via REUTERS
President-elect Donald Trump is wading into treacherous waters by backing the thuggish demands of the International Longshoremen’s Association on US port automation.
A quick recap: This fall, the ILA staged a brief strike over its demands for a gigantic — nearly 80% —wage hike over six yearsplus a full stop to all port automation.
Management, the US Maritime Alliance, offered a raise of “only” 50% and some flexibility around automation, an area where America’s ports badly lag the rest of the industrialized world.
President Biden stepped in and strong-armed the ports into agreeing to a deal on wages, with negotiations on other issues to continue through Jan. 15 — at which point a strike comes back on the table.
Now, negotiations have broken down again — and Trump has signaled big time support for the ILA on the automation question.
“I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” the prez-elect bragged on Truth Social. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.”
Fine: Trump has never pretended to be an old-school Chamber of Commerce-loving Republican — quite the opposite; that’s one big reason he’s gained such working-class support.
And a new strike shutting down the ports just five days before his inauguration would be a huge problem, bringing shortages and price hikes across the eastern United States.
But no way does the ILA deserve his complete support: This union is a lot closer to a protection racket than to Joe Hill.
For starters, it already has 50,000 members getting paid to do just 25,000 jobs: Under past labor contracts that allowed for some innovation, fully half the dockworkers at the East and Gulf coast ports sit at home collecting “container royalties.”
And Harold Daggett — the union boss vowing to “cripple” the US economy if any more automation is allowed — lives in a luxe, 7,000-square foot mansion in tony Sparta, NJ; among the vehicles in his five-car garage is a Bentley convertible.
Consider: Union hostility to automation is holding back US ports, not one of which makes the world’s top 50.
Europe’s largest port, Rotterdam, is also one of the most automated, yet that’s in the Netherlands, social-democracy central — proving that major automation is compatible with worker dignity even in the fanatically pro-labor European Union.
Then, too, the West Coast union has agreed to continued automation, so if the ILA gets its way shippers will increasingly just send their cargoes there: Workers in Daggett’s union will still lose ground.
More important: Most people aren’t longshoremen, and yielding to the ILA’s outrageous demands comes at everyone else’s expense, including all the genuine working-class folks who helped re-elect Trump..
And that’s to say nothing of the overall shadiness of the ILA itself, with its checkered history rife with Mob ties and the union bigs’ provision of no-show and other sweetheart gigs to favored members.
Sucking up to the ILA, in other words, is precisely the kind of ugly transactional politics aimed at favored groups that so sickened voters under Biden.
Trump’s playing with fire if he continues down this ILA-appeasing path.