[Freight Weekly] ILA, USMX will resume contract talks on Jan. 7

🥂Happy New Year!🥂 Boxy and the Freight Weekly team wish you a Happy 2025!

✊🏽Longshoremen union and an alliance of port employers along the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts are scheduled to resume contract negotiations on January 7. A strike deadline is set for January 15 if a contract isn’t reached between the stakeholders:

• Mainstream and B2B news outlets report that the International Longshoremen Alliance (ILA) and the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX) are expected to return to the negotiation table on January 7 — the parties haven’t met since last year.

• This is despite the looming deadline of a longshoremen strike if a deal isn’t reached by January 15. To complicate matters, President-elect Donald Trump endorsed his support for the port workers and the fight against automation.

• Resuming negotiations on Jan. 7 leaves only eight days for stakeholders to reach a mutually acceptable contract agreement with union leaders, especially Harold J. Daggett, the ILA international president and the Donald Trump-backed firebrand.

• “We want to avoid another strike, and hope that our employers represented by United States Maritime Alliance will respect our demands for a fair and decent contract. Automation has remained a key flashpoint between the major union and USMX,” Daggett wrote in a Christmas day letter to the ILA union membership.

• A deal on wages, a 62 percent increase, was agreed upon in September 2024, but no major agreement has been made since due to concerns over port efforts to boost automation and modernization efforts. ILA says they will not budge until USMX agrees not to push automation to the point where it costs union jobs.

• Indication of this was the three-day strike ordered from Oct. 1 to Oct 3, 2024.

• USMX maintains that automation will not harm existing port employment levels. In fact, they believe that the adoption of new technology and processes will help ILA.

• In a December 20 statement, USMX argued, “Evolving port operations and increasing wages and jobs for the ILA are not mutually exclusive. Modern technology is proven to dramatically increase the amount of cargo that can be moved through a port annually. ILA members make more money when they move more cargo, and ports need to hire more workers to manage that growth.”

• Despite the promise to return to the negotiating table from both sides, there is no guarantee that a strike will be averted. That means companies are preparing for contingencies to avoid major disruptions in their supply-value chains and shipping.

Bottom line: January 7 to January 15 will be crucial as the U.S. enters 2025 and prepares for the controversial return of a protectionist, anti-free trade president. The master contract negotiations will be closely watched by our team moving forward.

MORE: “How the Threat of Another Costly U.S. Port Strike Returned in 2025” - Inc.

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