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Rumble On the Docks: Contract Pits Pinstriped Pinheads Against Roughneck Roustabouts

A Longshoremen's Strike Would Have Big Consequences
By 

Editor, HuffPost New York

FILE - In this Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 file photograph, the port of Newark, N.J., is seen beyond the Bayonne Bridge, in Bayonne, N.J. In the scramble to attract larger cargo ships that will be able to pass through a widened Panama Canal in two years, the ports of New York and New Jersey are hoping to get a leg up on their East Coast competitors by seeking fast-track environmental permitting for a $1 billion project to raise the Bayonne Bridge. The project is seen as crucial to maintaining the ports' position as the busiest on the East Coast. (AP Photo/Mel Evans,file)
FILE - In this Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 file photograph, the port of Newark, N.J., is seen beyond the Bayonne Bridge, in Bayonne, N.J. In the scramble to attract larger cargo ships that will be able to pass through a widened Panama Canal in two years, the ports of New York and New Jersey are hoping to get a leg up on their East Coast competitors by seeking fast-track environmental permitting for a $1 billion project to raise the Bayonne Bridge. The project is seen as crucial to maintaining the ports' position as the busiest on the East Coast. (AP Photo/Mel Evans,file)

Last week, as the Chicago teachers’ strike was puttering out of the news cycle and the National Football League’s lockout of its referees was thundering in, a federal labor mediator announced to little fanfare that the International Longshoremen’s Association and U.S. Maritime Alliance had agreed, “for the good of the country,” to extend the master contract governing dock work from Maine to Texas for 90 days.

The media barely covered the news, but the implications were enormous. If the two sides had failed to reach a deal before the existing contract expired on Sept. 30, the resulting chaos would have touched not only the 20,000-some longshoremen who punch a clock on the East Coast, but thousands of truckers and railroad men, mechanics and warehouse workers, and the many millions of Americans who buy and sell automobiles, home electronics, designer jeans, toothpaste and anything else that’s manufactured on foreign shores. Pretty much everyone.

Three months from now, it could still happen.

Read more on The Observer

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