Dockworkers Strike Threatens to Close East Coast Ports

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The New York Times
Thursday, December 27, 2012

Dockworkers Strike Threatens to Close East Coast Ports

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Anyone who has seen “On the Waterfront” knows East Coast longshoremen can be a tough bunch.

The dockworkers are flexing their muscles again, threatening a strike beginning Sunday that would shut seaports from Massachusetts to Texas. It would be the first such coastwide strike since a two-month walkout in 1977 paralyzed the flow of tens of billions of dollars of imports — and the nation’s retailers and other businesses fear a painful replay if the 14,500 dockworkers make good on their threats.

“Unless something miraculous happens, I think we’re looking at a strike,” said Kevin M. Burke, president of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, which represents an industry that imports $72 billion in dresses, shoes and other goods each year through the East Coast and Gulf Coast ports facing a possible shutdown.

“Our companies are preparing for the worst,” Mr. Burke said, “but hoping for the best.”

The strike threat has so alarmed corporate America that more than 100 business groups wrote to President Obama last week to urge him to intervene to push the two sides to settle — and, if need be, to invoke his emergency powers under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to bar a strike. President George W. Bush invoked the act in 2002 to end a lockout at ports on the West Coast, where a different union represents dockworkers.

Despite their small numbers, the East Coast dockworkers have outsize influence. Many of them, like the crane operators who transfer containers from ships to the docks, are highly skilled and cannot be easily replaced. And because they control the loading and unloading of goods in most of the nation’s ports, a strike could cause extensive economic damage at a time when the economy is already weak.

“They’re in a crucial place in the flow of goods,” said Richard W. Hurd, an industrial relations professor at Cornell University.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey estimates that a strike would cost the region $136 million a week in personal income and $110 million in economic output.

The dockworkers union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, opposes presidential intervention, and labor specialists say Mr. Obama, like previous union-friendly Democrats, may be reluctant to enjoin a strike. On the other hand, the economy already faces a potential blow from tax increases and federal budget cuts scheduled to begin on Jan. 1, and a strike would cause further damage.

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