On the menu today: The International Longshoremen’s Association strike already has Americans going to stores and buying more than usual, leading to empty shelves. (But you don’t need to worry about toilet paper this time around.) The 78-year-old, Bentley-driving ILA head who makes $900,000 per year is fundamentally unreasonable, as he’s still complaining about E-ZPass, the electronic toll-collection system on East Coast highways, an entire generation after it was implemented. It cannot be emphasized enough that President Biden could end this strike immediately with a stroke of his pen, but he just doesn’t want to — even though widespread economic disruption and hardship probably hurt Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the election. We are governed by a senile idiot.
Meanwhile, the harshest assessment of Tim Walz’s VP debate performance comes from someone you probably did not expect. Read on.
The Strike Will ‘Cripple’ the Economy, Boasts the Union Boss
In about as vivid an example of the “MacGuffinization of American Politics” as you’re ever likely to find, this morning the New York Times writes, “Scenes of striking workers, hurricane devastation in the Southeast and missiles over Israel represent a rare moment of turbulence for Kamala Harris.”
Yes, but this is also a “moment of turbulence” for everyone else, and perhaps a lot longer than a moment. For Harris, the International Longshoremen’s Association strike that has shut down every port on the East and Gulf Coasts is a political headache to overcome. The Democratic candidate has to finesse the reflexive, unthinking pro-union stance of Joe Biden and the ludicrous demands — a 77 percent raise for workers and zero automation — coming from Harold Daggett, the ILA boss. The guy who enjoys a $900,000 salary and drives a Bentley boasted that his strike would “cripple” the economy. (More on him below.)
The strike and the resulting panic buying are the reasons plenty of Americans already can’t find toilet paper, paper towels, meat, and other products on store shelves.
Fears of supply shortages triggered by the strike by the International Longshoremen Association have led to some panic-buying in Hampton Roads, leaving gaps on grocery store shelves reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic. . . .
The first shortages will be felt in fresh foods such as bananas and other perishables that aren’t grown as much in the U.S., according to Jeff Smith, an economics professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who focuses on supply chain management and analytics.
Those effects could be felt by the end of the week, he said.
At a handful of grocery stores in Mobile on Wednesday, shoppers could be seen with several packs in their carts, but the lack of toilet paper does not seem to be a direct result of the strike. Some shoppers said the item was already on their grocery lists, but others said they were looking to stock up in fear that there will be a shortage.
Lisa Lea said she saw this firsthand at the Sam’s Club in Deptford, New Jersey, on Tuesday. She was among those who went to stores to grab essentials after hearing about the port strike, but found that bulk items of toilet paper and paper towels had been already cleared out.
“Everything was gone,” Lea said.
“Another customer in here just told me the whole meat section was wiped out,” said Kristal Hillie, who was shopping at the Super Lo grocery in Southaven.
Bottled water and toilet paper were top items, as fear of shortages sparked a wave of frenzied buying with Houston shoppers.
Long lines have been reported at retail stores across the city as shoppers scramble to secure essential goods. Social media is flooded with images of empty shelves, particularly in the water aisles, just hours after stores open.
Here’s the irony: No matter how long the strike goes on, toilet paper should be easy to find. “It is . . . a very domestic product: 90% of what is consumed in the US, comes from the US (and of the 10% that is imported, most is from Canada and Mexico).” That means it gets moved by trucks, and never has to come off a ship at the docks.
This morning, you can find lots of headlines like, “Shoppers urged not to panic buy amid port workers strike” and “Why there is no need to panic buy products during the port strike.”
The problem is that, if a bunch of other people in your town are going to the stores and buying a lot more products than usual, then it makes sense for you to go do the same to ensure you don’t run out in your home. You don’t know if there will be any on the shelves a week from now or beyond. A perceived shortage increases demand as much as an actual shortage.
Meanwhile, the backlog of ships waiting, or diverting to other countries, is only growing:
“Each day that this goes on it creates a backlog of containers and ships,” American Farm Bureau Federation economist Daniel Munch told CBS MoneyWatch. “A 3-to-5-day strike will take two weeks to clear — if it goes into three-week territory, it will be early January before it gets cleared.”
Today is Day Three.
Here’s the assessment from those in the shipping industry:
The backlog of vessels has built quickly over the past days according to Mirko Woitzik, Global Director of Intelligence for Everstream Analytics. Their analysis shows that the number of ships waiting grew roughly 20 percent in just the first 24 hours of the strike. Woitzik highlights it went from three vessels waiting on Sunday, to 31 on Monday, 38 yesterday the first day of the strike, and 45 as of Wednesday morning.
The number of containers now trapped offshore Woitzik calculates has surpassed 300,000 TEU having doubled in just the past two days. The expectation is that the volumes will continue to grow exponentially in the coming days.
Note: A “TEU” is a twenty-foot-equivalent unit, basically the large containers you usually see on cargo ships.
“The queue could easily grow to 100 by the end of the week as more containerships are on their way,” says Woitzik. Over 200 containerships with a total capacity of more than one million TEU will have arrived at U.S. ports by the end of the first week of the strike according to data from eeSea.
There are a few examples of ships already diverting while others appear to be lingering in Europe or away from the U.S. The NYK Demeter (4,888 TEU) for example omitted Port Everglades, Florida from its schedule with the carrier reporting it will instead discharge cargo in Halifax next Monday. Stadt Dresden (2.741 TEU) departed Norfolk shortly before the strike began and skipped a scheduled stop in Savannah, instead starting its return trip to the Mediterranean. Woitzik also highlights that there are more than a dozen vessels already in the anchorage off Freeport in the Bahamas.
Hey, let’s look around at other parts of the country.
Philadelphia NBC10’s Deanna Durante: “For some of the major stores, those big box retailers, they likely have warehouse products, got it here sooner, or maybe are using West Coast ports, where the workers aren’t on strike. But locally, smaller retail stores, those mom-and-pop businesses, some of them tell us they already have goods sitting, waiting at the dock.”
The Charlotte Observer: “Bananas, imported wine and beer, coffee and car parts — there’s a long list of items consumers across the Carolinas might struggle to find in coming weeks.”
Sina Golara, an assistant professor of supply chain management at Georgia State University, echoed Smith’s concerns. “The first impact will be delays,” Golara said. “A delay causes shortages, shortages cause prices to go up, and then consumers will be frustrated trying to find their products.” . . .
“Businesses would pass on their cost increases to the consumer,” Golara said, adding that extra pressure on the supply chain could spill over to other parts of the economy.
Hmm, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia . . . do you feel like you’ve heard a lot about those particular states lately? Like they’re important in some way?
Besides those states’ being three of the seven key swing states in this election, vast swaths of North Carolina and Georgia just endured the second-deadliest hurricane in five decades. Who needs additional economic hardship at a time like this?
Leslie G. Sarasin, the CEO of the Food Industry Association, reminded the world that this strike is particularly ill-timed for the Southeast:
We must be focused on helping the communities and people devastated by Hurricane Helene. The strike on the East and Gulf Coasts by the International Longshoremen’s Association threatens to make the situation even more dire. This action has already begun to jeopardize food supply chain operations, and the strike has the potential to disrupt the long-term stability of markets and commodities, namely pharmaceuticals, seafood, produce, meat, cheese, ingredients, and packaging.
An extended strike will likely cause dramatic increases in the cost and availability of goods, intensifying this inflationary environment. And, unfortunately, this situation cannot be addressed by a switch to alternative ports due to the freight costs and time associated with transporting products back to the East Coast.
In Harold Daggett, head of the ILA, the port managers and the rest of the country are dealing with someone who is fundamentally unreasonable. As the New York Post reports, last month Daggett fumed about the automated tolls that have been in place for a generation:
“Take E-ZPass. The first time they come out with E-ZPass, one lane, and cars were going through and everybody sitting in their car and go, ‘What’s that all about? I’m going to get one of them.’ Today, all those union jobs are gone, and it’s all E-ZPass. People don’t realize it, everybody’s got three cars, everybody got an E-ZPass on the window, and they go through like it’s nothing, and they get billed in the mail. They didn’t care about that union worker working in the booth.”
No, we don’t, because we want the most efficient and least expensive systems possible to best serve the most people possible! Nobody wants to endure a slow, inefficient, frustrating daily life just to preserve some union job!
E-ZPass was created in 1987 and became increasingly common on the East Coast throughout the 1990s. Think of all the time saved, think of all the gasoline saved, and think of the reduction in carbon-monoxide emissions from people sitting and idling while waiting for slow toll collectors. Harold Daggett hates the fact that your life is easier. He wants you back in the mid ’80s, sitting in traffic, waiting for the unionized toll collector to count out the dimes and nickels.
And it sounds like increasing automation at U.S. ports would do to them what E-ZPass did to East Coast traffic and toll collection.
Peter Tirschwell of S&P Global Market Intelligence notes the basic cost to lift a container off a ship is higher in America than anywhere else in the world. Ports elsewhere are more automated, cheaper and more productive (measured by the number of lifts on and off a ship per hour). According to a container-port performance index published by S&P and the World Bank, no American port is in the 50 most productive ports. The highest-ranked American port is Charleston at 53. It is no coincidence that Charleston is one of the less unionised.
A key point from the editors of National Review:
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.
It cannot be emphasized enough, and everyone in politics should be screaming this from the rooftops morning, noon, and night: President Biden could end this strike immediately with a stroke of his pen.
He just doesn’t want to do it. Instead, Biden is calling on management to meet all of Daggett’s demands:
THE PRESIDENT: Look, there’s a — there’s a consortium of mak- — basically six owners that control all the ports from all the way to the East Coast, down around the Gulf. And — and they’ve made — they’ve made incredible profits — over 800 percent profit since the pandemic, and the owners are making tens of millions of dollars in this.
The last thing they need is to profit off of this. It’s time to — for them to sit at the table and get this strike done.
Q: Will you be communicating with them directly about any of this?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, we have. We have. I haven’t personally, but we have. . . .
Q: Sir, do — do you — sorry. Do you have a view on the workers’ fight for restrictions on technology or automation for the dockworkers?
THE PRESIDENT: No — look, they just need to sit down and talk, because I — remember, we negotiated a similar strike on the West Coast before, and they worked it out. It’s time — they won’t even talk. So, let’s get that done.
The irony is that the dockworkers’ strike is just about the best friend Donald Trump could ask for right now and, as the Times suggested, a major headache for the Harris campaign. If everybody’s frustrated by higher prices and empty shelves in the coming weeks, does that make voters feel happier or less happy with the incumbent party? The strike is terrible for the hurricane victims, terrible for the economy, and terrible for the country as a whole. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s terrible for the Democrats.
Why can’t the almost-82-year-old president see the logic of this? What’s it going to take to slap some sense into him?
ADDENDUM: Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors and longtime political correspondent, fumed that Tim Walz botched his big moment in the vice presidential debate:
We saw the high school studies teacher destroyed by a professional politician last night. This wasn’t as bad as Biden’s debilitated performance in June, but it was close. Tim Walz was incompetent. Actually, he was worse than that: he was a willing accessory in the resuscitation of a mortal sleazeball, J. D. Vance. He treated Vance as if he were a moral equal. But that’s what liberal social studies teachers do: they can’t grock cynicism, they can’t imagine the poison that untrammeled ambition can inject into a formerly intelligent person. Minnesota nice turned out to be Minnesota gullible, Minnesota dumb. Minnesota weak.
. . . Walz was weak and confused. He was not a leader. And, one wonders—for me, for the first time—why Kamala Harris chose this softie rather than a vice president who might really go after the miscreants on the other side. I hope other people aren’t asking that question. . . . But tonight made Donald Trump’s path back to the White House—and he is the American antichrist—a little bit easier.
Now, when even a guy who calls Trump “the American antichrist” thinks your debate performance stank, you know you really fumbled it.
By the way, if Walz is such a disappointing, underperforming softie, what does that tell you about Harris’s judgment?