R. Nesbitt | Red Phoenix correspondent | Maryland–

On October 1, 2024, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) launched a strike including several key ports all along the East Coast of the United States, from Boston and New York in the North, to New Orleans and Houston in the South. After two days of struggle, the ILA suspended the strike after reaching a “tentative” agreement on wages with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), an association of shipping companies located all over the country. The fight is not over yet; negotiations are ongoing between representatives of the ILA and the USMX over various other concerns of the Longshoremen, chiefly, restrictions on automation driving up unemployment and driving down wages and bonuses for dockworkers. This is pivotal as automation and semi-automation have been responsible for more job loss and underemployment than NAFTA, and with continuing innovations to automation and to artificial intelligence, its impact will be felt even more deeply. The ILA must be praised for bringing this issue to the forefront of national discussion. 

As stated in our analysis of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River, much of the traffic going through Baltimore Port was diverted to other nearby ports like Wilmington, New York, and in Northern Virginia. The lost hours for Longshoremen in Baltimore and the heavy burden of labor on port workers in other cities, which in itself incentivized trends towards automation and partial automation, have all contributed in the desire of Longshoremen to secure commensurate wages for their onerous work and to protect their positions from the robotic shortcuts of the bosses. 

These negotiations will terminate on January 15, 2025, if an agreement is not met between the negotiators before then. The cautious rise in wages for Longshoremen (as the distribution economy reaches peak season) is a tremendous victory in itself for organized labor in this country, but already the representatives of the bourgeoisie are weaponizing this recent skirmish in the class war to their own ends. The Biden administration has touted itself as the most “pro-Union” administration since FDR, and while there is some truth to that, it only speaks to the depressing dearth of protections for the working class, and the cunning opportunism of the American bourgeoisie. Since 2020, unionized labor has reached heights of membership and activity not seen since the Great Depression, and even incredibly compact and unsteady industries in customer service, such as Starbucks, have unionized to great success these last four years. 

Why then does the Biden administration “champion” the PRO Act (H.R.20, Protecting the Right to Organize)? Why have they issued so many federal contracts to union positions? Why have they cut down on the theft of overtime pay? The reformist faction of the bourgeoisie see which way the wind is blowing: they know their ability to leech off of the passive support of the masses will wane if they don’t contribute even the most meager of gestures and incremental changes. Let us not forget that the mask was removed in 2022 when Biden signed legislation into law prohibiting the railway workers from going on strike. 

It is in this vein of scrambling on the floor for his mask that Biden declared his support for the ILA in late September and that he was not going to evoke Taft-Hartley (union busting bill mandating that workers continue to work while negotiations drag on between the union and the company), and that the USMX must come to the table and listen to the ILA’s demands. Conveniently, this political deception was thrown down only 30 days or so before the Presidential Election of 2024. Watch how the Biden administration responds to the ongoing negotiations after the election is over — that will be the real test.

On the other side of the tracks, as it were, the Republicans also made a big noise regarding the ILA strike, especially via the nationalist view of our economy “not depending so much on foreign nations for our necessities.” This hew of “America First!” has a comforting melody to the workers dispossessed of their careers by NAFTA, CAFTA, and PNTR (permanent normal trade relations) with China. The Republicans, however, cannot cling even to this more alluring masquerade. Union-busting Donald Trump signed the largest free trade agreement in the world outside of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. 

Of course it’s nothing earth-shattering to point out the lies of the ruling class in their various tones, but the important thing is that we are not deceived, that the working class takes what really must be learned from this recent strike to heart. A cursory view of the strike lasting only two days will be somewhat demoralizing. The “support” of the Democrats — the mercy of the butcher not dropping the cleaver on its product — will be comforting, but we must look at the bigger picture. No one could know the full scope and depth of the impact of Hurricane Helene, which was a central part of the arguments from economists and politicians, urging Biden to initiate Taft-Hartley on the one hand, and for the ILA to call off the strike on the other, so that supply disruptions did not cut off aid to the beleaguered areas in the storm’s path. Undoubtedly this, along with the threat to rising inflation, would have been important in convincing both the ILA and USMX negotiators to accept a piecemeal agreement while negotiations continue, aided not least of all by the political ramifications of this election season, and the workers and union representatives not desiring their natural and just struggle for subsistence to be weaponized by one party or another.

From where we stand, we cannot ever buy into the clumsy flirtations of either the Democrats or the Republicans. We cannot turn away from their records which always demonstrate their true class interests, and we must keep all eyes on the USMX in the course of these negotiations into their conclusion and beyond. We cannot permit fear mongering and the patronizing shaming of workers who “harm” the economy while the workers, the principal figures holding up the daily economy, are fighting for their very survival. That the ILA called off the strike is indicative of their solidarity with the communities suffering under natural disasters, and that this strike occurred at all in such a precipitous time is tremendously important for the strength, independence, and courage of the organized proletariat in the United States.

This is not to say that all of the actions taken by the ILA have been laudable. While it is significant that it initiated the largest strike since the 1990s, if there is any influence of the concerns for inflation and the outcome of the election going against the Democrats, the working class will have to reckon with ideological dependence on the bourgeois parties and state. Even more insidious is the clause to continue shipping arms contracted through the USMX (see Biden’s contracting of unionized jobs) to go to Israel. This stands in stark contrast to the strikes undertaken by workers at Baltimore Port, for instance, in refusing to load ships bound for Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. To raise this issue is not some herculean task — the West Coast dockworkers union, the ILWU, has in many instances voiced the demand to stop the supply of the Israeli murder factory even as recently as May.

For Marxist-Leninists, for revolutionaries, for progressives, we recognize the ongoing labor struggle for its subjective importance: developing the consciousness, association, and determination of workers in the heart of the empire. But as Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers,” and as Lenin argued time and again for the elevation of existing economic struggles to political and revolutionary struggles on the basis of contacts and participation from the most advanced strata of the proletariat, the American Party of Labor identifies this growing labor movement in general as both progress in the association of workers and as a challenge to revolutionaries: to make these connections, to make these exposures of the bourgeoisie, and to turn the workers’ economic movement into an independent revolutionary struggle on the basis of our combined experience, education, and determination for our social emancipation. The compromised decision to fuel Israel’s genocide on the Palestinian nation shows ever more clearly the importance of advanced workers and students going amongst and fighting alongside the proletariat overall, for the final victory in the class struggle, electoral circuses, imperialist lies, and economic fallacies be damned. 

Categories: Labor, U.S. News