President Joe Biden might have to make another difficult decision about intervening in a labor dispute, at the risk of either alienating his pro-labor base or imperiling the health of the economy.
West Coast ports are facing disruptions and delays as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union remain without a contract in negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association. The standoff involves some 22,000 dockworkers. Negotiations have now been going on for over a year, but if the situation deteriorates, it could cause major harm to the country’s supply chains.
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Now Biden is starting to be pushed by outside groups to act amid the labor disruptions — putting the man who has described himself as the most pro-union president in history in between a rock and a hard place.
“He’s getting a lot of pressure from business groups to get involved,” Dan Bowling, a Duke University School of Law senior lecturing fellow who teaches labor and employment courses, told the Washington Examiner.
Indeed, last week the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s President Suzanne Clark sent Biden a letter imploring him to “intervene immediately” and appoint an independent mediator.
Clark noted that isolated work actions began at ports in California in April, and there are fears that the situation could quickly worsen. The Chamber estimates a widespread West Coast strike could cost the economy up to $1 billion per day.
“Such intermittent actions raise concerns that larger disruptions are imminent,” the letter reads. “These actions follow a familiar pattern of negotiations between the PMA and the ILWU over the last twenty years, supporting the necessity of intervention by the Administration to prevent a larger economic catastrophe.”
If Biden were to intervene in some way, it would harken back to when he was criticized for getting involved with a massive labor dispute involving rail workers. Biden prevented a strike by convening a Presidential Emergency Board under the Railway Labor Act of 1926, and ultimately Congress used its authority to impose an agreement between the two sides. Rail strikes differ from other strikes because labor relations are governed by the Railway Labor Act rather than the National Labor Relations Act.
In this case, Biden is allowed to act under the Taft-Hartley Act, which empowers presidents to intervene in strikes that could create a national emergency. The law allows the federal government, through the president, to call for an 80-day cooling-off period to stop impasses. This can be done without the approval of Congress.
The last time such a move was taken was by President George W. Bush in 2002. He intervened following an 11-day shutdown of more than two dozen West Coast ports, which ended the employers’ lockout of 10,500 longshoremen. In seeking the temporary injunction, Bush said that the functioning ports are “vital to our economy and to our military.”
But for Biden, there isn’t a clear choice for what to do if the situation on the West Coast devolves.
“It’s obvious again, like the railway strike, he’s got bad numbers on the economy as is, and this would definitely hurt the economy if it continues,” Bowling said. “That will be some political damage for the president. And then again, what effect might it have on his labor base?”
Bowling said that some of Biden’s blue-collar and labor supporters have been migrating over to the camp of former President Donald Trump in the past few years. A labor worker who is on the fence will likely be unimpressed by Biden moving to use the federal government to intervene in union negotiations yet again.
“It’s lose-lose. It’s absolutely lose-lose for Biden,” Bowling said.
And Biden got some major flak for his intervention during the rail situation. A group of more than 500 pro-union historians condemned the president for intervening in the rail fight.
The historians told Biden that his move to impose a contract on the rail workers “constitutes a negation of the democratic will of tens of thousands of workers and a subversion of your commitment to a revival of the American union movement.” They noted the commitments that Biden has publicly made to labor.
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Even if the latest battle at the ports is able to be quickly resolved, there may be more union speed bumps down the road.
The current situation could be a preview of another union fight set for later this year. The Teamsters union, which represents some 330,000 UPS members, is holding a vote about whether it will strike. Such a strike would be the biggest single-employer strike in U.S. history and would deal a massive blow to the economy, given the sheer volume of goods shipped each day by UPS. The current contract expires on August 1.
