A new, potentially potent challenge to Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House has emerged in the beefy form of America’s dockers. Just one month before election day, they’ve gone on strike, with the power to inflict enormous economic damage at the worst possible time for the Democrats’ presidential standard-bearer.
The strike has loomed for months, but all efforts to negotiate a settlement between the dockers – known here as longshoremen – and their employers have been for nought. As of Tuesday, they downed tools in more 14 American ports stretching from Maine to Texas. Their action is halting the loading and unloading of at least 50 per cent of goods that travel into and out of the United States by sea. Immediate consequences are likely for the nation’s food supply, with consultancy Oxford Economics predicting that the strike will do $4.5bn of damage to the economy each week ahead of its resolution.
For Harris, the strike could not possibly be occurring at a worse time. Just as she aims to persuade Americans that the economy is safe and thriving in the Democrats’ hands, comes a union dispute with staggering impacts for the nation. In the post-pandemic era, supply chains are – in many industries – now based on “just-in-time” trading strategies. American supermarkets are already warning supplies of bananas and cherries will soon be running short, along with seafood, coffee, and incoming shipments of cars.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul told reporters on Monday that residents of the Empire State should brace themselves for higher prices, and empty shelves. “I don’t want to be in a position to say ‘yes, we have no bananas’,” she joked, “but we could get to that point.”
Unless it is quickly resolved, the strike will also have powerful impacts on American exporters as well. Soybeans and poultry depart aboard ships from American ports to customers overseas, along with cotton, meat and animal feed. The American Farm Bureau is warning that the strike is putting $1.4bn in weekly agricultural trade at risk, creating huge risks in crucial, farm-dependent battleground states in the US election including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The strike, if it persists, will also rapidly create inflationary pressures that fuel fresh recessionary threats to the United States, with impacts on the Federal Reserve Bank’s capacity to ease interest rates in the months ahead.
The dockers’ main union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, has 85,000 members and is demanding wage rises in excess of the 32 per cent awarded to members of another union last year. Currently, union leader Harold Daggett is demanding a 77 per cent pay award for his members over the life of their contracts. The employers, the United States Maritime Alliance, said on Monday it had increased earlier pay offers to just over 50 per cent, but the two sides have not held face-to-face talks since June.
Joe Biden has the legal power to end the strike, but is refusing to exercise it. Under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, any American president can order essential employees to return to work. Republicans are urging the President to invoke the Act, but Biden – a proud union supporter – says only collective bargaining should resolve the dispute.
The President’s Acting Labour Secretary, Julie Su, says she is working night and day to try and resolve the strike, and has made it clear that the White House supports the dockers’ demands. “This country’s port workers put their health and safety on the line to keep working through the pandemic,” she noted in a statement issued on Tuesday.
“As these companies make billions and their CEOs bring in millions of dollars in compensation per year, they have refused to put an offer on the table that reflects workers’ sacrifice and contributions to their employer’s profits”.
Her statement also claimed “the American economy has defied all expectations thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s economic leadership”. American voters, however, may rapidly lose confidence in Harris’s presidential candidacy the longer the strike continues, and the realisation that, within days, there may indeed be no bananas on the shelves.
