The US presidential campaign has dominated the airwaves and cyberspace over the past year. Yet not very far in the background has been an insistent drumbeat – the sound of workers on strike. Their clamour has reverberated from picket lines on the Northeast and Southeast coasts, from Boston, Massachusetts to Houston, Texas, the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. Workers in various industries have taken to the streets seeking to reverse a decade or more of wage stagnation and maltreatment.

A strike by 45,000 longshoremen took place in eastern and southern coast ports in early October. It lasted just three days, but was significant, threatening the sustained period of strong economic performance in the US. This was the dockworkers’ first strike in nearly 50 years, organised by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). Their capacity to halt work at all East Coast and southern ports gives their union considerable leverage over the economy. ‘Nothing is going to move without us, nothing,’ boomed ILA president Harold J Daggett to picketers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on the first day.

The union’s leverage extends to politics as well. The ILA has long been among the more conservative US unions, as opposed to the West Coast dockworkers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), one of the most leftwing. The Biden administration immediately declared it would not invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, an anti-union law empowering the president to forbid a strike when it is considered a threat to national security; and the Acting Secretary of Labor quickly moved to bring the ILA and US Maritime Alliance, the employer group, together to settle the strike.

Was this a victory for the dockworkers? Yes, and maybe: yes, since they reached a tentative agreement for wage increases of 62% over the six-year life of the contract, and in general port jobs pay reasonably well; but only maybe, because contract talks on the much thornier issue of (...)

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