In the latest sign of the growing strength of the labor movement in the United States, a three-day strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at ports on the U.S. East and Gulf coasts was suspended Thursday, after the United States Maritime Alliance, a coalition of shipping companies, agreed to raise wages by 62% over the next six years.
Analysts say the strike demonstrates the increasingly muscular stance the labor movement has adopted in the post-pandemic U.S. economy.
“The short and effective strike by port workers is in line with what we’ve been seeing in other industries in the past few years,” Todd E. Vachon, director of the Labor Education Action Research Network at Rutgers University, told VOA in an email exchange.
“From autoworkers to Hollywood workers to academic workers and health care professionals, unions have been increasingly using the strike as a tool to make major gains at the bargaining table during a period of increased cost of living and record income inequality,” said Vachon.
Details remain
The agreement between the ILA and the shipping industry leaves a number of issues unresolved, including the status of modernization efforts that could cost some union members jobs, and the funding of retirement accounts. Because of the unresolved issues, ILA members could return to the picket lines as soon as January if no further agreement is reached.
However, the agreement announced late Thursday put a halt to a job action with potential to seriously hobble the U.S. economy in the weeks leading up to next month’s presidential election.
In a terse statement released Thursday, the union’s leadership said that it had “reached a tentative agreement on wages and have agreed to extend the Master Contract until January 15, 2025, to return to the bargaining table to negotiate all other outstanding issues.”
String of union wins
The ILA’s success is the most recent in a number of high-profile job actions over the past 18 months, most of which have ended with significant gains for American workers.
Last year, the United Auto Workers mounted a successful strike against the Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. The 46-day job action resulted in higher wages, improved overtime policies and better retirement benefits, among other measures.
Other successful strikes were called by the Writers Guild of America, which represents film and television screenwriters, and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The actions resulted in wage increases and protections against actors’ likenesses being reproduced by artificial intelligence.
Other union victories included a strike by the graduate student employees at the University of Michigan and by the 75,000 employees of the Kaiser Permanente health care consortium.
At United Parcel Service, the mere threat of a strike by the Teamsters Union, which represents many of the company’s 340,000 workers, was enough to bring the delivery giant’s management to terms. Those included higher wages, reform of a two-tiered employment structure that saw some workers paid less than others for performing the same tasks, and improved working conditions.
White House, pandemic drove changes
Joseph A. McCartin, a professor of history and the executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, told VOA that there are several factors that have contributed to the recent string of union victories, not least of which is the current president, Joe Biden.
“I do think that the White House has made a difference,” said McCartin. “I think Joe Biden has been very outspoken, in a way I think that no previous president was, in terms of just how supportive he is of unions in collective bargaining.”
McCartin pointed out that it had been within Biden’s power to prevent the ILA strike before it began by invoking powers granted him by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The law allows a president to compel workers to return to the job and management to continue to negotiate, to prevent damage to “national health or safety.”
However, said McCartin, an even bigger factor may have been the way the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the way Americans think about their relationship to their jobs.
“It really changed workers’ expectations of what they felt like they deserved,” he said. “During the pandemic, we saw some corporate entities, like Amazon, earning record profits, but that wasn’t really being trickled down to the workers at those entities.
“I do think that there was a growing restiveness that had been building for a time among workers, and we’ve seen over the past couple of years how that’s been bubbling to the surface,” he said.
That feeling may also be responsible for a rise in public support for unions. A Gallup survey released last month shows that 70% of Americans now say they approve of labor unions. That number has been trending upward since support for unions hit a low of 48% in 2009, but the upward movement accelerated during the pandemic.
Dockworkers a case in point
The surge in corporate profits during the pandemic was especially apparent in the shipping industry. In the months leading up to the strike, the ILA released data about the profits of major shipping companies.
A.P. Moller-Maersk, the union said, saw profits in 2022 rise 50% to $82 billion. The shipping company Evergreen saw profit of $20.7 billion in 2022, triple what the company had earned in 2020.
“It’s an industry where profits — company profits — have been soaring with the expansion of trade,” Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, told VOA. “The workers haven’t been getting much of those profits, so they’re going to get a lot more now.”
Friedman said that the ILA likely timed its walkout carefully, knowing the damage an extended strike could do to the economy in the weeks preceding a presidential election.
“They know that this is the chance — they’re going to get maximum leverage if they do this now,” he said. “And the companies had to give in because of the pressure. They [were] losing a lot of money every day.”
