NEW YORK — A looming dockworkers strike threatens to shut down East Coast ports and snarl the national economy just before the election. Crippling the economy is not just a byproduct of a dockworkers strike — it’s the point, according to the crucial leader of the union threatening the disruption.
The decision to strike is largely in the hands of the mercurial and tough-as-nails head of the dockworkers union, Harold Daggett, a native New Yorker who’s been accused of having mob ties. Lately he’s been critical of the Biden administration’s labor record and provocatively asked where the president has been for his members.
In one video post, where he promised to hurt the economy if the union’s demands weren’t met, Daggett envisioned what will happen when his workers walk out: The first week, the strike will dominate the headlines. The second week, car dealers will start laying people off. By week three, malls will begin closing. Soon construction workers would lose their jobs.
“In today’s world, I’ll cripple you,” he said recently in a video post. “I will cripple you.”
It’s unlikely the damage to the economy will be as swift or severe as he imagines, but Daggett isn’t playing around.
For over a decade, Daggett has been the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, which represents the tens of thousands of workers who load and unload cargo at ports along the Atlantic Seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The union’s constitution allows Daggett to call a strike without a vote of his members. He has pledged one if the union’s demands aren’t met when a six-year master contract with the shipping industry expires at the end of September.
Daggett has rarely given public interviews and he declined to be interviewed for this article. The ILA instead prefers getting its message out in friendly forums, including through Facebook posts and YouTube videos.
A strike now appears increasingly likely and a major disruption to the supply chain could throw a wrench into Vice President Kamala Harris’ sunny economic message. The strike could be injected almost immediately into the presidential campaigns because it would begin the same day as Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.
While President Joe Biden considers himself the most pro-union president in history, Daggett — like the head of the Teamsters who has been causing headaches for Democrats — doesn’t seem to be buying it.
According to the ILA’s biography of their leader, Daggett is a third-generation member of the union. He was born in New York and lives in New Jersey, the two states that are jointly home to the East Coast’s largest cargo port. He rose through the ranks of the powerful New Jersey-based union local, 1804-1, and became the head of the whole ILA in 2011.
A less congenial version of events, found in court records filed over the years by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, allege Daggett rose through the union’s ranks in part because of his ties to the mob.
During the pandemic, Daggett’s workers kept going while many others stayed home. Shipping companies also made enormous amounts of money — raking in record profits and handing out giant management bonuses. But, in Daggett’s eyes, his laborers never got their piece of that pie.
Now he wants a contract that guarantees big raises for his members and a ban on robots taking longshore workers’ jobs.
Some numbers, floated by industry sources, suggest Daggett is asking for close to 80 percent raises over the next six years. The union rejects that but released numbers suggesting the figure is closer to 60 percent.
Anyone who is surprised hasn’t been paying attention. Over a decade ago, Daggett said he wished everyone working on the port could make $400,000.
While the industry is small — shrunken by generations of automation — it is powerful in part because the union represents workers at a choke point in international trade. The jobs remain highly sought after and quite lucrative for blue collar work.
In 2020, over 600 longshore workers in New York and New Jersey made over a quarter million dollars, according to the last available data from a bi-state agency that used to police the port.
Daggett, a union official, does well too. He received $728,000 last year from the ILA, plus another $173,000 as president emeritus of 1804-1, according to union filings with the Department of Labor. (For comparison, the heads of the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and autoworkers union all make less than $300,000 a year, though the heads of the actors and major league players’ unions make more than $1 million.)
The United States Maritime Alliance, which negotiates on behalf of the port industry, has accused Daggett’s team of failing to come to the table. The ILA, in turn, said in a statement that is misleading and there have been “multiple communications” in recent weeks but that the industry is offering an “unacceptable” wage package.
Lately, Daggett seems to be distancing himself from people who might seem like his allies, including the Democrats in the White House and in key port states.
He publicly dissed Biden, has not asked for help avoiding a strike from his ally New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and criticized a deal to avoid a strike reached last year by the union that represents West Coast dockworkers.
Daggett’s bluster is on full display when he rails against automation, which the ILA generally defines as any technology that would replace a human worker’s job.
“Someone has to get into Congress and say, ‘Whoa, timeout, this world is going too fast for us, machines got to stop,’” Daggett told one interlocutor in a recent friendly interview. “Yes, we’re getting smart kids out of MIT and all these places. Yeah, they are all brilliant, but what good is it if you’re going to put people out of work? Who is going to support their families, machines? Machines don’t have families.”
Daggett recently expressed major disappointment in Biden for how the president helped avoid a strike last year on the West Coast. Biden dispatched officials to broker a deal that included 32 percent increases for dockworkers there but that didn’t provide what Daggett considers sufficient protections against automation.
“Where is the president of the United States? He’s not fighting for us,” Daggett said in a recent video. “In L.A., he told the union, hurry up and get a contract. That’s the mentality they have. They don’t even know what the hell they’re doing today. Well, I know what I’m doing, I’m going to save everybody’s job.”
While that isn’t necessarily the agreed-upon version of the events — the West Coast union praises Biden’s time in office and has endorsed Harris — it’s important to hear how Daggett is framing that episode. Not long ago, the West Coast union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, was considered the more strike prone. Daggett’s remarks show that seems to have suddenly changed.
The last time any White House used the strike prevention powers given to presidents by the Taft-Hartley Act was in 2002, when President George W. Bush used the law to break an impasse involving dockworkers on the West Coast citing the risk to the military buildup ahead of the war in Iraq. (On Wednesday, the ILA pledged to continue moving military cargo, even if it went on strike.)
By contrast, East Coast dockworkers have not been on strike since 1977.
Perhaps that is why few people thought Daggett’s strike threat was real until recently, even though he’s been telegraphing his tough stance for months. During a July 2023 speech to a major gathering of ILA members, Daggett warned shipping giant Maersk to make a deal or else.
“Wake up, world,” he said. “I have a message for Copenhagen, that’s the home of Maersk: Don’t fuck with the maritime unions around the world. We will shut you down!”
Nonetheless, as recently as early August, Maersk’s CEO said a strike was “highly unlikely.” This changed quickly. The company announced this week it plans to charge higher prices to move cargo in and out of East Coast ports because of the potential strike.
Others see more than just a good deal for his members at play, including legacy and dynasty building. Daggett’s son, Dennis Daggett, is now the head of the powerful New Jersey local his father once led and the ILA’s executive vice president.
A person familiar with the maritime industry, granted anonymity to discuss a delicate situation, said part of the dynamic right now is Harold Daggett’s wish to see his son replace him atop the union; the better the new contract, the better the chances of that happening.
The Biden administration has never used Taft-Hartley and does not plan to. That alone is a major victory for the ILA, because threatening to invoke Taft-Hartley would decrease Daggett’s leverage.
If Daggett is grateful, he hasn’t shown it.
In one recent video, he criticized Biden’s response to the Baltimore bridge collapse. Daggett described a conversation he had with Biden about the bridge and accused the president of not doing enough to make sure dockworkers were kept whole. “I never got no help from the government,” Daggett said.
The White House and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s office both rejected this version of events.
“The president is proud of his support for port workers,” Biden spokesperson Robyn Patterson said in a statement. “That’s why he mobilized a whole-of-government response to get the Port of Baltimore quickly reopened so workers could get back on the job following the Key Bridge collapse and why he worked closely with state and local partners to ensure impacted workers got the benefits and assistance they needed.”
Carter Elliott, spokesperson for Moore, a Democrat, pointed to work with a union local and to temporary relief efforts that “provided more than $13 million in direct financial assistance to more than 3,300 temporarily-displaced port workers.”
Along his rise to power, Daggett has been dogged by allegations that he benefited from mob support in various ways. Two decades ago, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn accused him of benefiting from a mob conspiracy to elect him head of the ILA, which he was not at the time. He was acquitted.
During the trial, Daggett denied wrongdoing and said he rose through the ranks because of worker support. Daggett testified that a hit man who was cooperating with the government in the case had put a gun to his head years earlier because Daggett was intent on moving the union from Manhattan to New Jersey, where many of his members work. They also relied on a star witness — the hit man who co-founded the gang the Jets and was clinically deaf so could only read lips — who wasn’t considered credible by the jury.
One of the co-defendants in the case was missing during the trial and later found dead in the trunk of a car outside a diner in New Jersey — also acquitted but dead.
Still, even after that case fell apart, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn continued to describe Daggett as “an associate of the Genovese family” in a separate but related racketeering case that has been lingering in court for nearly a decade.
In the years since, Daggett and the ILA helped push New Jersey to dissolve a bi-state police agency meant to keep the union and mob in check.
