An Aborted Strike and Neo-Luddist Navel-Gazing by the ILA International Executive Continue to Demonstrate the Need for Workers to Take Up the Banner of the Class Union

On October 1st, 2024, 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at 36 ports across the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast went on strike after negotiations between the union and the US Maritime Alliance (USMX), the industry association composed of shipping lines, port operators, and other employers in the longshore industry, broke down. This marked the first time since 1977 that the ILA has struck. The ILA demanded substantial increases in compensation, and has consistently opposed automation at the ports where its members work. Contract negotiations were supposed to begin in June. However, the ILA claimed that it had discovered that APM Terminals, and its parent company Maersk, had implemented an automated gate system. This allowed trucks to move containers in and out of the port without ILA clerks or checkers, canceling negotiations. The bourgeois press was keenly interested in this event for a short time, though they quickly lost interest when negotiations resumed following the ILA’s top leadership ending the strike after only three days, quickly settling on monetary demands.

The international proletariat cannot afford to let this event be sent down a memory-hole. The ILA’s members occupy a significant position in the capitalist production process, for reasons that should be clear—its size and geography, that is, the significance of the US to the global economy, the extent of its jurisdiction, and the significance of the ports in question to the United States economy. Its activities must be watched with keen interest in order to assess the state of the class struggle. We must therefore clarify what is at issue, and what is at stake.

Capitalist production exists in a complex web of global commerce; commodities move into and out of the United States at various stages of the production process, much of it moves on ships. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 22 of the 25 top ports by dry bulk tonnage and 21 of the top 25 container ports by twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) fall within the jurisdiction of the ILA. The members of the ILA therefore occupy a critical position in the production process, and for that reason, they wield significant power.

The ILA maintains that it is opposed to automation, which it ostensibly fears will put its members out of work. This is not an unfounded fear; after all, the introduction of ever-greater levels of automation displaces ever-greater numbers of workers. The bourgeoisie are in control of production, giving them the power to determine what technology gets introduced. Moreover, the bourgeoisie are in general compelled by the laws of capitalist production to increase the degree to which machinery is substituted for human labor in the production of commodities. All of this renders union resistance to the introduction of new technology a fool’s errand, if it is not aimed at a proportional and general reduction of labor time while maintaining wage levels.

In June of 2024, the ILA’s officialdom canceled the negotiations scheduled to begin that month with USMX. This was due to the alleged discovery that automation had been introduced in several ports. The ILA maintains that this technology threatens to displace its members and render them unemployed and/or impoverished. The union ultimately struck on October 1^st, but called it off after three days, as we have said, and resumed negotiations. This was in part because it did not have a strike fund! Moreover, the ILA also maintains that it is not opposed to modernization. Yet what is modernization if not the increasing substitution of human labor with machinery, i.e., automation?

The last round of negotiations between the ILA and USMX was in 2018, when they signed a six-year contract extension. The ILA’s officialdom knew that this contract had a definite lifespan. Furthermore, at the time that it was negotiating this contract, technology like what the ILA alleges Maersk—through its port-operator subsidiary APM Terminals—introduced in violation of its contract had already been introduced in many ports around the world. This included the US ports where the ILA had jurisdiction!

In our leaflet The Need for an International Organisation of Port Workers (The Communist Party No. 6, June 2017), we highlighted struggles by the ILA against automation. Are we to believe that Harold Daggett, then and now the International President of the ILA, so quickly forgot about this issue, only to remember it six years later? No, this clearly points to a more serious problem with the ILA, with the AFL–CIO, and with unions across the globe. These organs of proletarian struggle have been perverted. They were formed to defend the immediate economic interests of the class against the intensification of capitalist exploitation, to ensure that the proletariat has the means not only to survive, but to fulfill its revolutionary destiny. Now, they stymie that struggle.

Apart from wages, which by all reports has been settled, what is ostensibly at issue in the conflict between the ILA and USMX is the introduction of automated gates at several ports subject to the ILA’s contract with USMX. There are a number of actions that must be performed in order for cargo to move through a port. When a truck arrives at the port, it must pass through the terminal gate before it can unload its cargo. In order to be admitted into the terminal, the identity of the driver and the firm employing them must be verified, as must the identity of the cargo that truck is delivering to or receiving from the port. In addition, if the truck is carrying cargo to be shipped, the owner of the cargo must have a valid contract with a shipper to accept the goods and place them on a ship. The compliance of the container and its cargo with relevant laws, as well as the completion of any relevant financial transactions, must also be verified. If the truck is departing the terminal with foreign cargo, that cargo must have cleared customs. This process is currently done by human clerks, who are ILA members, and the introduction of automation technology threatens their jobs.

Shipping is a business. The container shipping lines do not move containers out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather in order to make a profit. Thus, before they will accept a load of cargo, they must be sure that the load has a place to go and know when it needs to be there and that the intended recipient is willing and able to receive the cargo when it gets there. A container ship makes money by selling space on its deck, and cargo that isn’t going anywhere or can’t be unloaded reduces the space it has available to sell. The terminal operators are also in the business of making money. Therefore, they will not allow a load whose departure is not assured to enter.

Is the ship delayed? Is it due for departure before the cargo can be processed and loaded?  While there are warehouses at the ports, they have a finite amount of space and are often already full. Thus, there is also the question of whether there’s room for the container. If the cargo can’t be accepted for any reason, it will have to be taken to an inland warehouse. As the cargo has already been sold to a customer, who is expecting delivery by a date and time certain (as modern, just-in-time production methods make scheduling cargo shipments extremely inflexible) the cargo’s owner is now losing money. The owner must now pay twice for the cargo to be delivered, and their contract with their customer will contain penalties for late delivery.

The cargo owner must now negotiate for another truck to get it and bring it to the port, which may take days or weeks, and for another shipping contract to get it loaded onto another ship. As the availability of truck and ship must coincide, the fact that that the law limits the total number of hours a driver is permitted to be on the road in a given time period, as well as the number of consecutive hours they is permitted to drive before being required to stop and rest, becomes a significant complicating factor. This law is increasingly enforced by means of computerized logging devices, which increases the likelihood that a driver who violates the law will be caught and fined. It also increases the chance that the driver’s employer will be fined. Even when the driver is nominally freelance, the capitalists that require the truck driver’s services are unlikely to contract with him directly. Instead, they prefer to deal with other capitalists who provide them with the services of such “independent” “owner-operators”. The driver is therefore strongly disincentivized to exceed these limits, as they will not only be punished by the state, but their employer will also punish him. Of course, they will also be punished if they fail to violate this law at their employer’s insistence, which creates a perverse incentive.

In the case of unloading a ship, the truck enters the port empty, but the driver must still know what he’s expected to pick up, and similar challenges arise. Is the ship in port? Is the cargo unloaded? If not, how long will it take before it is? Where is the driver taking it? How long have they been on the road? When moving cargo, you are, in effect, solving a large series of equations, these questions are the variables in those questions, and it is precisely in solving these equations that the art of logistics consists.

The electronic computer is, if nothing else, a magnificent calculating machine, capable of processing large amounts of data quickly. It was invented precisely to solve such complicated problems, and the algorithms employed by the programs that it runs have undergone many decades of testing and refinement. In order to ensure that the programs are able to fulfill their purpose, the users must be able to rely upon the accuracy and timeliness of the data they need. 

Where it’s feasible to introduce such a system, its introduction is guaranteed. As Marx explained “[f]ree competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.” This is why we have seen the introduction of these technologies elsewhere, such as the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of New York. 

It strains credulity to claim that Daggett and the rest of the ILA’s international executive are unaware of this. The obvious conclusion is that the whole thing is a charade. They cannot permit the ILA rank-and-file to wield a real weapon—indefinite strikes terrorizing the profit-hungry capitalists that run the port—with which to defend themselves. 

But even if one can fool some people all the time, and all the people some of the time, one cannot fool all the people all the time. There must be many within the ILA who see through the charade and recognize the true game: the ILA’s international executive conceives of itself as being at the head of a power bloc within bourgeois society, and is playing the game of bourgeois politics. Instead, the view must turn 180 degrees, to that of united, non-compromising class struggle. With the leadership of its class political party, armed with its scientific program of communist revolution, the proletariat can re-conquer the trade union movement and revitalize its organs of economic struggle. Under the banner of a united class union front, with the International Communist Party at its head, the miserable conditions of modern life can and will be abolished!