By refusing to invoke the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to suspend the dockworkers’ strike in half the nation’s ports, President Joe Biden terribly abandoned his duty.
Biden got lucky that the union “suspended” the strike Thursday night until January 2025, but by relinquishing the Taft-Hartley leverage, he risked a horrid blow to the nation’s economy while setting a problematic precedent.
Nearly 50,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association were making outrageously extravagant demands while refusing to work, as their $902,000-per-year, Bentley-driving union president literally threatened to “cripple” the whole economy if the demands weren’t met. Several different analyses say the strike’s overall cost to the economy was shaping up to be $4 billion to $5 billion every single day. The strike, asking for a 77% pay raise that would bring most experienced dock workers well above $200,000 in wages plus overtime, came at all ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, even as almost the entire southeast already was suffering from the effects of last week’s Hurricane Helene. And this was all for ports that already, thanks largely to earlier concessions to union power, rank among the very least efficient in the entire world.
The strike’s ill effects would have been manifold and still will be if it resumes in three months. Supply shortages would grow, at first for bananas and other imported foods, but eventually for a cascading list of goods, while prices rise. Exports, too, would be distressed, as almost two-thirds of all U.S. exports go through eastern ports. U.S. manufacturers who export, along with producers of raw materials and foodstuffs for foreign buyers, would suffer. Already, as incoming ships were turned away from ports the dockworkers temporarily closed, the shipping companies were charging innocent importers stateside for the ships’ longer times at sea, even as the importers didn’t actually get possession of the goods the ships were carrying.
Just before bragging that he would “cripple” the economy if his demands aren’t met, ILA President Harold Daggett explained, with relish, how group after group would suffer and lose jobs. By the strike’s second week, he said, beginning at the 15:25 mark here, that auto salesmen would be laid off. By the third week, malls would close down because they lacked products on their shelves, and construction workers would be laid off because of shortages of steel and lumber.
In sum, while Daggett was trying to bring the port operators and shipping companies to their knees, he knew that an entire nation of innocent victims, consumers, and workers alike would suffer — and he didn’t care. This is a monstrously immoral attitude.
For all of these reasons, Biden should have acted, but he refused to do so. The presidential authority provisions of Taft-Hartley, a landmark compromise bill that passed with overwhelming, bipartisan majorities three-quarters of a century ago and has been a model of fairness ever since, are designed expressly for such circumstances.
The law provides that if a strike affects all or most of an industry involved in foreign “trade, commerce, transportation, transmission, or communication” while the stoppage would “imperil the national health or safety,” then the president could seek a court injunction to suspend the strike for 80 days while using the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to help them seek an agreement.
Obviously, this short-lived strike involved foreign trade, commerce, and transportation, while threatening all the deleterious effects described above.
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Presidents have invoked that provision, Section 206, of the law 37 times, with the two most recent, in 1971 and 2002, both also involving longshoremen’s strikes. With the national economy in danger and large areas of six states recovering from a major natural disaster, Biden had not just an option to act, but a responsibility. Instead, letting his left-wing ideology fly forth, he snapped at reporters: “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.” He said this even as he acknowledged that the port shutdowns amounted to “a man-made disaster” on top of a “natural disaster, [which] is incredibly consequential.”
For a president to allow a double disaster to continue despite having the means to avert it, all to kowtow to leftist sensibilities and union bosses, was inexcusable. The strike is now suspended, but Biden’s stark dereliction remains.