By Richard Mellor in California
This was a question some workers asked me and it’s a good question indeed. Firstly, they didn’t end the strike and it’s most likely the members never had any say in the decision. The leadership of the International Longshoremen’s Associaition (ILA) “suspended” the three-day walkout.
The reason, according to the letter the ILA President, Harold Daggett, sent to the members on October 5, is that the sweetener the port bosses offered on wages, a $24 an hour increase over 6 years, is tentative and dependent on what happens at the table when the negotiations resume on January 15 2025. To have accepted it now would have meant it came with a no-strike clause. So it wasn’t a friendly offer by any means.
Extending the contract until January 15, the ILA president says, will protect the union and its ability to “negotiate and fight for other important matters that go beyond economics.” Why that is the case, only he knows.
I think the Associated Press report on October 4 is a little closer to the truth writing, “The settlement pushes the strike and any potential shortages past the November presidential election, eliminating a potential liability for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.”
The strike must have shocked the crap out of Biden and the Democrats with the election only a month away, and some reports having Trump and Harris neck and neck. Biden came out fighting, announcing to the nation that he will not invoke Taft Hartley on the dockers, to force them back to work, and even further, “…..I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley,”. Is that so, Joe? But as I wrote in my previous commentary of the strike:
“I am not convinced that Biden introducing a no strike piece of emergency legislation in December 2022 that blocked rail workers from striking and utilizing the 80-year old Taft Hartley Act are that much different when it comes down to it.”
The strike was too great a risk for the Democrats
Truth is, the rewards that come with having your guy in the Oval Office are far too great to risk losing the election because of a strike and all that it entails: angry union members, angry consumers facing shortages, and so on. Billions are spent on US elections, for which of the two Wall Street parties governs society for the next four years.
We can only imagine the conversations that have taken place behind closed doors between government officials and the ILA leadership, its lawyers and lobbyists. But we know there has been considerable involvement on the part of the Biden Administration, as his Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, has received considerable praise from ILA President Harrold Daggett, “She’s knocking down doors. She’s trying to get us fair negotiations.”, writes Jenny Brown in Labor Notes, without a hint of criticism.
It seems, despite his macho image and somewhat profanity-laden comments, which are a bit of a trick to convince his members how blue-collar and tough he is, Daggett is putting his faith in one or the other of the two big business parties. I say “one or the other” as Daggett met with the degenerate Trump in November at Mar-a-Lago in what he referred to as a “wonderful” and “productive” meeting.
Container companies tripled their profits during Covid
Biden also put a lot of pressure on the “foreign” employers for price gouging and making excessive profits – a good old dose of economic nationalism, as if US corporations don’t have major interests in other countries. There was no doubt some wiggle room there, as in 2021, container carrier operating profits according to analysis by Sea-Intelligence, were $110bn, while, “….the combined 2010-2020 operating profit across all years was a combined figure of $37.54 billion,” So in 2021, thanks a great deal to the COVID pandemic during which dockworkers stayed on the job, the industry tripled its operating profit.
Not taking the wage increase now and accepting a no-strike clause seems like the right thing to do, but suspending a strike in this way is not, and it is clearly a concession to Biden and Co.
The important matters remaining are related to job security, healthcare and automation, which is the big one. Daggett continues in his letter to the membership that by extending the contract negotiations, “…. we aim to establish strong protections against the introduction of remote-controlled or fully automated machinery that threatens our work jurisdiction.”
What Biden got through the government’s interference in the negotiations was the Taft Hartley in the form of a cooling off period. A cooling off period is a common practice here in the San Francisco Bay Area, when rapid transit workers, who have the ability to cripple the Bay Area economy, go on strike.
The bosses and the union officials that are terrified of their own members’ power, know it is not so easy to get workers back out after the initial mood and action dissipates, so a cooling off period is a regular event and a strike-breaking strategy.
It needs more than a strike to hold back automation
The ILA will not be able to stem the tide of automation, it will need more than a strike to do that. It would take at very least a national strike and a political party of our own that workers do not have in the US, and that too is largely due to the failure of the heads of organised labour.
But my guess is, that with the sweetener on pay, I think it likely that in January, a grandfather clause or something like it will be offered to the present workforce with some compensation to others and the next generation will be the victims as thousands of jobs will disappear. There is no way the East Coast ports can compete with the west or the trend internationally as ports are automated.
Perhaps the ILA will end up with something akin to the 1960 deal with the ILWU back in 1960 that I included in my previous piece on the strike.
I thought that quote from an ILWU officer from 1960, and the addition to it by the author of the article in NR online that I linked to, is important for us to point to in articles or when we’re talking with workers and worth quoting again here.
When the ILWU on the West Coast agreed to containerisation back in 1960, Robert Rohatch from Local 10 in San Francisco, said of automation, “Pensions and shorter working hours are the only answer to mechanization.”
He was right as a first step, but as the author of the piece, Peter Olney while agreeing, took it one step further, “Enhancing the pension means that more senior workers retire and clear the field for younger workers. Reducing the workday, but maintaining the same compensation, helps to deal with job attrition that inevitably follows the substitution of machines for human labor. But there is a larger question of the changing structure and character of the employers that requires the leadership and vision of union officers schooled in a materialist analysis of the industry.”(My added emphasis)
Labour-saving devices – it depends on which class benefits
There is nothing inherently wrong with automation or labour-saving technology; it depends which class owns it. If workers own the means of production then it increases leisure time, when the capitalist class does it increases the exploitation of labour and profits. Workers are either thrown on the dole, left with menial low paid jobs, or, as often is the case, in to the prison industrial system which has grown immensely in the US in order to absorb those workers capitalism has abandoned.
The ILA is a very top down organisation, and it seems, run like a family business of which Harold Daggett is the CEO. If you look at the cc’s on the letter from Daggett to the membership on October 5 you’ll see what I guess is the union’s executive board of 13, and two members have the same last name, so there’s three members of the Daggett family, including the top officer in this union’s leadership body. This is not a healthy situation.
We have a situation where two major industries, both crucial to the US economy, and both an important part of the US defence industry that is wreaking havoc throughout the world, are engaged in strikes. It was not a good sign that the ILA did not strike ships carrying military hardware or the huge cruise liners, as the US military and the cruise industry are two of the main contributors to the climate crisis. It’s an indication to me, of the narrow outlook of the heads of organised labour.
Union leaders embrace the ‘Team Concept’
I am fairly sure that the present ILA workforce will come out of this relatively unscathed and probably with some protections and improvements in their lives. But I see or hear nothing from the ILA leadership or the IAM at Boeing that indicates they are prepared to confront late stage capitalism and US capitalism in particular.
The same old strategy and failed tactics are applied, and even the disastrous Team Concept philosophy remains untouched. No serious trade unionist or opposition caucus that aims to change the concessionary course of the present leadership can be taken seriously if it doesn’t openly condemn and campaign against class collaboration in all its forms.
For the younger generation, the prospect is one of declining living standards and attacks on our civil rights. There will at some point be a mass movement rising to confront this savagery of the market, but the failure of the leaders of the working class today, both in the US and throughout the world, to get that ball rolling, insures that the road will be a much tougher one than it need be.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original is here.
