History Lessons from the Port Strike

H arold Daggett, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) that struck ports from the Gulf Coast to Maine, said that he would teach Americans “what a strike is,” employing extortionate tactics based on ILA members’ position at a choke point of the supply chain to “cripple” the American economy and get otherwise-impossible demands fulfilled.

This was just as his predecessors in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) did in 1946. And as his predecessors in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO) did in 1981. And like his predecessors, he discovered that extortionate unionism has never been accepted by the American people, regardless of political party or general acceptance of collective bargaining, and so he had to effectively self-impose a cooling-off period to conduct more negotiations until January, in exchange for a wage increase lower than the one he demanded even to come to the table before the walkout.

When BLET struck just after World War II, President Harry Truman, a Democrat, a New Dealer, and a self-professed “friend of labor,” compared the act to the attack on Pearl Harbor just five years before. In a radio address recounting the damage the strike was doing to the country, he threatened to draft the strikers into the Army, to temporarily nationalize the railroads under emergency powers, and to run the trains using soldiers. BLET bosses gave in and called off the strike.

Like BLET before it and the ILA after it, PATCO’s leaders in 1981 believed their position at a transportation choke point would allow them to extort their employer — in PATCO’s case, the taxpayer — for whatever they could get. President Ronald Reagan, himself the former president of the Hollywood actors’ union, was having none of it, dusted off plans to use the military and supervisor controllers as replacements for the strikers, and canned those still striking after a 48-hour ultimatum, something he had the power to do under federal-worker labor-relations law.

But the BLET strike and dozens of other strikes that immediately followed the end of World War II were more consequential because they ushered in a Congress intent on ensuring that the nation would not be crippled by private labor disputes. The legislators elected in 1946 passed the Taft-Hartley Act with a bipartisan majority over President Truman’s politically opportunistic veto and constrained union powers that had been vastly expanded under the New Deal.

During the ILA strike, much attention was paid to whether President Joe Biden would “invoke the Taft-Hartley Act,” referring to a provision that allows the government, when a strike affects national health and safety, to impose a “cooling-off period” for mediated negotiations.

Even beyond that provision, Taft-Hartley already protects consumers through another provision that bans “secondary” or “solidarity” strikes which would expand a union’s powers of extortion.

How so? Consider the port strike as an example. The ILA only closed the East and Gulf Coast ports with its strike; these closures would cause shortages if the strike had continued or if it restarts in January. But the ILA cannot, by contrast, close the West Coast ports, whose workers are represented by a different union that has its own valid contract. The West Coast union has vocally supported the ILA and perhaps would strike to support the ILA if it could, which would make all the problems caused by the ILA strike much, much worse. But Taft-Hartley bans secondary boycotts, so the West Coast ports stayed open, as they will if the strike restarts. And the same law prevents other unions from causing further chaos “in solidarity” with the ILA, like railroad unions or the Teamsters.

The Taft-Hartley rule protects Americans from extortionate unionism, which is why Big Labor hates it and would repeal it under the union boss-backed PRO Act, the zombie legislation that keeps coming back courtesy of Big Labor’s friends in Congress and the Biden administration, which praised it in the State of the Union address.

It is easy to put on rose-colored glasses when looking at labor unions, remembering the “good old days” when unions were more common. But the ILA and Harold Daggett have, as Daggett explicitly vowed, brought back one of the real dark sides of union power. Sometimes, the past is best left in the past.