About 45,000 port workers across the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States, including those in Baltimore, Maryland, went on strike on Tuesday as a midnight deadline for a new labor deal over wages and automation passed.
Labor negotiations stalled between the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), leading to the shut-down of up to 36 East and Gulf Coast ports.
The two sides, which had not been in formal negotiations since June, reportedly moved closer on wages on Monday, but apparently no deal had been reached.
The USMX, which represents the ports, said in a statement on Monday evening that it requested an extension of the current contract and increased its offer by raising wages by nearly 50 percent over the life of the contract.
The employer alliance pledged to keep the limits on automation in place from the old contract. But the labor union wants a complete ban on automation, according to an AP report.
A statement from the ILA said earlier on Monday that employers have refused to compensate workers fairly.
"The ILA is fighting for respect, appreciation and fairness in a world in which corporations are dead set on replacing hard-working people with automation," the ILA statement said, "Robots do not pay taxes and they do not spend money in their communities."
Local media reported that the ILA is seeking a 77 percent wage increase over the six-year life of the contract, for the union workers to make up for inflation and years of minimal raises.
The ILA members make a base salary of about 81,000 dollars per year, but some can pull in more than 200,000 dollars a year with large amounts of overtime, said the report.
Local experts estimate that the strike, the first by the ILA since 1977, could cost the U.S. economy up to 5 billion U.S. dollars a day, stirring inflation and supply chain concerns weeks before the presidential election.
There are fears that the strike could cause a shortage of supplies and rising prices of goods.
"I think right away you could start seeing shortages with respect to things like vegetables and fruits and things that are perishable that they've got to get in and out quickly. But the longer it goes on, the worse it could get, and more and more products are going to be affected. So, my hope is we can get it resolved sooner rather than later," said Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland who is now a Republican Senate candidate.
The affected ports handle roughly half the country's cargo ships. According to data from the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports handle more than 68 percent of the country’s container exports and 56 percent of its container imports.
U.S. port workers strike over wages, automation
The ongoing probe revolving around the late U.S. financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has become a powerful symbol of systemic dysfunction in Western political and judicial systems and has significantly eroded public trust, according to analysts.
In the latest episode of the China Global Television Network (CGTN) opinion show 'The Point with Liu Xin' which aired Wednesday, experts debated the ongoing controversies surrounding the latest release of documents in the so-called Epstein files.
The newly-released files totaling some three million pages have sparked serious scrutiny across the Atlantic, prompting the resignation of several political figures over their ties to Epstein, who died under mysterious circumstances in a maximum-security facility in 2019.
Han Hua, the co-founder and secretary general of the Beijing Club for International Dialogue, a Chinese think tank, noted how Epstein, in spite of his conviction, had seemingly built up an expansive network of the rich and powerful, and said the sense of "elite impunity" and the seeming disregard for morality among many of those involved has dealt a huge blow to Western democracy, which is supposedly built upon the basis of the rule of law.
"Right after 2008, Epstein certainly has built an even stronger and much larger Western elite circle including politicians, including academia, including the political and the religious figures like the Dalai Lama. So this actually indicates the 'bankruptcy' of the Western democracy from the moral high ground, from the rule of law. It is systematic damage to the whole system and also to the judicial and legal system. And they are building a circle that can protect Epstein and the elites in this circle from getting [allegations], from getting legally punished, so that the cases [could become] even larger. And there are so many victims, there is no perspective with regard to the victims to be protected," she said.
Josef Mahoney, a professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University, said the ongoing Epstein saga has deeply flamed public distrust, exposing uncomfortable truths about how power operates behind closed doors.
"We've also seen, as has been raised, the question about whether or not the system can be trusted. There's intense distrust now in the system. But at the same time, I think the other point to be raised about moral authority is that what you see are leaders, figures from different fields, from across the political spectrum, essentially working together in a way, so they represent and they stoke divisions in society that exploit and suppress the people. But at the same time we see them, the left wing, the right wing, the center, all sort of having these extreme parties or relationships with each other, which really begs the question of whether or not there's a true democracy to begin with," he said.
Epstein case sows deeper distrust in Western politics, judicial systems: analysts
