Truckers idled along with 45,000 dock workers in “really creepy” ILA strike

Thousands of truckers, mostly independent contractors whose living is dependent upon drayage and other hauls from the nation’s ports, have been idled along with those represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA).

Some 45,000 dockworkers are on strike. They have largely shut down three dozen or so ports, shutting most of Newark-New York and shipping terminals along the Gulf and East Coasts.

Those busy industrial hubs, now largely devoid of activity, have been shuttered since Oct. 1 when the ILA began its action. The dockworkers’ strike is their first since 1977, and it has idled ports from New York to New Orleans.

“It was eerie, like a ghost town,” Sean Murphy, a warehouse manager in northern New Jersey, told the New York Times. “It was really creepy, if I can be honest with you. It was dead silent. I’ve never seen that in my entire life.” 

Dockworkers covered by the ILA contract earn between $80,000 and $200,000 per annum. They rejected a 50% raise over the lifetime of the proposed contract. The union wants a $5 per hour increase for each of the six years of the new contract—a 77% increase for workers earning the current top rate of $39 per hour.

Besides wages, another sticking point is automation. Newer ports around the world load and unload ships through automated cranes. The ILA wants to preserve jobs through this strike, but are getting little sympathy from the mostly owner-operator truckers who work the ports.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) noted that truck drivers have a long history of sacrificing their time to make up for chronic supply chain inefficiencies, including those deriving from strikes, pandemics and natural disasters. OOIDA also pointed out that the current port strike highlights the issues truckers face throughout the supply chain.

“Drivers constantly face downward pressure on their earning potential because their time is not valued by anyone within the supply chain,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said in a statement. “We encourage a quick resolution to this latest dispute and emphasize the need for specific discussions about how supply chain deficiencies stifle driver compensation, increase loading and unloading delays and hurt highway safety.”

Not lost on the drivers is the reality that they are compensated only per load — meaning the time they sit waiting goes unpaid — while the dockworkers earn nearly $40 in hourly wages. That eliminates incentives to move faster and work the docks harder.

There doesn’t seem to be any love lost between port truckers and the dockworkers.

“They have that flippant attitude,” Joseph Green, a truck driver from Massachusetts complained to the Times. “They don’t care.”

The traditional tension between truck drivers and dockworkers adds an odd dynamic to the strike.

The Biden administration has refused calls to interfere with the collective bargaining process. But the administration did take one step to pressure shipping carriers to increase revenue: surcharges that have been fixtures on shipments to ports disrupted by the strike.

“Our administration is calling on ocean carriers to withdraw their surcharges,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “No one should exploit a disruption for profit, especially at a time when whole regions of the country are recovering from Hurricane Helene.”

The Conference Board, a business research organization consisting of more than 1,000 companies across the globe, estimated a one-week port strike could cost the U.S. economy nearly $4 billion—about $540 million per day.

East Coast and Gulf Coast ports handle more than half of all U.S. container volume and a quarter of annual international trade, totaling about $3 trillion.

“A port strike would paralyze U.S. trade and raise prices at a time when consumers and businesses are starting to feel relief from inflation,” Erin McLaughlin, senior economist at the Conference Board, said in a statement. “There’s no easy Plan B. While shippers have already begun diverting some cargo to the West Coast, capacity for such alternative options is limited.”