View this email in your browser

 

OCTOBER 14, 2021

Meyerson on TAP

Biden Unclogs a Port-Well, Partly

L.A. longshore workers will now work 24/7-but companies'
exploitation of port truckers will still slow things down.

Gridlock 'R' Us. And while President Biden has yet to eliminate the
choke points (Manchin, Sinema) blocking the flow of crucial legislation
on Capitol Hill, he did manage to bull through another choke point
yesterday: the Port of Los Angeles, through which, along with its
adjacent Port of Long Beach, roughly 40 percent of all America's
imports flow. He brokered a deal with Local 13 of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union in which its members agreed to work 24/7
to clear up the backlog of the many thousands of containers now sitting
at the port.

Just goes to show that it's easier to reach a deal with one of
America's leftmost unions than it is with a couple of nominally
Democratic and deeply narcissistic senators.

But the longshore workers are just one small link in the global supply
chain. A particular choke point at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach is
the truckers. It was relatively easy to strike a deal with the longshore
workers because they belong to a small-d democratic union that has
massive credibility with its members, for whom it regularly negotiates
the best contracts in blue-collar America. Thanks to the far-sightedness
of its long-ago, legendary president, Communist fellow traveler Harry
Bridges, who agreed to the switch from unloading individual products to
unloading massive containers so long as his members pocketed the gains
in productivity, ILWU members routinely make more than $100,000 a year,
and a good deal more with the overtime that they'll now be putting in
for.

But no such deal can be reached with the truckers, because their
employers-trucking and logistics companies-insist they're not
their employees but, rather, independent contractors, and thus unable to
form a union. As such, the truckers are both too many (they sit in long
lines waiting to pick up and drop off the containers) and too few (with
low pay and no benefits, there are not enough of them to cope with the
regular number, much less the backlog, of containers).

On Monday, two days before Biden reached his deal with the longshore
workers, a federal judge ruled that one L.A. port logistics company, XPO
Logistics, had violated the law by paying 784 drivers who'd brought a
class action suit against the company less than the minimum wage and
refusing to cover their trucking expenses-both the result of XPO's
insistence that those drivers were independent contractors rather than
its employees. The judge directed XPO to pay those drivers $30 million.
(For aficionados of labor law inside ball, the ruling confirmed their
belief that the workers' attorney, Julie Gutman Dickinson-who when
working for the NLRB had once persuaded a court to order a company that
had decamped to Mexico to return to the U.S. or face ruinous
penalties-may well be the best worker-side litigator in the land.)

At a time when workers are fleeing crummy jobs in record numbers (4.3
million quit in August, an all-time record), it's clear that one link
that's missing from our now slo-mo supply chain is the presence of
industries in which employment is sufficiently attractive that it's
fully up and running. Ending worker misclassification would help remedy
that, though measures more drastic may be required to deal with the
choke point of Manchin and Sinema.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

[link removed]

U.S. Snubs Biodiversity Summit

The U.S. refuses to join the global conference in China on biodiversity
due to decades of pharma lobbying. Yet habitat destruction could fuel
future pandemics. BY LEE HARRIS

The Dwindling Choices on Build Back Better

Democrats can cut programs, tighten expiration dates, or count tax cuts
and spending separately. But so far they're just posturing and
fighting. BY DAVID DAYEN

No Christmas Turkeys for Britain

How Boris Johnson's U.K. is crippled by aftereffects of Brexit BY
DENIS MacSHANE

⏩ Harold Meyerson on the Half-Full, Half-Empty State of American Labor

Our Editor-At-Large on the return of the strike and prevalence of
workers quitting their jobs. BY PROSPECT STAFF

To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to
subscribe. 

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM


The American Prospect
IDEAS, POLITICS & POWER
The American Prospect, Inc.
1225 I Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC xxxxxx
United States
Copyright (C) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.

To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here
.

To manage your newsletter preferences, click here
.

To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters,
click here .
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States