The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) demanded a 77 percent wage increase over six years and a complete ban on automation at ports on the East and Gulf Coasts in its negotiations for a new labor contract. As a ludicrous opening bid to be bargained down to something more reasonable, perhaps that demand was justified. But the ILA turned down more than one generous offer before shutting down ports from Maine to Texas in a strike it has been bragging about doing for over a year. It’s time for President Biden to use the powers he has under the Taft-Hartley Act to end the strike.
In general, we oppose government intervention in economic affairs, and we would prefer to see employers and employees come to terms without federal involvement. But labor-relations law as currently constituted under the Wagner Act creates monopolistic unions that exercise outsized power with the backing of the federal government. That’s why, after Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 14 years in the 1946 midterms following a post-war strike wave, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act with broad popular support and over President Truman’s veto to limit the damage those monopolies can do.
The Taft-Hartley Act is already working, even though Biden has so far refused to use its strike-ending provision for economically harmful strikes. In many other countries, a dockworkers’ strike could spiral out of control by spurring solidarity strikes across the economy. The Teamsters, freight-rail union SMART-TD, West Coast dockworkers’ union ILWU, the Association of Flight Attendants, and the United Auto Workers have all pledged their solidarity with the ILA, but Taft-Hartley prohibits them from actually going on strike by limiting legal strikes to disputes between employers and employees.
This provision in the law reflects the commonsense intuition that workers and customers in other industries should not be harmed by a labor dispute that they have no role in. Taft-Hartley protects those innocent bystanders by forbidding solidarity strikes, and the American people are better off for it.
President Biden’s position on the dispute has been reflexively pro-union and disconnected from actual events. His administration’s stance, as expressed on September 17 before the strike began, was, “We encourage all parties to remain at the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith.” The problem with that is parties had not been at the negotiating table since June, when the ILA broke off negotiations because a terminal at the Port of Mobile was using an automatic gate to process trucks.
To put the ILA’s 77 percent wage-increase demand in perspective, West Coast dockworkers got a 32 percent raise in their contract last year. East Coast employers offered that, and the ILA turned it down. Employers tried 40 percent, and the ILA turned it down.
At the last minute before the strike began on Tuesday, employers offered to increase pay by 50 percent, triple the employer contribution to retirement plans, increase health-care benefits, and keep the current contract’s already restrictive language on automation. And the ILA turned it down.
After the strike began, what did Biden say? That employers need to “come to the table and present a fair offer.” Apparently, an offer far better than the one dockworkers on the other coast accepted last year is not fair, and it’s on the employers to come to the table that the ILA left months ago.
Harold Daggett, the yacht-owning, Bentley-driving representative of the working man who as president of the ILA has two of his sons as vice presidents, has been bragging about his union’s ability to “cripple” the U.S. economy and cause job losses in other industries if the strike continues for more than a week or two (so much for “solidarity”). Situations such as this are exactly why the Taft-Hartley Act gives the president power to seek an injunction to end nationally damaging strikes, and why the federal government employs mediators to facilitate a new contract.
To satisfy the law’s requirement that a strike “imperil the national health or safety” to be enjoined, Biden could refer to Daggett’s own descriptions of his action’s consequences. At that point, a federal court would order workers to return to the docks and implement an 80-day cooling-off period while the sides negotiate a new contract with federal mediation.
George W. Bush used this provision of the law to stop a lockout of dockworkers on the West Coast in 2002. Biden could do it again. But he has said, “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.” The president who believes that border-security laws are optional, the secretary of education can unilaterally give away hundreds of billions of dollars to student borrowers, and the advice and consent of the Senate can be ignored to keep a feckless acting secretary of labor in place indefinitely does not “believe in” an actual law that has been on the books for 77 years.
We suspect his belief in Taft-Hartley will increase as the strike continues and its political consequences become more severe. The ILA does not deserve the American people’s sympathy, as its opposition to automation makes America’s ports inefficient and harms downstream workers and consumers. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed to protect Americans from situations just like this one, it has a successful track record of doing so, and it’s ready and waiting for Biden to use it whenever he, or the staff that is ventriloquizing him, catches up with reality.