A strike wave has hit the United States in recent years with mixed results. After decades in retreat, the labor movement in the United States has had rumblings of becoming a militant force once again, something we haven’t seen since the early days of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). This trend has continued into 2024 with the recent strike of dock workers along the East and Gulf Coast Ports by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA).
Longshoremen walked off the job at 12:01 am October 1st for a strike that lasted three days. The demands included a 77% pay raise over six years, maintaining ILA jurisdiction, protecting Container Royalties, and no automation of ILA jobs.
Bourgeois Attacks on the Strike
In typical bourgeois fashion, the country was sent into a panic by the three-day strike as the media warned of empty shelves, and a shattered economy in the weeks leading up to the strike. After the devastating Hurricane Helene made landfall in late September, the capitalist-controlled media rushed to further fear-monger about how the strike would “block the recovery” for the hurricane’s victims.
Attacks on the strike escalated against the workers after the New York Post had a field day with the contradictions regarding the bourgeois lifestyle led by ILA President, Harold Daggett. The bloated salaries and lavish lifestyles of many business unionist bureaucrats, including Daggett, do not reflect the living standards of the rank-and-file members and are used to diminish the workers’ struggle. There will be more on this, what Lenin dubbed the “labor aristocracy,” later.
Fitting in their “exposé”, the NY Post article had no mention of the exorbitant salaries paid out to the CEOs of the port carriers, represented by the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX). USMX is a modern-day cartel aimed at monopolizing control of the East and Gulf Coast ports in the United States. USMX plays a similar role in the collective bargaining process that the National Carriers Conference Committee (NCCC) did in the railroad dispute in 2022.
We also saw the typical attacks from Conservative and Republican Party politicians, and even sections of the Democratic Party as the so-called “party of labor” had its share of attacks on striking dock workers.
Citing an article on the ILA’s website where Daggett showed empathy for Trump after his alleged assassination attempt, many Democratic Party operatives, including former Obama staffer Jon Cooper, attacked the strike as a stunt to damage the economy to get Donald Trump elected. This rhetoric lasted throughout the entire strike, refusing to take into account the union’s attempts at negotiating a new Master Contract well in advance of the prior contract’s expiration. In a statement the ILA released on the first day of the strike, the union noted how negotiations went with the USMX:
“Let’s be clear: the ILA has been fully prepared to negotiate a fair contract since two years before its expiration. USMX’s claim that they are ready to bargain rings hollow when they waited until the eve of a potential strike to present this offer. The last offer from USMX was back in February 2023, and the ILA has been listening to our members’ concerns ever since.”
We cannot also forget the role played by Daggett and the ILA leadership in securing the AFL-CIO endorsement for President Biden in the 2020 election. This endorsement was in doubt after the resolution passed by the AFL-CIO convention in 2017 ending labor’s support for the “lesser of two evils.”
