American dockworkers take a defiant stand

The dockworkers on the east coast of the United States, 45,000 of them belonging to the International Longshoreman Association (ILA), are on strike for the last three days, first time since 1977. They are demanding increase in pay by 77 per cent and an assurance that there would be no automation at ports which would threaten their jobs.

On the other hand, United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), the owners of the container ships which carry significant amount of seafood imports to the United States and beef and chicken exports from the United States, are struck, and there is a big break in the global supply chains. This has huge economic impact, which would cost around $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion every week.

The USMX is willing to offer only 50 per cent hike in pay, and there is silence on the issue of automation. Surprisingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, US President Joe Biden has thrown his lot with the dockworkers. He said, “It’s time for them to sit at the table and get this strike done.”

But he explained where his sympathies lay. He said, “They (the owners of ships containing tankers) made incredible profits, over 800 per cent profit since the pandemic, and the owners are making tens of millions of dollars from this.” Biden’s transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg asked the owners to make concessions. He said, “The companies need to put forward an offer that’s going to get the workers to the table. We actually think the parties economically are not as far apart from each other as they think.”

This is in many ways strange for a government to support the workers. But the Republicans and others who support business interests are asking President Biden to invoke the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to end the strike and ask the dockworkers to get back to work. But given President Biden’s stated position, he is unlikely to use his executive power against the interests of the workers.

Many of the experts express the view that the dockworkers’ demand that there should be a ban on automation is the most unreasonable because in every field, mechanisation is the trend, and it is inevitable. They point out that European ports, and even those in Mexico, are more automated than the American ones. Perhaps the experts have a point.

The trend has been of greater mechanisation and greater automation. And it would be impossible, and counterproductive to stop the trend. The dour scenario is that the dockworkers are bound to disappear and they have to pick up some other trade. That would be the primitive style of capitalism, which marked the 19th and 20th centuries when workers lay down their tools and walked into oblivion.

But usually there has been a compromise. The workers were absorbed into the new mode of work and made part of the mechanisation/automation process, of minding the machines and monitoring the machine work. No work can be left to the machines entirely, and this is a fact. So, what is needed is both empathy and imagination on the part of the employers.

It also comes as a surprise that in the third decade of the 21st century when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the boom sector and more people are being absorbed into the AI and semi-conductor industry, there is this very old style confrontation between the owners of the container ships and the dockworkers. This is class struggle in the antiquated 19th century sense. But that it should be re-enacted in the most developed economy in the world is indeed ironical.

Longshoremen have something heroic to it as much as the old style farm hand. Perhaps the longshoremen have no future even as the farmhand does not. But is it really so? There is still need for their trade even as the world struggles to go back to a greener way of life.