Ultrabulk trans-oceanic cargo ship on the Columbia River at Astoria. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

So the dockworkers’ strike is off for now, with a promise that it could resume in January. Did union bureaucrats accept a 62 percent pay hike in return for ending their three-day, early October walkout as part of a deal to help the Harris presidential campaign? If so, you can hardly be surprised. They endorsed her, and most of labor, with the notable exception of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, regards a possible Trump presidency with the alarm reserved for earthquakes or tornados.

Unions may or may not be correct, because Trump has proposed many pro-worker policies, but it’s easy to understand their apprehension. The GOP is no friend of labor, and Trump is their candidate, no matter how out of the Republican mainstream he is, so any GOP candidacy represents the aristocracy, and many in labor regard Trump’s generous proposals like no tax on tips and ending Reagan’s tax on social security as noblesse oblige. This may be correct. After all, we live in one of history’s worst periods of extreme class calcification and class war by the rich on the rest of us, and only a fool would trust ANY presidential candidate to change that.

The 45,000 striking dockworkers got a deal to suspend their strike until January 15, during which time they’d negotiate a contract. So East Coast and Gulf ports hurried to reopen. The union, the International Longshoreman’s Association and the boss, “the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents ports and shipping companies, reached a tentative agreement on wages,” announced AP October 4. But many dockworkers were disgusted, according to the World Socialist Web Site October 11, which quoted one dockworker: “There is no contract… and we don’t get anything until a contract is signed.” Another said, “We have nothing.” Another told WSWS, “It is an ‘election’ contract being pushed because the ILA leaders don’t want to embarrass Biden and Harris during an election or disrupt the transport of materials to the war.” This dockworker added that the contract “is like the election [itself] because nothing will improve much for us after we have it. The union is not telling us anything.” Meanwhile the 62 percent pay hike leaves untouched the matter of automation “at 36 ports stretching from Maine to Texas,” reports AP. So what about that? Well, WSWS argues that this suspended strike virtually guarantees that automation will occur, and not in a manner beneficial to workers.

The ILA demanded “a total ban on the automation of gates, cranes and container-moving trucks in its ports,” AP reported October 2. This issue is bound to rear its ugly head again in January, so don’t be surprised if dockworkers walk out and shut down coastal shipping then, because automation isn’t going away, and neither are the longshoremen. “In 1960, as ports on the West Coast introduced machinery to move cargo once moved by hand…[the great] Harry Bridges, who led the union at the time, negotiated pay increases and job security arrangements for some of the workers,” wrote AP. But because the ILA wasn’t tougher about automation, “the downside was that as port machinery became more common, the size of the union eroded precipitously over the years.” Dockyards in Rotterdam, Dubai and Singapore are more automated than thus more efficient, AP claims, while “Mexico is building a highly automated port that could compete with U.S. ports.”

So it’s a supposedly ancient conundrum: How to save union jobs without allegedly becoming non-competitive. AP quotes MIT’s Yossi Sheffi on automation being inevitable. In that case, unions that get retraining and tuition reimbursement for their workers come out ahead. “In its current contract, the ILA has a provision that requires the union’s agreement if the ports add any automation, essentially giving the ILA veto power. But ILA President Harld Daggett has said the union wants a stronger ban.”

Meanwhile during the recent three-day, mini-walkout, the Chamber of Commerce shrieked for Washington to break the strike by classifying it as a national emergency. Not to be outdone, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal piled on with not-so-subtle union-bashing, as they fretted, according to an MSNBC opinion piece October 5, “that the economic chaos resulting from foreign goods not coming into American ports would cost Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris the election.” The dockworkers’ critics pounced on them supposedly earning good money for blue-collar employees. “Others argued that by blocking automation, the workers were standing in the way of progress.”

In short, the scene was set for massive demonization of the longshoremen if their strike continued. The sole dissenting voice was senator Bernie Sanders. “I congratulate the 50,000 port workers who went on strike against the outrageous corporate greed of the shipping industry and,” Sanders tweeted, “won an historic increase in wages. Billionaires in the shipping industry must not be allowed to get even richer by replacing port workers with robots.”

Predictably, right-wing media portrayed things in garish anti-union colors. “Biden strong-armed the ports into a bad deal that in the long run will push up prices” – the New York Post whined October 6 – “and harm organized labor.” Ho, ho! What will harm organized labor is that outlets like the New York Post will crucify workers if or when longshoremen strike again in January. Such reactionaries won’t be alone. Expect centrist corporate media’s nose to get out of joint over a future dockworkers’ strike, as it generally does over ANY walkout. And Biden is fickle when it comes to strikes. Remember the railway workers? He busted their walkout pronto. But just maybe, on his way out the white house door in mid-January, Biden will leave the dockworkers alone, if they’re walking the picket line then.

And it looks like they will be. The ILA “asserts ‘absolute, air-tight’ anti-automation stance,” blared a Washington Post headline October 7, over an article arguing that the “temporary wage deal…means the focus of talks will shift to concerns about the use of technology.” When that happens, the union will be portrayed in the offensive tints of a bunch of stupid, thoughtless Luddites, as always happens when labor resists decimation by new machines. The Post article’s lead got right to the point: “When Harold Daggett looks at the self-checkout scanners in the grocery store or the E-ZPass automatic toll lane on the highway, he does not see a modern convenience [what convenience? Now customers have to do the work formerly done by employees and scan their bananas and carrots themselves]. He sees a job killer.” That, the Post argues, is because Daggett, like all committed unionists, is an enemy of “the march of progress.”

Well, maybe progress should stop marching. Especially when it throws tons of people out of work, but even more generally, what has so-called progress done for us lately? A forced march to, very possibly, the end of a habitable planet. It’s time to retire this hackneyed, exhausted thinking about progress. Workers are right: slow it down – better yet, as WSWS insists, use automation to benefit workers, not to dispossess them. And indigenous water protectors are right: stop this so-called progress dead in its tracks. Maybe “progress” was fine hundreds of years ago, but more recently it has metastasized malignantly on all living things, including, very notably, people. Maybe if the corporate media and the powerful elites they represent finally acknowledged that mind-numbing cliches about progress are killing us, we’d have a chance to make it out of the fatal trap this progress snared us in. But don’t count on it: our plutocrats and their mouthpieces rarely admit anything that goes against their interests. Even when it’s too late.

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