Cameron Henderson
01 October 2024 11:00am
Harold Daggett isn’t afraid of a fight.
The union leader has twice won cases against the US Justice Department over alleged Mafia ties.
Now he has laid down the gauntlet to Joe Biden, threatening to “cripple” the US economy with strike action, kicking off on Tuesday, that could halt container traffic from Maine to Texas, costing billions of dollars every day.
The US East and Gulf Coast port workers walk out, from 12.01AM ET on Tuesday, came following a dispute over automation and pay.
Members of the New Jersey-based International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) union, which represents 47,000 port workers, had said they would down tools if an agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance employer group could not be reached.
The walkout will be the first coast-wide ILA strike since 1977, affecting ports that handle about half of the nation’s ocean shipping.
The dockworkers’ strike is already raising fears of shortages and delays for a wide range of goods, from cars and bananas to Christmas decorations, which in turn could trigger price spikes.
With fewer than 40 days to go in one of the tightest presidential races in history, the economic impact may yet play a decisive role in the minds of voters, for whom the economy is the number one issue, as they go to the polls.
“These people today don’t know what a strike is,” a fiery Mr Daggett, the union’s president, said in a recent video post. “I’ll cripple you. I will cripple you.”
For months, Mr Daggett, 78, has threatened to shut down the 36 ports covered by his union if employers such as container ship operator Maersk and its APM Terminals North America do not deliver significant wage increases and stop terminal automation projects.
The US Chamber of Commerce had urged Mr Biden to use his authority to push back the walkout for 80 days saying it “would be unconscionable to allow a contract dispute to inflict such a shock to our economy”.
However, the president said on Sunday he did not plan to intervene.
Mr Daggett is pushing for wage increases of more than 60 per cent.
“These companies are making billions of dollars,” he said in a recent interview. “They should take us along. We brought them to where they are.”
‘Machines don’t have families’
He has railed against robots taking jobs away from dock workers, specifically automated cranes and technology used to check trucks in and out of ports.
“Someone has to get into Congress and say, ‘Whoa, timeout, this world is going too fast for us, machines got to stop,” he said.
“Who’s going to support [workers’] families? Machines? Machines don’t have families.”
In separate talks with the United States Maritime Alliance, he said: “We will never allow automation to come into our union and try to put us out of work as long as I’m alive.”
Mr Daggett has labelled the wage increases offered by the Maritime Alliance “insulting”.
Under the current contract, which expired on Monday, longshoremen earn up to $39 an hour, but the ILA is pushing for that to rise to $69 an hour over the next six years.
The average hourly wage in the US is $28.34, according to an analysis of numbers from the Bureau of Labour Statistics by Forbes. The average annual salary is $59,428.
Including overtime, longshoremen can earn more than $200,000, but the dock workers say they have to put in long working weeks to make that much money.
Blue collar credentials
Mr Daggett is a figure whose long union career has been shrouded in controversy. A third generation ILA member, the longshoreman has worked for the union for 57 years, becoming the international president in July 2011.
Despite his eminent blue collar credentials, the union baron earned $728,000 last year from the ILA, plus another $173,000 as president emeritus of a local union branch, Politico reported.
He previously owned a 76-foot yacht, the Obsession, and has been spotted by his members riding in a Bentley, according to The New York Times.
The Justice Department, which has reportedly lost two cases against Mr Daggett, has accused him of being an “associate” of the Genovese crime family — one of the infamous “Five Families” of the US Mafia.
Charged with racketeering in 2005, Mr Daggett, took the witness stand and portrayed himself as a mob target, despite evidence against him from a turncoat Mafia enforcer saying he was under the mob’s control, the New York Times reported.
During that trial, one of Mr Daggett’s co-defendants, a renowned mobster named Lawrence Ricci, disappeared. His decomposing body was found in the trunk of a car outside a New Jersey diner several weeks later, with the killing still unsolved.
Despite his union serving as a historic symbol of the grip of organised crime on union members, as depicted in the 1954 film “On the Waterfront”, Mr Daggett was acquitted in both cases.
The union leader has previously criticised the Waterfront Commission, set up to combat Mafia control of the port, calling the allegations of mob influence “total bulls—”, and a “dark, ugly attack on Italian Americans”.
“It’s a damn tragedy for the Waterfront Commission to enjoy free rein and target Italian Americans as part of their historic anti-worker campaign. Let’s be real here. The Waterfront Commission has, for decades, claimed good jobs went to only those with so-called ‘mob ties,’” he said in 2022.
Grinding to a halt
What impact America’s east coast ports grinding to a halt could have on voters remains to be seen.
However, the strike poses a challenge for Democratic candidate Ms Harris, who has so far maintained a tricky balance between adopting a pro-union posture and promoting a business-friendly economic agenda.
The vice president has been endorsed by most major private sector unions but has faced opposition among some rank-and-file members. The Teamsters union, the fifth largest in the US, chose not to endorse either Ms Harris or Mr Trump.
During her presidential campaign, Ms Harris has sought to further bolster her appeal among working class voters in the Rust Belt, recently telling the Economic Club of Pittsburgh that she has “always been and always will be a strong supporter of workers and unions”.
Meanwhile, the strike presents a golden opportunity for Trump, who will be hoping for a repeat of 2016 when he was able to win over working class voters in key battleground states.
The walkout could enable the former president to hammer home his message that the Biden-era has saddled consumers with high prices and supply-chain misery.
Summing up the line the Republican candidate will take, Jonathan Berry, a former top Labor Department official under Trump who is now managing partner at the law firm Boyden Gray, told Politico that an ILA strike “will give voters, particularly union voters, yet another reason to want a historically successful dealmaker back in the White House” .
The post Harold Daggett: How union leader who fought mob tie allegations is holding the US economy to ransom appeared first on The Telegraph.
