On the day the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) began their two-day wage scale meetings to hash out final contract demands to present to their employers, union brass once again reiterated that East and Gulf Coast port dockworkers “most definitely will hit the streets on Oct. 1” if they don’t get a new deal.
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In a video posted on the ILA’s website Wednesday, the father-son duo of international president Harold Daggett and executive vice president Dennis Daggett addressed the stalled contract negotiations with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), and the union’s positioning. The contract expires Sept. 30.
“We can’t even get past the economics of the contract,” the younger Daggett said. “We are very, very far apart.”
A report from the Wall Street Journal says the ILA wants a six-year deal that includes a 77 percent pay increase for its 45,000 workers. But the union has kept its lips shut on what their full demands.
Such a port strike would be “highly disruptive” to the global supply chain just ahead of the holiday season, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc told reporters at an event at the Port of Los Angeles on Aug. 27. These would include supply chain delays and cargo backlogs that would take nearly a week to clear out even if work stopped for just one day.
“If suddenly you create a big traffic jam because of a strike on a market as big and consequential as the U.S. East Coast and Gulf, it’s going to have serious ripple effects across not only the U.S., but across other geographies,” Clerc said.
President Daggett, who was an ILA member during the union’s previous strike in 1977, has global ambitions beyond the East and Gulf Coasts . In perhaps a bit of rhetoric designed to pressure negotiations, he said his next step after striking a new deal would be to form an alliance with “every dockworker union around the world” to combat the growth of automation projects at global ports.
“The only way we can fight this is by having this alliance,” said the brash ILA president. “Let’s say [Maersk] wants to go into Chile and build a fully automated terminal. Well, if that’s going to happen, this alliance now will kick in and we will shut down Maersk throughout the world…Now we might shut them down for three weeks to send them a strong message. None of your ships are going to move.”
Including the automation and economic concerns like wages and benefits , there’s a third sticking point in the negotiations surrounding “right of control” work, and whether the union is supposed to work in certain jurisdictions and situations.
“There’s a right of control issue here, because carriers and terminal operators believe that they relinquish all responsibility once a container is [moved] out of the terminal. We don’t believe that is the case,” Dennis Daggett said. “Now the economics are the sexy issue. That is what our members need and what they deserve. But for me personally, if we don’t resolve that issue, they can pay us $100 an hour, and it doesn’t matter. We won’t have jobs in the future.”
A major difference between the current negotiations and prior ILA-USMX talks is that the union wants agreements for all local contracts before a master deal is finalized.
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In February, the ILA gave local unions a May 17 deadline to complete the bargaining talks at the individual ports. But that hit a major snag in some hubs that sent the wider negotiations to a standstill, namely the Port of Mobile, over the use of an automated gate that the younger Daggett called a “violation of the contract.”
“I think the mistakes that we made in the past as a union is we spent so much time and energy negotiating the master contract that we negotiated the locals after the fact,” Daggett said. “At that time, the employers didn’t have the appetite or the energy to negotiate with us, and there was a no strike clause in the massive contract, so I think they took advantage of that. So with this go-around, because the USMX wasn’t prepared enough, we thought outside the box.”
Daggett believes the switch in negotiating tactics is why the meetings have seemed so contentious.
The ILA has already resolved a local agreements at the Ports of Virginia and Boston, according to the executive vice president. But at the time of the video’s filming, which was “almost 60 days from the expiration of the contract,” contracts at the Port of Philadelphia and Florida ports in Miami, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville had yet to be resolved.
“If you don’t sit down at least three times a year with the other side and talk about issues and problems, these things fester,” Daggett said. “By the end of the contract—and in this case, a six-year term—a lot of animosity builds up.”
On Tuesday, the National Retail Federation yet again called on both parties to return to the negotiating table. The trade association called for a resumption of negotiations in January during their first impasse, and was part of a 158-member coalition letter in June that urged the Biden administration to work with both parties to hammer out a deal.
While drama persists on the eastern seaboard, more potential labor action could take place at West Coast ports up in Canada.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) representing 730 foremen at British Columbia’s ports say 96 percent of members voted to authorize strike action if necessary in an ongoing labor dispute with port employers.
However, no 72-hour strike or lockout notice has been issued.
The union initially sought to strike in July, but were blocked by Canada’s labor board since they only wanted to bargain with one employer, DP World, rather than take an industry-wide vote. Their last agreement with the B.C. Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA) expired more than a year ago, in March 2023.
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