Port strike deal ends no-win dilemma for Democrats

A dockworkers strike that threatened the U.S. supply chain weeks before an election is over just days after it began — a resolution that White House officials credited to weeks of quiet engagement with both sides, punctuated by President Joe Biden's public efforts to heighten the pressure on shipping companies to reach a deal.

The union that represents tens of thousands of East Coast dockworkers and the shipping industry announced Thursday evening that they had reached a tentative agreement on wages and are extending an expired contract through Jan. 15. That outcome defuses a political time bomb for Democrats, especially Vice President Kamala Harris, who needs all the union support she can get but could not afford a prolonged strike that would have soured voters on the economy.

“Effective immediately, all current job actions will cease and all work covered by the Master Contract will resume,” the International Longshoremen’s Association and the alliance of shipping companies that employ dockworkers said in a joint statement.

The terms of an agreement were not immediately available, but the wage increase is expected to be substantial for union members, some of whom already do well by blue-collar standards, earning six figures a year. The workers load and unload cargo containers at ports along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, a critical conduit for goods including automobiles and bananas.

“Today’s tentative agreement on a record wage and an extension of the collective bargaining process represents critical progress towards a strong contract,” Biden said in his own statement. “I congratulate the dockworkers from the ILA, who deserve a strong contract after sacrificing so much to keep our ports open during the pandemic.”

Returning from a tour of hurricane damage, Biden told reporters his team had been working hard on the matter. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su traveled to ILA headquarters Thursday morning and stayed with the parties throughout the day, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“With the grace of God ... it’s going to hold,” Biden said.

Multiple people familiar with Biden's and the White House's thinking said the president's team was deeply engaged on the issue over the past month, eventually turning up the heat on the shipping companies this week after the dockworkers walked off the job. The people were granted anonymity to speak about internal and private conversations.

Biden on Monday evening called ILA leader Harold Daggett to convey that he had their backs and was pushing the shipping companies' representative, the United States Maritime Alliance, to make a better offer.

But as the union went on strike Tuesday morning, Biden believed that the alliance, known as USMX, could have prevented the situation — and he wanted to ramp up the pressure. He issued a statement clearly backing the union and calling out the largely foreign-owned shipping companies for their record profits. That last step unnerved the ocean carriers, who began to express concerns about the public pressure campaign, according to the people describing the White House's viewpoint.

Part of the administration's message was that the shippers had a patriotic responsibility to reopen the ports to expedite the recovery from Hurricane Helene, the people said.

For all its potential economic peril, the strike created a moment of uncommon political unity, as Biden, Harris and former President Donald Trump all denounced the foreign shipping companies that control much of the trade coming in and out of the country. The messaging became another sign that both parties see the support of blue-collar workers as crucial to the outcome of November’s elections.

The strike also put a spotlight on Daggett, the union’s fiery leader , who had been threatening disruptions to the supply chain for over a year and attacked the shipping companies based in Europe and Asia. But not all the attention was good — his relatively high union salary, reportedly expensive tastes and alleged mob ties became a brief lightning rod for union critics. Elon Musk posted this week on X that “Dude had more yachts than me!”

ILA on Wednesday said Daggett and other union officials were subject to death threats and issued a legal threat to the New York Post for publishing images of his residence.

The shipping companies previously offered nearly 50 percent wage increases over six years — and the union rejected that.

Figures in that ballpark would dwarf what a separate union that represents West Coast dockworkers got in a new contract last year and could set a new pattern of demands for powerful industrial unions nationwide.

Another person familiar with the negotiations said automation remains a sticking point. The ILA does not want technology replacing its workers.

Daggett speaks passionately about the threat of robots replacing humans. Picketing dockworkers held signs at ports across the country this week that read, “Machines don’t feed families.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul — a Democrat whose state is home to part of the East Coast’s largest port — said she hopes the two sides can reach a lasting agreement soon.

“Now that the International Longshoreman’s Association has decided to suspend their strike action while negotiations continue, I continue to urge USMX and the ILA to reach an agreement that respects the rights of workers and ensures a permanent flow of goods,” she said in a statement.

Major business groups and some Republicans leaned heavily on the White House to intervene using the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which affords the president emergency powers to seek court injunctions to temporarily halt stoppages.

Biden repeatedly rejected the notion, banking his faith that the collective bargaining process would lead to a swift conclusion.

Taft-Hartley is near-universally reviled by labor unions, who see it as a weapon that deprives them of one of their biggest points of leverage in labor negotiations.

Invoking it would have essentially meant deflating unions’ enthusiasm for Harris in the hopes that doing so would have been less calamitous than a protracted strike — a trade-off that Biden’s bet sidestepped entirely.

The development also comes the same day that the International Association of Fire Fighters announced that it would not endorse in the presidential contest, a disappointment for Harris not long after another influential union — the International Brotherhood of Teamsters — similarly opted against an endorsement.

The snubs have quietly rankled Harris allies, who note that as president, Trump appointed anti-union officials to the National Labor Relations Board and Department of Labor and this summer joked with Musk about firing striking workers. By contrast, Biden and Harris have bolstered workers’ power and emboldened unions as much — if not more — than any Democratic administration in living memory.