ILA ups the heat with strike threat

In a webcast International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett and Executive Vice President Dennis Daggett said the ILA is ready to strike if the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) will not agree to a “fair” contract for its members.

The current 6-year contract between the ILA and the USMX expires at the close of 30 September 2024. “There is a real chance we won’t have a new agreement in place. We could be hitting the streets at 12.01am on 1 October 2024,” Harold Daggett said. In his view “the USMX think the ILA won’t go on strike. Let me tell them and all of America the ILA most definitely will hit the streets on October 1st if we don’t get the kind of contract we deserve.”

It is widely reported in US media that the ILA is seeking a wage increase of US$5 per hour for each year of a new six-year contract. This would amount to a 76% wage increase over the duration of the contract. In addition, the ILA is seeking to increase pension benefits and the container royalty payments ILA members receive each year. These are payments based on the tonnage weight of containerised cargo that is not stuffed or stripped by ILA labour.

Dennis Daggett provided more detail on how negotiations have got to this point. By mutual agreement the parties started talks two years ago. Dennis Daggett said the ILA “did its homework”, studying trends and in the shipping industry and in automation technology. The union put together a comprehensive proposal based on shipping lines “sharing” the benefits of their outsized profits over the pandemic period with the ILA workforce.

The ILA went into early talks ready. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case on their side,” Dennis Daggett said. The sides remain very far apart. “They don’t want to share, and we found that offensive,” he said. The ILA is now ramping up the threat of a strike to get the message across that its demands are serious. “A strike is one of the few weapons that we have, and we are going to use it,” Dennis Daggett warned.

In the area of automation, the ILA Master contract already has some protections prohibiting “fully automated” terminals and, it is understood, local port agreements that limit the extent of “semi-automation”. Dennis Daggett said the ILA wants to “tighten up those protections because we have found out that terminal operators are sliding in certain automation which we believe is in violation of the contract, which we are addressing now”. He singled out APM Terminals at Mobile Alabama, where the ILA believes the terminal operator is overstepping with the extent to which process automation in the gate system infringes on ILA clerk’s work.

In previous contracts the ILA and USMX have negotiated a Master Contract that contains no real detail on automation other than to prohibit “fully automated terminals”. Where US east and gulf coast terminals have looked to implement semi-automated equipment and process automation, the details of how that affects the workforce have been hammered out in local, port specific agreements after the Master Contract was concluded.

For this contract negotiations the ILA has demanded the process start with local agreements first before it will agree to a new Master Contract. There has been some progress in this respect. Dennis Daggett said agreements have been reached in Virginia and Boston, but talks in the South Atlantic region, Florida and at Alabama are “at an impasse.”

Dennis Daggett repeated the ILA’s position that it is not backing down over automation. “We see automation overseas and we are not going to allow that cancer to come here on the east coast,” he said.

Harold Daggett has wider global ambitions. To stem the tide of port automation he is trying to put together a global alliance of unions to “shut down” the business of any carrier when its terminal operating company attempts to implement port automation anywhere in the world.

The ILA is also trying to follow the shipping lines into other parts of the supply chain to grow its membership opportunities.

Dennis Daggett said one of the ILA’s differences with the USMX relates to the handling of containers beyond marine terminals. “There is a right of control issue here because carriers and terminal operators believe that they relinquish all responsibility once a container is TIR’d out of the terminal. We don’t believe that is the case,” he said. This refers to the TIR convention that allows for intermodal transport of goods that have a TIR Carnet to move across countries without intermediate Customs procedures. When such containers arrive in the destination county the TIR is terminated. This affects who is responsible for the cargo and its handling.

The ILA has talked tough on some of these issues previously. However, contracts have been agreed and there are semi-automated cranes in operation in Virginia and New York. The ILA has certainly turned up the heat and increased its demands for these negotiations. If the union stays its course, it seems more likely than not that the US East and Gulf coasts are heading towards a strike in October.