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East and Gulf Coast Dockworkers Set to Strike After Rejecting 'Insulting' Wage Offers
Dockworkers at East and Gulf Coast ports are set to go on strike after their contract expires at midnight on Monday as they seek higher pay and better job protections, in what would be the first coordinated walkout at ports from Maine to Texas since 1977.
The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), a union, has reached an impasse with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), the port operators' group, over pay rises and protection against automation of jobs, among other benefits.
The strike is expected to have consequences across the economy: East and Gulf Coast ports bring in about half of the country's containerized goods and send out about two-thirds of them.
President Joe Biden doesn't plan to intervene to force a deal, administration officials have said, following pressure from union officials and advocates who want to ensure the dockworkers keep their right to strike.
An ILA statement on Sunday said USMX "refuses to address a half-century of wage subjugation," and another earlier in the week referred to the wages the port operators were offering as "insulting" and "a joke."
The expiring contract covers 45,000 longshoremen at about three dozen ports, including the Port of New York and New Jersey, which is the third busiest in the country.
The last strike at all of the East and Gulf Coast ports was in 1977; containerized trade is now even more essential to the U.S. economy than it was then.
West Coast dockworkers are covered under a different contract that was reached last year after many months of acrimonious negotiations.
The U.S. president has the authority to suspend a dockworkers strike under the Taft-Hartley Act, anti-union legislation passed in 1947. Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush both used the act to break dockworkers strikes.
Union officials are watching the Biden administration closely in the current labor dispute. AFL-CIO President Elizabeth Shuler last week implored Congress to stay out of the process, warning that even the suggestion of federal intervention could prevent USMX from negotiating in good faith.
"Averting a strike is the responsibility of the employers who refuse to offer ILA members a contract that reflects the dignity and value of their labor," Schuler wrote.
Biden, a Democrat, angered many union members and working class advocates in 2022 by working with Congress to intervene to stop a major railworkers strike.
Some experts believe the president won't want to do that again ahead of the November election, for fear of hurting Democratic turnout.
"They just don't want to have a fight with labor going into the election," Harry Katz, an economist and labor relations expert at Cornell University, toldThe New York Times. "Because you need the unions to get out the vote."
However, the administration will also likely face pressure from certain Democrats and business interests who worry about the economic impact of a strike just before the elections. JPMorgan analysts estimated that the strike would cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion per day, roughly 6% of gross domestic product.
"There is little chance that the administration would risk jeopardizing its recent economic successes less than two months before a tightly-contested election," Bradley Saunders, an economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients last week, according toThe Washington Post.
The ILA and USMX are negotiating pay increases, healthcare benefits, and the use of automated or semi-automated terminals, which threaten jobs. Pay has reportedly emerged as a central point of contention in recent negotiations. USMX offered an hourly pay rise of $2.50 each year over the course of a six-year contract; the ILA asked for a $5 raise per year, the Times reported.
The current top pay rate for the 45,000 longshoremen is $39 an hour, but the West Coast dockworkers are set to receive just over $60 in 2027, the final year of their contract. The ILA's requested rate would mean the top rate was $69 an hour in the final year of the new contract.
USMX is made up of global shipping companies that made "windfall profits" in 2021 and 2022, according to the Times.
The shutdown, which could begin as early as 12:01 am on Tuesday, won't affect cruise ships or military cargo, which the ILA has pledged to continue transporting.
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NYT's Bret Stephens Blasted for 'Escalate in Iran' Column
Critics denounced New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens for advocating for escalation in Iran in a Tuesday column and argued the newspaper shouldn't give him a platform for such "dangerous" rhetoric.
Citing Iran's nuclear capabilities, Stephens, a neoconservative, called for a "direct and unmistakable American response" to the "utterly intolerable threat" posed by Iran. He wrote that the U.S. should, at a minimum, destroy an Iranian missile complex, and should not try to "rein in" Israel as its leaders consider how to respond to a barrage of nearly 200 missiles fired by Iran on Tuesday.
"Incredibly the [Times] editors let Bret Stephens publish an article advocating war with Iran, without even asking him to include a paragraph explaining how such a war would go, what the human toll would be, or how he thinks it would end," Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, a left-wing magazine, wrote on social media.
World Beyond War, an anti-war group, reacted similarly, writing on social media that "Bret Stephens' warmongering in the [Times] fuels the dangerous drumbeat for war with Iran, ignoring the devastating human cost of conflict."
"Escalating violence isn't the answer—it's time for diplomacy, not more destruction," the group added.
Some of Stephens' critics pointed to his record of support for the war in Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.
Qasim Rashid, a Pakistani-American human rights lawyer, said Stephens wanted a "repeat in Iran," arguing that Stephens is "a racist war monger who relishes in promoting war that kills innocent Muslims and people of color."
Iran said Tuesday's strikes, which were targeted at Israeli military facilities and were mostly intercepted by Israeli and U.S. forces, were retaliation for recent Israeli assassinations, including of Hassan Nasrallah, who was the leader of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. Israel bombed a residential area last week to assassinate Nasrallah, killing six others in the process, and, earlier on Tuesday, had launched a ground incursion into southern Lebanon.
Stephens, who is Jewish and whose direct family members fled pogroms in Europe, attributes the hostility to Israel by Hezbollah and Iran to antisemitism. He began Tuesday's column by citing an antisemitic quote by Nasrallah, whom he said met an "overdue demise."
The column, titled "We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran," then asked readers to imagine a scenario in which one of the Iranian missiles had carried a nuclear warhead.
The invocation of the nuclear threat reminded critics of the justifications used by neoconservatives in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Stephens himself was among the many to push the idea that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein posed a such a threat.
"Saddam may unveil, to an astonished world, the Arab world's first nuclear bomb," Stephens wrote in The Jerusalem Post in November 2002, echoing the arguments for war of then-U.S. President George W. Bush.
This prediction turned out to be flatly wrong—no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Andre Damon, a journalist at World Socialist Web Site, said Stephens is now repeating old tricks in trying to justify a war with Iran.
"Twenty years on, it's the same script," Damon wrote on social media.
Stephens didn't join the Times until 2017, but the newspaper's coverage in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion has been widely critiqued for parroting the Bush administration's dubious assertions.
Reporting from The New York Times in September 2002. (Photo: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)
In 2014, Margaret Sullivan, then the Times' public editor, wrote that "the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not the Times' finest hour."
"Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism," Sullivan wrote. "Many op-ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous."
Robinson of Current Affairs argued Tuesday that little had changed.
"The intellectual standards at the paper are so low that you can just say 'we need a war' without answering even basic questions about the war you are proposing," he wrote. "This is precisely the kind of stuff that gave us the horrific Iraq disaster but nothing was learned."
Stephens attended boarding school in Massachusetts and has degrees from the University of Chicago and London School of Economics and Political Science. He became the editor of The Jerusalem Post at age 28, where he named Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq War, the newspaper's "Man of the Year." Stephens also worked at The Wall Street Journal for many years before joining the Times.
Critics have long assailed Stephen's judgment and called for the Times to fire him. In 2019, he received criticism for suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews were smarter than other people. In 2021, Stephens wrote a piece titled "Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York," referring to the then mayoral candidate whose actual mayoralty of the U.S.' biggest city has been riddled with scandal.
The criticism hasn't stopped Stephens from doubling down on his positions and using absolutist language. Last year, he wrote that he didn't regret his support for the Iraq War. And in his Tuesday column, he pushed for Israel's total victory over its foes.
"Wars, once entered, need to be fought through to an unequivocal victory," he wrote.
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