The entire U.S. trade community has been waiting for an agreement to end the massive strike in the coastal ports. The blockade of loading and unloading activities at these ports threatened to cause significant economic losses and another logistics crisis.
According to Reuters, in the early morning hours, dockworkers and port operators agreed to temporarily suspend the strike. However, there’s still a risk that the protests will return.
Longshoremen return to work. Representatives of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which represents some 45,000 dockworkers on East Coast ports, have agreed to improve workers’ pay conditions.
The ILA called off the strike on Thursday, announcing that it had reached a tentative deal to extend the current Master Contract (which expired a few days ago) until Jan. 15, 2025. Following this statement, the dockworkers represented by this association returned to their posts and resumed port operations.
Wage increases. According to The Wall Street Journal, the agreement includes an offer of a 62% wage increase over the next six years, compared to the 77% demanded by the dockworkers. The new offer is an improvement over the port operators’ previous proposal, which stuck to a 50% wage increase.
The new offer would gradually increase wages over six years from $39 per hour to $63 per hour in 2030. The shipping companies “got real rich during Covid when everybody stayed home while my people went to work every single day and some of them died on the job,” ILA representative Harold Daggett told the Journal.
It’s just a truce, not the end of the war. As the ILA statement points out, the tentative agreement is only a temporary return to business pending final ratification by the dockworkers’ rank and file of the deal reached between the association and the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents port operators and shipping lines.
If the ILA rank-and-file votes against the agreement, both sides would return to bargaining, and loading and unloading operations at East Coast ports could stop again.
This has happened before. The shadow of the strike still hangs over U.S. ports. This isn’t the first time collective representatives have reached an agreement, only to have the rank and file reject it.
Just a few weeks ago, 33,000 Boeing workers, on strike since Sep. 13, unanimously rejected a tentative agreement between the company and their representatives.
Their refusal has once again triggered the strikes holding up the delivery of new planes, as reported by CNN. Something similar could happen if the ILA dockworkers disagree with the deal.
The White House has mediated the dispute. Despite the White House’s refusal to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, which would allow President Joe Biden to delay the strike for up to 80 days, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and the president have called for negotiations and the normalization of port activity.
After the ILA called off the strike, Biden expressed his satisfaction in a statement: “This step indicates progress toward a strong contract and represents the power of collective bargaining. As I have said, this is about fairness–and our economy works best when workers share in record profits. Dockworkers deserve a fair share for their hard work getting essential goods out to communities across America.”
Image | Tyler Casey (Unsplash)
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