The Dockworkers’ Strike Is a Big Test for Kamala Harris

The container ships that dockworkers load and unload keep getting bigger. By one estimate their capacity has grown, since their introduction in the 1950s, by 2,900 percent. In August the country’s 10 largest ports increased inbound volume more than 19 percent over the previous year, according to industry analyst John D. McCown.

Dockworkers represented by the ILA earn a base pay of $81,000, and the most senior can earn, with overtime and benefits, up to $200,000. The ILA is asking for a 61.5 percent pay raise over the life of the six-year contract, along with certain limits on automation. That’s an aggressive demand, but shipping industry profits exceeded $400 billion in each of the previous four years. “They don’t want to share it,” ILA President Harold Daggett complained to CNN.

You can be forgiven for thinking dockworkers are forever going on strike, or threatening to do so. That’s true of West Coast dockworkers, who handle the majority of U.S. imports and are represented by the more militant International Longshore and Warehouse Union, or ILWU, founded by Harry Bridges, a radical whose ties to the Communist Party prompted the CIO to expel the ILWU in 1950. (The ILWU rejoined the combined AFL-CIO in 1988, then quit it again in 2013.) The ILWU went on strike in 1971, 2012, and, very nearly, last year, when it engaged in a series of work slowdowns before Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su helped negotiate a contract.