The International Longshoremen’s Association released a joint statement on Thursday night with USMX, an organization representing its employers, announcing that “a tentative agreement on wages” had been reached and that “all work […] will resume.” The precise terms of the agreement were not detailed in the statement. The workers agreed to suspend their strike and return to the bargaining table until January 15th.
The port strike started on Tuesday at 12:01am, when the workers’ contract ran out, as all of the nearly 50,000 workers in the ILA walked off the job and began picketing. The strike affected 36 major ports along the East coast of the United States, from Maine to Texas, which bring in about half of all goods imported into the country. In a statement on Tuesday, USMX said that it had offered a “nearly 50% wage increase” to the ILA, which had been demanding a 77% increase over 6 years and a ban on the automation of machinery like cranes, gates, and trucks.
President Biden weighed in yesterday on the strike, calling on the foreign-owned companies represented by USMX to bargain fairly: “ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic and in some cases profits grew in excess of 800% compared to their profits prior to the pandemic.” He went on to note that executive compensation and dividends to shareholders had grown in line with these margins, and that workers deserved to “see a meaningful increase in their wages as well.”
This is the first strike of its kind from the ILA since its 44-day strike 1977. The effects from that action were much less challenging than a strike of similar length would have been today, as the American economy was not nearly as globalized, and the country had not gone through deindustrialization. This meant that most goods people needed were still available to them, and the consequences of the strike mostly affected goods for export.
