Biden-Harris Dodged Catastrophic Dock Worker Strike By Accident

Most Americans might not realize it, but the country just avoided a massive crisis last week, with the relatively quick and painless end to the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike, thanks in large part to Gov. Ron DeSantis. Had the strike continued, American consumers would have seen shortages everywhere, and the economy would have been ruined.

The reasons for the strike were nothing unusual. The ILA was in talks with its employer, the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), for a new six-year contract. And even though the USMX extended an “offer of a nearly 50% wage increase” to its employees, this was not enough, and the ILA staged a strike in order to win an even bigger increase and guaranteed protections against automation.

Because the ILA had so much leverage in the negotiation, the Biden administration and the USMX were stuck with a few options, none of them good. They could stay out of the talks and simply try to encourage the USMX to meet the extravagant demands of the strikers, which Biden’s spokespeople tried, but with little success.

Or the Biden administration could have invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to temporarily halt the strike and force both parties back to negotiations. Nevertheless, Biden dismissed this idea, knowing that the optics of forcing union workers back to the docks would upset an important part of his coalition.

Or the Biden administration could actively force the USMX to cave to the demands. Considering the high salaries that the longshoremen already enjoyed and the fact that they were obviously exploiting their unjustified stranglehold on the American economy, giving them everything they asked for would also be bad optics by showing weakness and potentially setting up an unsustainable situation that would make the cost of using the ports prohibitively expensive.

Then there was what actually transpired. Out of nowhere, Gov. Ron DeSantis took action and deployed the National Guard to the ports in Florida. Unlike the president and his surrogates, DeSantis has a state to run — one that has been devastated by one of the worst hurricanes in modern history — and doesn’t have time to play games with ILA.

He made this point clear in his statement on this decision: “Unlike the federal government, Florida is taking decisive action to ensure that our economy continues to function and that victims of Hurricane Helene will have access to what they need to rebuild.”

Hours later, the ILA inexplicably ended its strike, settling for a 62 percent pay increase after demanding 77 percent and agreeing to revisit the matter in January to iron out all the details.

While the strike has been quickly resolved, there is reason to think this type of problem will happen again. Therefore, it would benefit everyone to learn a few lessons before making a choice at the ballot box this coming month.

First, Ron DeSantis proved once again why he is America’s best governor. If he hadn’t taken the measures that he did, the strike would have lasted far longer, costing the country over half a billion dollars a day. More importantly, it would have critically hindered efforts to rescue and aid the countless victims of Hurricane Helene.

Second, Biden proved once again why he is one of America’s worst presidents. He took no action when the strike began and was ready to let it continue. Yes, it would have devastated the economy, but he knows that the corporate media would cover for him as they have with everything else.

More fundamentally, the Biden-Harris administration is responsible for creating the conditions for the strike in the first place. As columnist Jeffrey Tucker recently noted, so much of it had to do with inflation: “Inflation [created the conditions for the strike] because falling purchasing power has the most dramatic impact on wage workers while hitting the well-to-do in much less impactful ways. As a result, these dock workers are looking at their bills, the price of groceries, the rise of rents and insurance payments, and then note how well off management is doing, and finally something snaps.”

This leads to the final point: In many ways, the ILA workers have no one to blame for their problems but themselves. Their demands are pricing themselves out of their own industry, essentially begging employers to replace them with robots and foreign workers.

Pro-labor writers like Sohrab Ahmari may celebrate the union for playing hardball, but this kind of behavior easily becomes counterproductive and destructive. Workers should be rewarded (and usually are) for becoming more productive and more skilled, not because they can shut down production and crash the business.

Moreover, unions like the ILA are the ones voting for Democrats and donating to their campaigns. In return, Democrats have opened the border and printed trillions more dollars, ushering in cheap labor to replace union workers and setting off higher prices that make them poorer. Fortunately, some union workers are coming to the realization that voting for Trump is ultimately better since he promises to close the border, deport illegal immigrants, and bring down inflation.

However, too many other union workers will continue voting for Democrats like Kamala Harris who abandoned them long ago in favor of global elites who aggressively oppose private unions and collective action. They may be able to strike and negotiate better deals at the moment, but that leverage is quickly dissolving and will be completely gone if Democrats win another four years. And there won’t be a Ron DeSantis to save them next time.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman , a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written for essays for The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X.