Beware the Ides of January

President Trump’s first crisis will loom before Inauguration Day.

[N.B.: The title of this post is blogger’s license. The event against which the warning is directed is slated for January 15th, and the Ides of January fall on the thirteenth.¹ Had the fatal session of the Roman Senate been scheduled for January 15, 710 AUC (ab urbe condita), the soothsayer Casca would have whispered, “Caesar, beware the 18th day before the Kalends of February”, which Plutarch might not have bothered to record.]

Remember the longshoremen’s strike on the East Coast that “ended” on October 4th, when the International Longshoremen’s Association agreed “to take a measly 62 percent raise and not spoil the election for Democrats”? The country was thus spared a work stoppage that would not only have stolen Christmas more conclusively than an army of grinches but would also have impaired recovery from Hurricanes Hélène and Milton.

Unhappily, the respite came with an expiration date. The ILA and the employers’ bargaining agent, the United States Maritime Alliance, agreed on wages and employee benefits. Left for future negotiation was the most intractable issue, the ILA’s demand that the East Coasts’s already obsolescent port infrastructure be frozen in place, with no further automation during the six-year term of the next collective bargaining agreement. The shipping companies want no more stringent restrictions than are currently in effect. The deadline for resolving the dispute is January 15th, after which the ILA is free to walk off the job again.

The least likely outcome of the negotiations is agreement by the ILA to increased automation. The union’s president talks like a caricature of a true Luddite nostalgic for the Neolithic Era:

International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) President Harold Daggett warned in a recent interview that machines are taking too many people's jobs, and pointed to automated toll booths and self-checkout machines as examples.

In an interview posted on ILA's YouTube channel a month ago, Daggett said he has been fighting automation for years because machines replace workers.

“Take EZPass,” Daggett said, referring to the electronic toll system that allows drivers the ability to pay tolls without stopping their vehicles to pay. “The first time they come out with EZPass, one lane of cars were going through, and everybody’s sitting in their car and go, ‘What? What’s that all about? I’m gonna get one of them.’”

“Today, all those union jobs are gone, and it’s all EZPass,” the ILA president continued. “People don’t realize it. Everybody’s got three cars. Everybody got an easy pass on the window, and they go through like it’s nothing, and they get billed in the mail. They didn’t care about that union worker working in the booth.”

Daggett then railed against self-checkout machines, and suggested federal lawmakers need to take action to stop the trend of automated technologies.

“You go in a store today, it’s self-checking – they don’t need anybody to check out,” Daggett said. “Someone has to get into Congress and say, ‘Whoa. Time out. This world is going too fast for us. Machines got to stop.’”

Mr. Daggett’s salary is reportedly $900,000 a year. (His sons also draw salaries from the union.) Perhaps he can afford to purchase only clothing whose fabric has been spun by hand. Certainly his expressed principles demand no less.

The backwardness of U.S. ports is astonishing. At Reason, Eric Boehm summarizes facts that would embarrass most Third World countries:

But whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston – three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike – are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank’s most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which “reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction” the World Bank notes. [emphasis added; links omitted]

In the World Bank report, Baltimore ranks 300th, New York 306th and Houston 335th. New York and Houston are among the ten busiest U.S. container ports. The others in that group are Los Angeles (ranked 336th in efficiency), Long Beach (346th), Savannah (348th, dead last), Seattle (279th), Charleston (340th), Oakland (343rd), Hampton Roads (Port of Virginia) (52nd) and Miami (217th).

If the shippers don’t give in and sentence our country’s ports to another six years of less-than-Third-World quality, we can expect a renewal of the ILA strike at midnight January 15th. We can be sure that the remnant of Joe Biden will have neither the time nor the will to do anything about it.

Five days later, President Trump will take office, equipped with authority under the Taft-Hartley Act to halt strikes that “imperil the national health or safety”. That authority is not, however, the power to declare a state of emergency and suspend due process of law. Exercising it is a fairly arduous process leading to a forced return of the parties to the bargaining table under the auspices of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. If the workers are recalcitrant, they cannot be conscripted into forced labor. The employers can only submit their “best and final offer” to a vote by the union members. If they accept it, they go back to work. If they don’t, the President is supposed to recommend Congressional action. If matters reach that stage, the sequel is impossible to predict, except that the resolution of the dispute won’t be quick, and the cost won’t be trivial.

So the new President will have a crisis on his hands the moment that he lowers his right arm and takes his left hand off the Bible. It would be nice if he had a Secretary of Labor with experience in labor-management negotiations. Instead, he will start with a locum tenens, most likely inherited from the Biden Administration. His nominee for Secretary, outgoing one-term Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R–Ore.), will be hard to confirm quickly. She has drawn objections from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and plenty of other conservative movers and shakers. The confirmation wheels will grind slowly, if they grind at all.

Those opponents cite the nominee’s endorsement of legislation that would ban right to work laws and give state employees an unfettered right to unionize, but if she were the favorite congresscritter of the National Right to Work Committee, she wouldn’t be an ideal, or even a so-so, choice to deal with a crippling strike. Her labor relations background consists of two years as a very junior member of the House Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee, one of seven subcommittees on which she serves and one whose remit is, as the name suggests, incredibly broad.

Nor did she acquire labor expertise in her pre-Congressional career. Here is her own account of her experience:

Prior to serving in Congress, Lori started her public service career in 2002 on the Happy Valley Parks Committee, where she helped build the Happy Valley 4th of July Festival that it is today. Later, she won a seat on the Happy Valley City Council and became city council president. She was elected mayor in 2010, becoming Happy Valley’s first female and Latina mayor. She was re-elected in 2014. In 2022, she was elected the U.S. House of Representatives to represent Oregon’s 5th Congressional District. She is one of the first Latinas and is the first Republican woman elected to Congress from the state of Oregon.

Lori is a mom and small businesswoman. She is married to her high school sweetheart, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, and supported the couple as he finished medical school. Later they founded an anesthesia management company and opened several other medical clinics in the Pacific Northwest.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it doesn’t look like preparation for staring down Harold Daggett.

Perhaps Donald Trump could handle an ILA strike personally – he has certainly dealt with labor unions before – if the world were otherwise peaceful and serene, if there were no wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, no threat to the Red Sea shipping lanes, no influx of illegal aliens across our borders, no saber rattling by Xi Dynasty China. . . . Unfortunately, the President-Elect has opted to leave his new Administration exposed to the possibility of a staggering defeat in its opening months.

Maybe he – and we – will be lucky. The Donald’s political good fortune is becoming a legend. But, as the saying goes, that’s not the way to bet.

1. “In March, July, October, May/ the Ides fall on the fifteenth day” but on the 13th in other months.