The International Longshoremen’s Association is now on the second day of a massive strike that could cripple the economy if it lasts for a long time.
The union, which has not gone on strike in 50 years, walked off the job on Tuesday while demanding a 77% pay increase and assurances that members’ jobs will be protected from automation, which is rapidly changing the way port jobs are conducted.
With Election Day a mere five weeks away, the strike could have a massive impact on the economy, just as voters are lining up to go to the polls to choose the next president and who controls Congress. The members of the union work at the docks and ports along the eastern and southern coasts, from Maine to Texas, unloading the hundreds of thousands of shipping containers that cross oceans to bring goods manufactured overseas to the United States. If the strike were to last just one week, the impact on the economy could be devastating.
But why did the union pick five weeks before Election Day to go on strike? The answer lies two years ago, when the railway workers’ unions all went on strike but were subsequently forced back to work after President Joe Biden and a bipartisan majority in Congress passed a bill forcing the union to accept a contract proposed by a government panel.
Now, when it comes to the International Longshoremen’s Association, Biden has the ability to stop the strike once again by invoking the Taft-Hartley Act, which allows the president to order the striking workers to go back to work for a cooling-off period in the hopes that an agreement can be reached in the meantime.
This is why the strike has put Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Democratic Party in a tough spot. The president can elect to invoke Taft-Hartley and force the striking workers to return to work, but doing so will undoubtedly anger organized labor, which is contemptuous of such interventions. And since labor unions are a key constituency of the Democratic Party, a rift with unions five weeks before Election Day could prove enormously problematic for the party’s efforts to maximize support among union members.
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But the alternative is not much better. If Biden stays out of the collective bargaining dispute as he has pledged to do, he risks hurting the economy so badly that voters, who are mostly motivated to vote by their wallets, punish his party at the ballot box and hand former President Donald Trump a second term in the White House. Conversely, the longer Biden stays out of the dispute, the more pressure is placed on the companies affected by the strike to meet the dockworkers’ demands.
This is why the union chose to strike now. By walking off the job a month before the election, it drastically lowered the odds that Biden would intervene in the strike and thereby give the union more leverage in its efforts to secure a new and more favorable contract. It’s a shrewd move and one that may end up paying off in spades.