The incoming Republican president’s rhetoric in defense of the stevedores is all but indistinguishable from Joe Biden’s.
There is an article of faith among Donald Trump’s most vociferous defenders that he fights for the right’s causes and convictions with a vigor that exposes the old-guard GOP’s capitulatory spinelessness. This tenet of the MAGA movement is unfalsifiable insofar as whatever Trump’s priorities are at the moment automatically become the right’s priorities, even if they might have been core Democratic principles only a few minutes earlier. The president-elect’s abject surrender in the face of extortionist tactics from one of the country’s most avaricious labor unions is a case in point:
“I’ve studied automation, and I know just about everything there is to know about it,” Trump said with a confidence matched only by his incuriosity. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American workers, in this case, our Longshoreman.”
The incoming Republican president’s rhetoric in defense of the stevedores is all but indistinguishable from Joe Biden’s. Foreign firms are exploiting American workers and consumers by . . . flooding their ports with affordable consumer goods and basic essentials. International producers and domestic shipping interests are enjoying “record profits,” and should spread the wealth around. International ports that are investing vast sums in automation, increasing their efficiency and attracting more capital as a result, are somehow engaging in self-harm. America will not be competitive unless it abandons competitive practices.
These were the arguments the right, properly understood, rejected in whole and with enthusiasm in October, when the Longshoreman put a gun to the nation’s head to preserve their own impossibly comfortable legacy privileges. “I will cripple you, and you have no idea what that means,” threatened Harold Daggett, the ILA president Trump found so convincing. Unless his union’s demands were met — a 77 percent raise for dock workers over six years and a total ban on the automation of cranes, gates, and container moving trucks — the well-compensated labor organizer would grind America’s economic gears to a halt.
His union briefly made good on its threats when it refused to accept a compromise deal that would grant port workers a mere 50 percent raise over the same time period. Biden caved. Washington and the ILA settled on a 62 percent wage hike that did not address automation concerns, but the arrangement extended only to January 15 of next year. Trump, it seems, is eager to give this union what it wants lest he find himself in Biden’s unenviable position. Contrary to the mythology around Trump promoted by his fan club, the president-elect seems to have no stomach for this particular fight.
Over the course of the dockworkers’ two-day labor action, NR documented all the myriad ways in which this retrograde union — a nepotist outfit with ties to organized crime that dispenses heritable jobs to the well-connected (when they’re not paying members not to work at all) — stood athwart American economic dynamism in the face of direct foreign competition. “China, the Netherlands, and Singapore are outpacing us,” Rich Lowry observed. “Rotterdam began automating in the early 1990s. In contrast, we have fully automated only three terminals at our ports, with another three considered semiautomated. We don’t have a port that cracks the World Bank’s list of the top 50 around the globe.” America, it seems, will not be made great if that imperative makes organized labor’s most thuggish operators mad.
In addition to documenting this union’s myriad abuses of its undue dispensations, Dominic Pino submitted a recommendation to Trump should he win the election and be subject to the same extortion racket that broke Biden. “He should take a page out of Reagan’s playbook and prepare to turn on a union he has in the past supported, for the benefit of the American people as a whole,” Pino wrote. “Biden sided with these bullies and prolonged this conflict. Trump can end it by standing up to an arrogant union that he’s previously supported, just as Reagan did.”
It was good advice from someone who knows what fighting for principle looks like. But it seems that Trump didn’t have it in him for that sort of standoff, and Americans who aren’t ensconced in taxpayer-subsidized sinecures will be the ones to suffer.