Solidarity Is Unconditional, Even When The Context Is Iffy.

Talks of port shutdowns have been brewing for weeks now, and this came to a head yesterday with the announcement from longshoremen and dockworkers affiliated with the Canadian Union of Public Employees that two terminals at the Port of Montreal had officially been shut down. Today, ports across the Gulf and East Coast shut down in what is the first dock strike in half a century. Unions are complaining that carriers have made nearly $400 billion in profit in recent years– perhaps more than they made since international cargo was first containerized, according to one analyst. There are some weird elements of this particular strike, which is what this article is mostly about. But they don’t diminish the importance of solidarity– which is also what this article is about.

With no new negotiations scheduled and a statement from the White House defending workers’ rights to strike as opposed to invoking draconian measures to force back to work, the labor action promises to broadly destabilize retail markets. One source suggested that hoarding of consumer goods has already begun, but I haven’t been able to actually substantiate this (making it all the weirder to see it published on a real news media website).

Let’s also recall that this is happening in the aftermath of a catastrophic hurricane that killed over 100 people (and counting) and did tens of billions of dollars of damage including wiping out entire sections of interstate highway in the Carolinas. Suffice it to say, the supply chain faces a bit of a mess right now, and not for the first, second, or third time in the past few years.

Let’s establish quite clearly here that Handbuilt has always been a staunch defender of workers’ right to collective bargaining. We’ve written a lot about the labor movement in this country, ranging from thinking about the importance of labor in the just transition to the UAW strike last year.

Context: Labor and Sustainability

It’s especially important as we’ve made huge progress in conversations about sustainable construction and power grid decarbonization, while we continue to fail to make much meaningful progress in terms of the social side of sustainability. I always say that in discussions about the “triple bottom line,” the social element– whether the worker building the thing, the tenant living in the thing, or the innocent bystander or some other stakeholder who stands to benefit or get screwed by the creation of the thing– is often disregarded. This is my beef with companies that brag about switching to sustainable aviation fuel but can’t afford to pay flight attendants living wages. It was also my beef with the US Green Building Council, which spends so much time talking about sustainable buildings and even gives a glance toward social sustainability, but turns out to mostly just be a multi-level marketing scheme for building certifications.

In this case, though, we’re not talking about sustainability or decarbonization as much as we’re talking about workers rights– and the threat of workers being displaced by automation. I personally think many cases in which a robot can do as good a job as a human are some sort of win, with one major caveat, and that’s that the displacement of labor by automation must be accompanied by a meaningful way to offset the loss of employment– something like UBI. Of course, whether we’re thinking about productivity gains from automation or just the wholesale creation of corporate profits at large, there hasn’t been much in the way of a “trickle-down” effect on the wealth that has been created in the past ten, twenty, thirty-some years.

Hence the strike.

It’s not that dockworkers aren’t well paid– the top-earners can make $200k with overtime- but rather that they’re representing an industry that is raking it in, and the dockworkers (appropriately, I think) want to be compensated for the impending loss of jobs. This was one of the major underlying plot threads in the second season of David Simon’s HBO series The Wire, which dealt with the question of automation displacing dockworker labor in the early 2000s in the Port of Baltimore.

The Politics and Intrigue of Union Power

It gets more complicated, too, when we see that Harold Daggett, president of the ILA, has his own complicated history. One Threader went so far as to suggest that he has a vested interest in promoting the strike to destabilize the economy ahead of the election. I thought it sounded far-fetched, but the man’s history might make him a bit suspect in this regard. I wanted to unpack this a bit and I’ll say that I definitely found some potentially suspect things.

First off: the Department of Justice tried to go after Daggett for alleged ties to the mob about twenty years ago– and, miraculously, lost that case. I am not sure how the DOJ should lose a case like that, but it also occurs to me that organized crime is often quite well-organized– in a way that could potentially insulate participants from each other or indeed from the act of the crime itself. The mob has a longstanding connection with ports, well, everywhere, since, well, as long as there have been ports and mobs. Potential criminal affiliations aside, Daggett makes the better part of a million dollars a year and allegedly drives a Bentley (the car of working-class America).

In other words, it’s perhaps not that hard to imagine that Daggett was involved indirectly in criminal activity, even if he wasn’t convicted. Imagination of a criminal, of course, does not a criminal make. But the idea of an ally of the working class driving a Bentley strains credulity. But I guess, well, we have seen the whole UAW saga, right? 

The Trump Connection

While Daggett couldn’t be convicted by the testimony of informants and circumstantial evidence alone, it’s not pure conjecture to tie him to Trump, a man who, be it said, knows some things about criminal convictions. Daggett boasted about visiting Trump at Mar-A-Lago just earlier this summer on the ILA website. Remember that whole thing about imagining what is possible? I can imagine that it might have been possible for the two of them to talked about this very scenario of the potential strike.

Trump, of course, blamed the strike on Bidenflation, even though the dockworkers are managing the imports of products whose prices are higher because of the very tariffs Trump’s administration created. Bizarre, but then again, not too much out of the dude’s mouth isn’t bizarre these days. You know, not to mention the fact that most of the inflation in the Biden era was the product of Trump-era spending that took awhile to catch up with the monetary machinery. Never mind that, though.

Labor leadership cozying up to the Republican Party is a peculiar phenomenon. After all, that woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party never thought that leopards would eat her face. But one might suspect that it has to do with the feelings that the American working class has suffered a wanton betrayal in the past few decades. That’s not just a perception– it’s demonstrably true. But it’s also demonstrably true that it’s mostly happened at the hands of Republicans. We can go back to Ronald Reagan breaking the back of the American labor movement with the crushing of the PATCO strike in 1981, or to Kay Ivey’s comments today blaming greedy union men for depriving the people of Alabama of their imported TVs.

But none of this means that we shouldn’t show solidarity with striking workers. Sure, it’s not entirely auspicious for the Harris campaign going into October (though the campaign does seem to be leading Trump). To the Threaders suggesting that this strike is bad for Democrats, well, it may be. Know what would be worse than the strike being bad for Democrats? A scenario in which we were selective about the strikes we choose to support. Of course, I’m going to eat my words if this costs the Democrats the election (it won’t).

Shipping rates soared during and immediately after the pandemic, as supply chains snarled and demand surged. Industry profits topped $400 billion from 2020 to 2023, which is believed to be more than the industry had previously made in total since containerization started in 1957, according to analyst John McCown.

Is this the October surprise? It’s not quite clear. The length of the strike is anyone’s guess, but preliminary commentary suggests that this will cost the economy about $5 billion per day, and each day of delays in shipping create five days of backlogged work. Not entirely clear to me how that works, either, but supply chains are extremely precarious these days.

One thing I know for sure, though? We should have listened to Frank Sobotka.