Tens of thousands of longshoremen working at the ports on the East Coast returned to work on Friday after they reached a tentative agreement on wages with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX).
The strike has been postponed until Jan. 15, 2025.
That means consumers won’t have to worry about a shortage of goods imported into the country. However, looking ahead, The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the USMX will eventually have to make a more long-term agreement after the holiday season.
Local union dockworkers chanted for a victory after beginning a strike on Tuesday at 12:01 AM that halted Thursday night.
“Y’all made history,” said Warren Smith, President of ILA Local 1408 in Jacksonville.
The tentative agreement includes increased wages and extending the master contract, a contract that impacts longshoremen all along the East Coast.
USMX is a consortium of importers and exporters who use the ports to either bring goods into the country or export them from the country. This is the group that the longshoremen union has been negotiating with. This does not include the ship. The port is not involved in this negotiation.
The impact of the two-and-a-half-day strike was felt with panic buying for everyday products throughout the United States, out of worry, that everyday imported goods would dwindle during the strike.
Now that the strike is over, locally, the dock site where many of the union members work reopened at 1 p.m.
Smith said that everyone went back to work with the same professionalism they’ve always had, but now with better pay and safeguards from automation.
“You know, its one thing to request something, it’s another thing to get it and for the community to stand up behind us in such a powerful way and say ‘Hey, you all deserve it,” Smith said.
Before the strike was postponed, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he was going to activate the State Guard and the National Guard, the Department of Transportation and the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to take certain actions to mitigate potential disruptions caused by ongoing port strikes.
However, maritime attorney Rod Sullivan said the guardsmen and women could do line handling and unload or reload a car carrier but most of the work is specialized.
“There’s no question about the fact that those longshoremen who are involved in offloading and unloaded containers and moving around the port, they do have a very specialized job and not anybody can walk in and do that job and take over for them. It’s just too complicated. It’s too long a learning curve to become proficient,” Sullivan said.
Smith, a longshoreman for over two decades, said he’s grateful for the community seeing their value.
“The most important thing I want to say, I want to really give appreciation to the community. They showed up, they showed out, they got behind us in a real way. Labor unions keep fighting. Keep fighting for your members. Workers united will always win,” said a grateful Smith.
For the next three months, work at the docks will go back to normal but on Jan. 15, 2025, both sides will return to the bargaining table to negotiate all other outstanding issues.