Thousands of unionized dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts are preparing to walk off the job Tuesday, stranding cargo containers, choking off supply chains for consumer goods, and costing the economy an estimated $5 billion a day.
President Joe Biden has one card left to play — a nearly 80-year-old law that would force union members back to work while negotiations continue.
On Sunday, Biden said he would not get involved.
“It’s collective bargaining,” he said. “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.”
On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre backed that sentiment up.
“I know there’s a question about the Taft-Hartley. We have never invoked the Taft-Hartley to break a strike and are not considering to do so now,” she said at the press briefing, referring to Biden as a “pro-union president.”
Under the federal Taft-Hartley Act, presidents can intervene in labor disputes that threaten national security or safety by imposing an 80-day cooling-off period of sorts. During that time, workers have to show up and do their job.
The contract between the operators of port terminals from Maine to Texas, which handle about half of all goods shipped to the United States, and the International Longshoremen’s Association, is expected to expire one minute past midnight. The contract covers workers who load and unload cargo ships in three dozen ports.
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The port operators group, the U.S. Maritime Alliance, and the union are stuck over wage increases.
About 45,000 longshoremen are covered by a contract between the Maritime Alliance and the I.L.A.
Negotiations between the two have been stalled since June, when the union stopped talking, citing the use of labor-saving technology at a port in Mobile, Alabama, that would kill jobs.
As the clock continues to tick toward the deadline, dread has started to set in.
“We are literally at cliff’s edge,” Chris Spear, the president and CEO of the American Trucking Association, told NewsNation. Spear said the effects of the strike will ripple through the country and be felt by nearly everyone in America.
And it’ll happen pretty quickly. “You are going to see the severity of it in week one, starting with agriculture,” he said. “Forty-six percent of everything in agriculture is exported through these East Coast ports. So farmers, those perishables from produce but also meat, poultry, soybeans, cotton. This is very significant for our farming community, but also, 85% of canned goods go through the East Coast ports. So you’re talking about half of North Carolina under water or mud and four other states directly impacted and trying to recover from a natural disaster. This is not the time for a strike.”
Tim Ryan, the owner of Square 1 Farms, a Sunrise, Florida-based importer that sells asparagus to supermarkets, told the Wall Street Journal that the “effects of the strike have already begun.”
Ryan said he will fly 150,000 pounds of asparagus from Peru this week that would usually arrive by ocean at Florida’s Port of Miami, to avoid the risk of the vegetables getting stuck at sea and rotting. The air rates will quadruple his transportation costs, adding 50 cents a pound to the prices he charges stores.
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“Either supermarkets elect to absorb that cost, or they will pass it on,” he said. Ryan sells his products to grocery stores such as Walmart, Kroger, and Wegmans.
Trade groups representing hundreds of retailers and manufacturers from Target to General Motors have appealed to the Biden administration to step in and stop the strike, warning that a shutdown could be devastating on the economy and trigger inflation ahead of the holiday shopping season. Despite the pleas, he remains firm that he will not invoke the Taft-Hartley Act.
What is the Taft-Hartley Act?
The Taft-Hartley Act is a federal law that restricts the power of labor unions. It was enacted by Congress in 1947 over the veto of then-President Harry Truman who called it a “dangerous intrusion on free speech.”
Taft–Hartley was introduced after a wave of strikes took place in 1945 and 1946. The act was pushed through the GOP-controlled Congress, though many Democrats supported their colleagues in its passage.
The legislation modified the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. It added new restrictions on unions as well as designated new union-specific unfair labor practices. Among other things, the new law prohibited political strikes, mass picketing, closed shops, and secondary boycotts, which is when a trade union strikes or boycotts in support of a strike initiated by workers in a separate corporation.
It was also the first law that banned unions and corporations “from making independent expenditures in support of or [in] opposition to federal candidates,” according to First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams.
Amendments in the Taft-Hartley Act also allowed states to enact right-to-work laws banning unions. It also prevented federal employees from striking.
The law also gave the president the ability to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that cause a national emergency. Presidents have used the power less frequently as the years have gone by. It was last used by President George W. Bush in 2002. He invoked the law to intervene in the 11-day shutdown of 29 West Coast ports, saying they were “vital to our economy and to our military” and could not afford to be shut down.
President Richard Nixon invoked the Taft-Hartley Act on Oct. 4, 1971, following a wave of walkouts in ports.
Labor leaders have referred to the Taft-Hartley Act as the “slave-labor bill.”
Eleventh-hour intervention?
Not likely.
Even before his Sunday comments to reporters, the White House signaled it was not going to get involved. “We’ve never invoked Taft-Hartley to break a strike and are not considering doing so now,” a Biden administration official told Reuters.
“We encourage all parties to remain at the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith.”
Robyn Patterson, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration’s task force on supply chain disruptions was “prepared to respond swiftly to help minimize potential disruptions.”
The AFL-CIO has also said Biden should not intervene.
“Averting a strike is the responsibility of the employers who refuse to offer I.L.A. members a contract that reflects the dignity and value of their labor,” the labor group’s president, Elizabeth Shuler, said in a letter to members of Congress.
Spear sees it differently.
“For three months, these parties have not been to the table,” he said. “It’s the job of the president and this administration to bring them together and to negotiate and to get an outcome.”
Negotiation standstill
Money is the biggest sticking point.
Longshoremen on the East and Gulf coasts with six or more years of experience presently earn $39 an hour, up 11% from their previous contract.
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However, if one factors in inflation over that time (about 24%), it doesn’t shake out.
A person familiar with the negotiations told the New York Times the union wants a $5-an-hour raise in each year of the new six-year contract, while employers were offering annual raises of $2.50 an hour.
