The longshore strike that paralyzed East and Gulf Coast ports last year for three days produced big wage gains and expanded protections in an industry where jobs are constantly under threat of automation.
The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) has settled its East and Gulf Coast contract shortly before a January 15 strike deadline. The deal locks in a 62 percent wage increase over six years and expands existing automation protections. Workers will also see larger “container royalty” payouts.
The agreement will go first to a body of ILA delegates, and then members will vote. The full agreement is not yet public.
ILA members won the big wage promise after striking for three days in October, shutting down container shipping on the East and Gulf Coasts in their first coastwide strike since 1977. But the twenty thousand workers went back to work with the major question of automation still on the table.
Further negotiations broke off in November, when the union and the port employers, organized under the US Maritime Alliance (USMX), deadlocked over the introduction of new technology to automate work. Employers, flush with cash from a recent shipping boom, seek to invest it in automated equipment to reduce human control and blunt the effect of job actions.
The sides reconvened less than two weeks before the strike deadline and quickly inked a tentative agreement.
Automation Is Here
Around the world, automation threatens to undermine the power of longshore workers, who are often highly organized and control an important choke point in global trade.
Strikes, lockouts, and slowdowns can be extremely costly. Longshore workers in the United States and elsewhere have used this leverage to secure relatively high wage rates.
Port automation isn’t all or nothing — terminal operators have lately introduced varying degrees of laborsaving technology. Already in use in the United States are scanners, radio frequency identification devices, cranes that can operate for part of their range of motion with no human input, and even cranes that are fully autonomous.
The fully autonomous cranes, however, are only in place on the West Coast, under an agreement with the separate International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
Secret Meetings
While negotiations were on hold, the father-son team of ILA president Harold Daggett and vice president Dennis Daggett met with US president-elect Donald Trump, who issued a statement of support in their fight against automation.
Trump and a few other Republicans have been making overtures to some union leaders, painting themselves as protectors of the working class. After the meeting, VP (and heir apparent) Dennis Daggett lobbed back lavish praise for Trump.
This week, the senior Daggett, in his first contract update in weeks — before announcing the terms of the agreement — released a statement calling the president-elect a hero: “President Trump gets full credit for our successful tentative Master Contract agreement.”
US presidents from both parties have used executive power under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to intervene in port disputes. But President Joe Biden promised not to intervene and did not invoke Taft-Hartley during the three-day strike, despite howls of indignation from the US Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers.
Job Protections on New Tech
In the deal, the union holds on to existing contract language that protects against certain types of automation and has won guaranteed jobs where partial automation is put in place.
Port employers will still be blocked from implementing “fully automated” port technology: the employers cannot implement equipment that is “devoid of human interaction.” And the union and the employers have to agree on implementing any new technology; if they cannot agree, the question gets sent to arbitration.
This language prevents East and Gulf Coast port employers from implementing the more extreme forms of automation seen in other parts of the world, including the Long Beach Container Terminal, in Southern California, where autonomous trucks and cranes entirely replace human operators.
Semiautomation Rolls On
But semiautomation still threatens jobs. East and Gulf Coast port employers have been expanding job-killing technology even under the existing contractual protections.
Global Container Terminals’ operation in Bayonne, New Jersey, is one of three semiautomated terminals on the East Coast (the other two are smaller operations in Virginia). Massive rail-mounted gantry cranes there can move along part of their trajectory with no human input.
Union workers lift and place shipping containers by video feed, which allows employers to assign them multiple cranes at a time. Traditional operations would assign one or more operators to each crane.
For this type of work, the union won an employer commitment to add one job per semiautomated crane, including in locations where the technology is already in place. This still accounts for less human labor than would be required if semiautomation were not present, and the work will be different. In New Jersey, the new jobs will maintain the equipment, rather than operate it.
In this way, the new agreement allows continued expansion of semiautomation across ILA ports. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the next several years the Port of Virginia intends to add thirty-six semiautonomous cranes to its existing stable of 116. Even though the contract requires additional staffing, other ports can be expected to do the same.
Container Royalty Cap Lifted
The union historically has faced down advances in technology by requiring that workers be made whole. To this day, shippers pay each worker a “container royalty” per ton of cargo they handle, first negotiated in 1960, to offset the cuts in labor resulting from containerization.
As shipping volumes rose, though, the employers created a royalty cap and pocketed 50 percent over the cap. After the recent negotiations, that cap will be removed.
For higher-volume ports, this could mean additional tens of thousands of dollars to each worker every year. The union will also reap the benefits: the ILA collects 10 percent dues on container royalties, compared to 0.9 percent on regular income.
Members Generally Positive
The ILA does not have a robust democratic culture. Members are still in the dark about the contract specifics and how they were reached.
The Daggetts sped ahead without the rest of the negotiating team on several occasions, including when they met with Trump and when they conducted a pre-negotiations meeting in January.
However, ILA member reactions to the news on social media have been overwhelmingly positive.
Longshore workers who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal expressed frustration with the process, citing nontransparency, the lack of member input, and union leaders’ inattention to local issues like staffing and pensions. But they expected the contract to pass.