Five Half-Truths About the Longshoremen’s Strike

We have been told many things about the longshoremen’s strike over the past week. Most of the reporting has been in half-truths, at best – possibly because the press doesn’t know any better (the operations of our seaports are an admittedly obscure area of specialization), or possibly because the press doesn’t want to share information so damning to the side they instinctively favor.

Here are just a few of the misleading statements thrown at us in the past week:

1: “The strike is over!”

Well, now, that’s just a lie.  The longshoremen voted to give their union bosses the power to declare a strike at midnight on Oct. 1, and they went on strike at 12:01a.m.  The optics were awful, especially timing it mere hours after a devastating hurricane hit, and just a month out from a presidential election.  The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) suspended the strike after three days, not as a gesture of good faith, but to postpone it until after the election, when it might be easier for the Biden-Harris regime to resist the natural public pressure to support the American people rather than a few union bosses.

This strike isn’t over.  It’s just delayed until after the election, so it doesn’t hurt the Democratic party at the polls.

2: “This strike is between the workers and management.”

All strikes are between employees and employers, aren’t they?  Well, not necessarily.

We think of strikes as being intra-factory things, don’t we?  The workers at a factory shut down the factory for a while.  The typical strike is a closed set, not really affecting the general public. This is never completely right, but at least it’s closer to the truth when you’re looking at a factory.

When a service goes on strike, however, then they are really striking against the customers of that service.  And with the transportation industry, in this case, the 36 ports that process half the ocean trade in the USA, a port strike is really directed against the entire American public. 

The longshoremen aren’t really striking against a few dozen shipping lines and terminal operators; they are striking against the entire manufacturing and distribution community, the businesses and consumers of the United States, all of whom depend on the ports to move their cargo. 

When ILA boss Harold Daggett shouted “We will cripple you!” into a live microphone, he wasn’t talking to the containership lines.  He was talking to the American public. 

He intended to cripple us, the United States of America, in the belief that this would cause the American public to rally to his side.  It’s the method of persuasion used by torturers who make a victim watch his wife and children getting beaten first, in order to make him cave more quickly.

3: “The employers are a bunch of foreign-owned multinational corporations.”

This is an interesting argument; it’s not so much a lie as a red herring, but there is material in this one worth exploring.

The typical container ship costs between $50 million and $150 million to buy, and another nine or ten million per year to operate.  So obviously, the companies operating them have to be enormous, just to have the capital to play in that sandbox.  

These companies also have to be enormous, to be able to pay longshoremen their $100,000 to $300,000 per year salaries (yes, that’s what they make, due to things like time-and-half, double time, holiday time, etc.).  So, attacking them for being big companies is foolish; if they weren’t big companies, they couldn’t afford to overpay the way these people are demanding.

But the really interesting item there is the term “foreign-owned.”

Joe Biden and his regime have frequently attacked the shipping industry over the past four years, deriding them as “foreign owned” companies who somehow don’t deserve the fair treatment in law or press that a domestic company would merit.

But why are most of them foreign-owned? 

Containerization is an American invention; Malcom McLean founded Sea-Land Service as an American shipping line, after all.  We used to have lots and lots of American shipping lines – along with Sea-Land, there were American President Lines, Farrell Lines, American Export Lines, Isbrandtsen Lines, and more.  All those giants have been acquired over the years by foreign companies.  Why?

The shipping business is no different from any other industry, frankly.  If the tax and regulatory codes get too onerous where a business is located, companies start looking for other locales, where they won’t be used as a piggy bank to be plundered - or a pinata to be smashed - by local, state, and federal governments.

Just as the policies of the Democratic party have driven large and small manufacturing to foreign shores over the past century, so too have the United States become inhospitable to the shipping industry.  There are still some American shipping lines, particularly in the bulk and short-sea arenas, but the policies of Washington D.C. are the reason all these big carriers are now “foreign-owned” punching bags to the talking heads of the Left.

4. “The Docks Are Ours!”

Another of the key reasons the union lost public support almost immediately was the sight of Harold Daggett’s cadre wearing tee-shirts that proclaimed “The Docks Are Ours” in viral video clips.  These are employees, not property owners.

In reality, these guys want to work the docks, not own the docks at all.

The ocean shipping business isn’t a stable business like blue chip stocks, where the annual profit margin is steady and predictable enough to provide a dependable quarterly dividend.  Container lines have years of multi-billion dollar losses, hopefully balanced off by a couple years of billion dollar profits.  Looking at a profitable year, in a vacuum, doesn’t tell you anything about the business or its capabilities.

The union is demanding a share of the profits in good years, without offering to share the catastrophic losses in the numerous years when the shipping lines take a bath. 

They don’t really want the docks to be theirs at all; they just want to be toll collectors on them.

5: “Automation is our enemy!”

American longshoremen claim to hate automation.  But do they really?

For the thousands of years before automation, longshoremen would load and unload crates, pallets and barrels by hand, one at a time, with no more mechanical assistance than portable ramps and manual block-and-tackle. 

For those thousands of years, longshoremen were constantly injured, maimed, or killed by such cargo.

No longer.  Today, we have gantry cranes, roll-on-roll-off services, transporters and elevators.  It’s not 100% safe, of course; no job is.  But the ratio of injuries to cargo volume is infinitesimal by comparison to a century ago.

Would the longshoremen like to drag these 20-ton containers on and off the ships without those cranes, or shove cargo the size of a building onto a ship with only their strong shoulders to manage the job?

They campaign for their contract demands with sophisticated cameras and computers. They drive to work in cars, SUVs and pickup trucks.  They swing containers on and off the ships by operating crane control systems in comfortable air-conditioned rooms; eating hot meals from a fully-outfitted port kitchen, drinking coffee made by an automatic-drip coffeemaker.

The union uses automation all the time. Automation is their best friend; they just won’t admit it.

There wouldn’t be cargo to move in those hundreds of millions of containers each year without automation – so, the unions wouldn’t have jobs without automation.

What they are demanding – as they have been demanding for 60 years – is the power to control the introduction and use of automation, to the exclusion of the rest of the world.  Not only do they have no such right, they have no such ability, no matter what clauses they slip into a contract.

The more they restrict the modernization of our American ports, the more business other countries’ ports will take away from our ports.  Canadian and Mexican ports are happy to pick up our slack.

As we pick up more business, more longshoremen jobs are created.  And as we drive business away, more longshoremen growth is stifled.

That’s just Economics 101.  But if their leadership understood economics, they wouldn’t be so happy to be represented by an unreconstructed marxist like Harold Daggett, or cheered on by a corrupt dementia patient like Joe Biden, would they?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/five_half_truths_about_the_longshoremen_s_strike.html