On Tuesday, dockworkers went on strike, shutting down ports across the East Coast and Gulf Coast to demand higher wages and a guarantee that automation won’t be used to throw many of them out of work. It was a massive demonstration of the power of working people to grind the gears of the economy to a halt by simply refusing to show up.
The bosses caved in record time. Both sides agreed to a tentative deal Thursday.
The bosses caved in record time. Both sides agreed to a tentative deal Thursday. The dockworkers will return to work in exchange for a 62% pay increase over the next six years. That’s a very good thing.
What’s alarming is that even as the workers were being demonized by right-wing media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, many liberals were fretting that the economic chaos resulting from foreign goods not coming into American ports would cost Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris the election. Even some otherwise left-of-center journalists were criticizing the workers for having the audacity to strike or even calling on President Joe Biden to force them back to work.
Naysayers had argued that the workers were greedy. As they saw it, dockworkers already made more than enough money. Others argued that by blocking automation, the workers were standing in the way of progress. Many observers said that collective bargaining is all well and good within reasonable limits, but shutting down this much of the flow of goods coming into the country was too much of an economic disruption to be allowed.
All of those arguments missed the mark by a mile. The only structural power the working class has in a capitalist system is the power to disrupt the economy by withdrawing its labor. That’s the entire point of union organizing.
In this case, the union members stuck to their guns and won. Their victory is a victory for everyone who has to sell their working hours to a boss to make a living.
There were breathless headlines about dockworkers who make “six-figure salaries,” but those were about the top earners. As Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., pointed out in his statement of solidarity with the striking workers, the average income for these workers is $60,000 a year, with “many East Coast port workers mak[ing] as little as $20 an hour — the same wage that a fast food worker in California currently makes.” And loading and unloading cargo ships is demanding work, often involving very long hours. The idea that these workers are overentitled clashes jarringly with these basic realities.
The labor movement exists to give the working-class majority of a society a say in what goes on at the workplaces where they spend half their waking hours.
There’s a much bigger problem, though, with the idea that striking dockworkers didn’t deserve support because they already made good wages. That argument assumes that labor activity is just a way of procuring charity for workers who are poor and desperate enough to need it. That’s exactly the wrong way to think about it. The labor movement exists to give the working-class majority of a society a say in what goes on at the workplaces where they spend half their waking hours and some input into how the profits created by their hard work are divided up. It imposes some small measure of democracy on the economy. The more that happens, the more everyone who works for a living benefits.
Every dollar that doesn’t reach the pockets of workers pads the profits of already wildly profitable companies. The ocean carriers have made record profits in the last few years: $400 billion since 2020. Meanwhile, the dockworkers whose labor does so much to produce those profits are actually making 12% less than they were two decades ago, when adjusted for inflation. Why should the bosses hoard the benefits of the industry’s success? If some dockworkers make more money than you do at your job, then why should your conclusion be that the dockworkers are greedy and not that you should organize with your co-workers for a better deal?
It’s all too easy to think of corporate CEOs and shareholders raking in money as the inevitable order of things and working people trying to get a bigger piece of the pie as an imposition. Similarly, we just take it for granted that advances in automation will be used to throw some workers into unemployment while the ones lucky enough to keep their jobs have to work as hard as ever as they see their employers’ profits skyrocket.
But that’s not the only way things could work. Imagine that these companies were collectively owned by the workers themselves. In that scenario, labor-saving technology could actually be used to save labor for everyone. Workers could all work shorter hours for the same income, spread the work that still needs to be done by humans more thinly among themselves and give themselves more time to spend with their loved ones.
In the world we live in, though, ownership and labor are separated, so bosses decide how automation will be implemented. This is a problem that’s going to impact every corner of the economy as technology advances, and any workers who want to avoid being left in the cold at the end of the process need to be ready to follow the dockworkers’ lead and draw a line in the sand.
People who profess to be workers’ allies need to take their heads out of the sand.
And people who profess to be workers’ allies need to take their heads out of the sand.
Lee Fang, a heterodox left-wing journalist I’d expect to be sympathetic to organized workers, assailed the dockworkers on the grounds that Biden has been a pro-labor president and the strike had the potential to “cause crippling inflation only 1 month out from the election.” He said this “might take the cake” as an extreme example of “self defeats of organized labor.”
Dylan Matthews of Vox went so far as to call for Biden to invoke Taft-Hartley, a notorious piece of union-busting legislation passed in the 1940s, lest the dockworkers’ strike “cause inflation to come roaring back weeks before an election.” Matthews said “you can support bargaining” without tolerating the “sabotage” of the economy that would come from shutting down traffic at East Coast ports. But what incentive are employers supposed to have to give concessions if workers can’t back up their bargaining demands with a credible threat to walk off the job? That’s the only way workers have ever been able to build real power. As it happened, the bosses caved before the supply chain disruptions could cause inflation. Even if things hadn’t worked out this way, though, it’s disturbing that Matthews was willing to throw striking workers under the bus for the “greater good.” If Biden had taken Matthews’ advice, the “pro-labor” president using a union-busting law to shut down a major strike would have had demoralizing ripple effects throughout the rest of the organized working class. Even if all you care about is Democrats winning elections, screwing over dockworkers would still have been a bad idea. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is already being supported by a higher percentage of union households than any other Republican candidate in the last 40 years. A Democratic president invoking Taft-Hartley to shut down a high-profile strike would likely only make things worse. As Chris Isidore and Vanessa Yurkevich point out at CNN, if the union had continued to work under a contract extension, thus delaying any strike until after the presidential election, then they “would have lost bargaining leverage” by losing the chance to shut down the ports before the “pre-holiday shipping season” really got going. In telling the workers to throw away their best chance to win this massive pay raise to make sure Harris won, Fang and Matthews were essentially telling them not to take action themselves but to trust politicians to look out for their interests. But workers can’t exert much influence on the political process if they don’t start by building power for themselves where they work. Biden has been more pro-labor than recent presidents. But his record is mixed. It’s true that in many ways, Biden has been more pro-labor than recent presidents. But his record is more mixed than Fang suggests. He came into office promising to pass the PRO Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize unions, but it hasn’t passed and never seemed to have been a high priority for his administration. And two years ago, in a situation much like this one, Biden invoked the Railway Labor Act to prevent a major rail strike. It’s good that this time around he did the right thing — he told reporters that he didn’t “believe in Taft-Hartley” — but these blotches on his record show the limits of trusting politicians to be benevolent toward workers. While Republicans are certainly worse on labor issues, the sad fact is that the working class has relatively limited influence in both parties. There’s no way to change that more basic reality without building a bigger and more militant labor movement, one that’s not afraid to flex its muscles at times that might be inconvenient for others. And if you work for a living, then that’s exactly what you should want to happen.
Ben Burgis
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast. 
