A potentially crippling strike up and down America’s East and Gulf Coasts has been avoided – at least for now – after longshoremen and the shipping and port companies reached a tentative deal on a new contract Wednesday.
The United States Maritime Alliance, the group representing ship lines and port and terminal operators, which uses the acronym USMX, and the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), a union which represents 50,000 members who fill 25,000 jobs spread between three dozen locations at 14 port authorities from Maine to Texas, jointly announced that they agreed on a six year deal Wednesday. The deal is not complete until it is ratified by the union’s membership.
Without a deal, the port workers were set to go on strike on the morning of January 16.
“We are pleased to announce that ILA and USMX have reached a tentative agreement,” the two sides said in a joint statement. “This agreement protects current ILA jobs and establishes a framework for implementing technologies that will create more jobs while modernizing East and Gulf coast ports – making them safer and more efficient, and creating the capacity they need to keep our supply chains strong.”
“This is a win-win agreement that creates ILA jobs, supports American consumers and businesses, and keeps the American economy the key hub of the global marketplace, the two sides added.”
The ILA and USMX reached a deal in October on wages, which increased hourly pay by 10% in the first year and 62% over the six-year tentative deal. That ended a three-day strike. Workers returned to work and negotiators were sent back to the table to work out the rest of the contract. Negotiators met on Tuesday for the first time since mid-November.
Wednesday’s deal is agreement on all other items including automation, which was a key issue for the union who believed jobs would be lost.
The sides did not publicly disclose the details of the agreement. But a source familiar with the negotiations said that as the final details of the contract were being worked out this week, there was a compromise reached on technology at the ports, Automation was the key sticking point for the union over concerns they would lose jobs.
Fully automated technology is still out of the contract, but it does allow for semi-automation. USMX can implement new technology like cranes that can perform some tasks without human involvement. However, the contract gives the ILA guaranteed jobs directly associated with any new technology, the source said.
Management had argued ports need to introduce technology to improve productivity – not to eliminate union jobs. But the union said it was not convinced its members would go unhurt by new technology.
President Joe Biden had refused calls by many of the nation’s business groups to intervene and order the ILA members back to work during the October strike.
It’s not clear that President-elect Donald Trump would have taken the side of USMX and order the ILA back to work if a new strike started and spilled over into his tenure. After meeting with ILA President Harold Daggett in December, Trump came out firmly in favor of the ILA position on the issue of automation at the ports, writing on his Truth Social platform that the foreign-owned ship lines that dominate the USMX “have made a fortune in the US by giving them access to our markets…. I’d rather these foreign companies spend it on the great men and women on our docks, than machinery, which is expensive, and which will constantly have to be replaced.”
This story has been updated with additional context.