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| Dockworkers on strike from Maine to Texas demand fairness. AP News. |
Oct. 1, 2024: A strike by dockworkers at 36 ports from Maine to Texas, the first since 1977, began walking the picket lines early Tuesday morning, according to AP News. (click here)
From our perspective at Artisan Coffee Imports, the message is clear: this is payback time and the coffee industry should take note. It's a coincidence, but appropriate, that today is International Coffee Day, a day where the industry celebrates the extensive, often unseen collaboration among countless people across the globe, all working together to deliver that perfect cup each day.
Three years ago the shipping lines took advantage of a post-COVID landslide of shipping demand and raised prices to levels that were beyond gauging. (click here) Their profits tripled. They lined their pockets and those of their shareholders. They should not be at all surprised that the dockworkers who made those profits possible were watching while they worked extra-hours, with extra health-care consequences and zero and minimal pay increases or benefits.
From AP News: Shipping companies made billions during the pandemic by charging high prices, he said. “Now we want them to pay back. They’re going to pay back,” Local ILA president Boise Butler said.
Apparently, executives in the big shipping lines and at the ports (who are the employers of the dockworkers) are aghast at the ILA labor union's demands. They've been unable to negotiate a contract and haven't even had formal negotiations since June. The ILA has made demands like:
- a 77% pay raise over the six-year life of the contract.
- a complete ban on automation.
These are just demands in the face of estimates like this one of the profits shipping lines have raked in: in 2021 alone, the maritime shipping industry doubled the profits made in the past two decades. (source)
Making profits is not inherently a bad thing - but what you do with them is. Did the shipping lines work to ensure that dockworkers received compensation, better healthcare, better retirement benefits and did they invest in increased safety on the job? Did they think creatively about funding re-training programs for today's dockworkers so that they would be happy to allow automation? If a worker can see themselves as the one hired to run the machines - on the docks and perhaps elsewhere, it's an easier change. We need leaders who can envision a transition with their profits - a transition that moves workers into new opportunities with jobs outside the shipping industry where they are begging for people who can manage, repair and maintain robots. If you don't remember who is actually doing the work, they will remind you.
I hope the strike will not be long. I hope the executives will realize their distributions to shareholders needed to extend to the workforce and this is the time, since it wasn't done three years ago.
More power to you, ILA. I hope the leaders of global, multi-national coffee roasting companies are taking notes about what happens when we forget on whose backs all those "reported earnings" are built -- or, in the case of coffee -- on whose backs those profits are grown.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice"
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
