owning a yacht and driving a Bentley,” the Post stated.
Arena Magazine Editor Max Meyer wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that Daggett “was acquitted on RICO charges after the main witness against him, mobster Lawrence Ricci, was found decomposing in a car trunk in New Jersey.”
Just less than a month ago, Daggett implied during an interview that a potential ILA strike has the potential to “cripple” the U.S. economy.
“These people today don’t know what a strike is,” he said at the time. He then described what would hypothetically happen in the first few weeks of an all-out ILA strike. “When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port – a lockdown,” he said:
Everything in the United States comes on a ship. Construction workers get laid off because the materials aren’t coming in. The steel is not coming in. The lumber is not coming in. They lose their job. Everybody’s hating the longshoremen now – because now they realize how important our jobs are.
During the early September interview, Daggett challenged Biden to intervene in the potential strike, adding that even if the administration forced the union boss to go back to work himself, many of his workers would not obey.
“Who’s going to win here in the long run?” Daggett asked. “You’re better off sitting down, and let’s get a contract, and let’s move on with this world.”
“In today’s world, I’ll cripple you,” he said at the interview’s conclusion. “I will cripple you. And you have no idea what that means. Nobody does.”
On Monday, hours before the strike spread across much of the country, a reporter asked President Joe Biden if he would intervene in the then-impending strike.
Biden responded: “No.”
When pressed to name a reason, the outgoing president stated: “Because there’s collective bargaining, and I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.”
The bipartisan Labor Management Relations Act, 1947, popularly known as “Taft-Hartley” after its two sponsors in Congress, places several checks and balances on unions.
Per FOX Business, the nearly eight-decade-old federal law enables the president to take action to end a labor strike that “if it occurs or continues, would ‘imperil the national health or safety.’”
Taft-Hartley also gives the president the power to intervene in strikes that impact “trade, commerce, transportation, transmission, or communication among the several States or with foreign nations.”
Critics from across the political spectrum have called on Biden to invoke Taft-Hartley.
In a Tuesday letter to Biden, House Transportation Committee Chairman Sam Graves, R-MO, and Rep. Daniel Webster, R-FL, wrote: “Continued inaction only compounds our Nation’s economic harm, further burdening American families’ pocketbooks.”
Furthermore, Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent for the left-wing news website Vox, criticized Biden’s decision, calling it the “perfect encapsulation of Dems’ cargo cultish approach to labor.”
“Refusing to invoke T-H to avert a devastating port strike that threatens to cause inflation to come roaring back weeks before an election in which Dems will lose ILA members in a landslide,” Matthews wrote.
Multiple polls over the past few weeks show Vice President Kamala Harris poised to receive the least support among unionized workers of any Democratic nominee in recent memory.
POLITICO noted that during the 2020 COVID outbreak, “Daggett’s workers kept going while many others stayed home.”
At the time, “Shipping companies also made enormous amounts of money — raking in record profits and handing out giant management bonuses,” POLITICO’s report continued. “But, in Daggett’s eyes, his laborers never got their piece of that pie.”
“Everybody went to work during COVID. Nobody stayed home,” Daggett said during the same September interview mentioned above. “Well, I want to be compensated for that. I’m not asking for the world. They know what I want … And if they don’t, then I have to go into the street and we have to fight for what we rightfully deserve.”
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