Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, threw her lot in with striking dockworkers and their demands for substantial wage increases and a halt to cost-cutting port automation.
Harris addressed the dockworkers’ strike on Wednesday after the workers followed through on their promise to begin striking this week. This move could potentially cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars in damage only weeks before the 2024 presidential election.
“This strike is about fairness. Foreign-owned shipping companies have made record profits and executive compensation has grown. The Longshoremen, who play a vital role transporting essential goods across America, deserve a fair share of these record profits,” Harris said in a statement.
The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), a union of 45,000 dockworkers mostly along the East Coast, went on strike Tuesday after contract negotiations with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) collapsed. It is the first ILA strike in decades, and it comes after the union’s chief negotiator Harold Daggett explicitly threatened to block imports and “cripple” the economy in the process.
The workers demanded a nearly 80 percent pay raise and a halt to automation that threatens to replace their jobs while lowering prices for consumers.
“Our offer would increase wages by nearly 50 percent, triple employer contributions to employee retirement plans, strengthen our health care options, and retain the current language around automation and semi-automation,” the USMX said of its last-second negotiations with the dockworkers.
Daggett owns multiple multi-million dollar properties and makes an annual salary of $728,000 from the union. He is one of many ILA members suspected of having mob ties and got off on racketeering charges in 2005 after one of his co-defendants disappeared mysteriously and later turned up dead. Federal prosecutors accused Daggett of having ties to the Genovese crime family, one of two organized crime families allegedly linked to ports along the East Coast. The ILA’s well-documented mob ties go back decades and remain a problem for the union.
Harris also took the opportunity to criticize her GOP presidential rival, former president Donald Trump, for his anti-union presidential record, especially when it comes to his appointments on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the government agency that oversees labor disputes.
“As President, he blocked overtime benefits for millions of workers, he appointed union busters to the NLRB — and just recently, he said striking workers should be fired,” Harris said. Trump endorsed the idea of firing striking workers during an X interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of X and a Trump supporter.
“Donald Trump makes empty promise after empty promise to American workers, but never delivers. He thinks our economy should only work for those who own the big skyscrapers, not those who actually build them,” Harris added.
The Biden administration’s NLRB has repeatedly intervened in contested labor disputes to side with unions against businesses. Progressive Democrats consider Biden’s NLRB a bright spot in his administration’s policy agenda, and critics have broadly questioned the agency’s regulatory authority.
Trump blamed the dockworker strike on inflation during the Biden presidency and said the workers were suffering because of it.
“The strike was caused by the massive inflation that was created by the Harris-Biden regime,” Trump told Fox Business. “Everybody understands the dockworkers because they were decimated by this inflation, just like everybody else in our country and beyond.”
President Joe Biden has said he would not invoke federal labor law under the Taft-Hartley Act to break up the strike and bring the longshoremen back to work. The ILA has not endorsed a presidential candidate this cycle, but the union’s political action committee has given 95 percent of its contributions to Democrats, according to non-partisan watchdog Open Secrets. Four years ago, the union endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
A picture of Daggett with Trump from a meeting they had in 2023 circulated widely when the ILA strike began. Dagget said Trump supported the union’s opposition to automated terminals and “listened to my concerns” about right-to-work laws.
Trump and Harris are actively courting working-class voters in three decisive states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as election seasons heats up and early voting begins in some states.