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Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian today. Coming up in today's show, we'll talk about the challenges immigrants often run into transferring their professional certifications from abroad. Think of people who have trained as nurses, doctors, or lawyers in their home countries and then want to find work in their field when they come here. It's not always easy. We'll want to hear your thoughts and experiences in that arena.

Plus, data show that young adult men are having a hard time launching into adulthood more living at home with their parents and not working or underachieving, shall we say, than young women in their 20s and early 30s. We'll talk about why and hear your stories. Almost a week after Hurricane Helene tore a path through Florida and up through Georgia and western North Carolina, it's becoming apparent that this was almost a Katrina-level storm in terms of the damage it's caused.

We'll share some resources for people who want to help folks in that area who were so hard hit by Hurricane Helene and will be picking up the pieces and rebuilding probably for years to come, but first--

Crowd: No contract, no work. No contract, no work. No contract, no work.

Brigid Bergin: No contract, no work. That's the sound of dock workers at the Port of New York and New Jersey this week. It's day three of a strike of thousands of dock workers at ports on the East and Gulf coasts. Those workers are members of the International Longshoremen's Association. It's the first major strike by those workers since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. Union officials are demanding wage increases, pointing to billions in profits made by shipping carriers even as their wages have remained stagnant. Of course, this strike comes at an especially potent time.

The nation is cleaning up after the devastation of that major storm I just mentioned. Gasoline and other supplies are in short supply, we're just weeks before the presidential election, and right around the corner, it will be holiday shopping season again, when supply chain and inflation issues may be acutely felt by consumers. Joining me now to talk about what's happening and how we got to this point is Peter S. Goodman, a reporter who covers the global economy for the New York Times and author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain. Peter, welcome to WNYC.

Peter S. Goodman: Thanks so much for having me, Bridgid

Brigid Bergin: Peter, let's just start with the basics. Could you tell us a little bit more about the players involved in the strike? I mentioned the union, but how many union workers are we really talking about? How many ports are we talking about here, and who are they negotiating with?

Peter S. Goodman: So we're talking about roughly 45,000 workers at something like 14 major ports and three dozen shipping terminals at those ports on the East Coast and on the Gulf Coast. We're talking about some of the largest ports in the country that collectively are the gateway for more than half of the imported products reaching the United States. This is Newark, Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, Houston, Mobile, Alabama. We're talking about the people who load and unload shipping containers.

This is the primary way that lots of key cargo makes its way around the world. Not just finished products, but parts and components used by factories that employ American workers. We're talking about farming interests in the Midwest who use container ships to ship out things like soybeans. All of this cargo is basically at a standstill. The union is negotiating with the owners, or rather the operators of the ports, who tend to be international shipping companies. These are all foreign companies. They're organized in an alliance of three. There are three alliances.

Think like airline alliances, like your Atar Alliance or your One World or what have you. There are three of them that control upwards of 85%, 90% of the most lucrative routes in the world. That's from China to the West Coast to the US. That's from Asia to Europe and onto the East Coast of the US. The union argues they're effectively monopolies. They've been reaping enormous gains, to your point, record profits, and they want a greater piece of the action.

Brigid Bergin: What do these doc workers typically make, and what kind of wage increases are they asking for?

Peter S. Goodman: They make a fair bit of money. A lot of these people make upwards of $200,000 a year after factoring in overtime. These are some of the better-employed people in the blue-collar world. It's a testament, many experts would argue, to the value of having a union. They've been militant over decades. They control a really critical choke point in the global economy, and they expect to be paid for it, and they've organized effectively to get it. They also note, again that they're talking about record profits having worked through COVID when they were deemed essential workers. They're looking for raises.

Initially, they were looking for north of 70% over six years. They've revised that down to about 61% over six years. Reportedly, the port overseers have upped their offer from something in the 30% range, which was deemed totally unacceptable, now up to about 50%. The key sticky point is over-automation. The port workers want assurances that ports will not add automation. They see that as a way to undercut their bargaining position and to replace them with robots who don't go on strike and don't call in sick and keep working no matter what.

Brigid Bergin: I want to get to more of the automation piece of this in just a moment, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the work that these workers are doing. You talked about unloading these cargo ships, but these are jobs that are at all times of day, 365 days of the year. What is the labor and health risks that the union at least is arguing might justify what you have laid out are not insubstantial wages?

Peter S. Goodman: These are tough jobs. These are jobs that involve getting up very early, sometimes working, as you note, all through the night. They are at the beck and call of the container shipping industry, which operates at all times of day and every day of the year. There is the risk of getting crushed by a falling container. All these doc workers can tell you about people they've worked with over the years who've been killed or who've lost limbs. It's tough, dangerous, physically challenging work.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we want your help to report this story. If you're a worker on strike, we want to hear from you. What are the conditions that you're dealing with at the ports? How are you feeling in this moment? What do you want people to understand about why the strike is going on and what it means to you? Give us a call. Tell us your story. The number is 212-433-9692 that's 212-433 WNYC. You can call or text at that number. Or maybe you're feeling the impact of the strike in a different way. Are you a truck driver who transports goods from a port or maybe a small business owner feeling that supply chain impact or maybe bracing for it?

Give us a call. Tell us your story. Again, the number 212-433 WNYC. That's 212-433-9692 again, calls or texts, we love them both. Peter, you started to tease out this point how the work at these ports has certainly evolved in recent decades. You point back to a date in one of your recent articles of April 1956, when the industry made a pretty dramatic shift. Talk a little bit about what happened then and how the work was done before and after that date.

Peter S. Goodman: I appreciate it because it's really important. The dock workers are not wrong to look at automation as a threat to their livelihoods. It's not clear that automation has to lead to job losses because it can free people up to do other things, and in lots of industries, we've seen jobs increase. The classic example being banks and ATMs, there were lots of forecasts that ATMs would kill banking jobs and we ended up with more jobs precisely because it frees people up for other things. The dock workers do remember that day in 1956 when the first container vessel sailed from the port of Newark, then a very small and insignificant port, to Houston.

The significance of having these standard-size boxes that can be loaded at factories with cargo was to dramatically reduce the cost of loading and unloading ships and specifically to shrink what dock workers are paid. Previously to containerization, every loading and unloading was like this dangerous, tedious, difficult, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Dock workers would have to figure out we're going to put this side of beef in the hull over here. We got these big barrels full of chemicals. We got boxes full of cotton or other raw materials, and they'd have to fit this all together. It would take days, typically, to load or unload.

It was dangerous, and they could always withhold their labor as a way to threaten the bottom line of the shipping companies. The shipping companies did not like being at the mercy of militant dockworkers' unions. Along comes containerization, which is a way to turn a process that took days into a matter of hours. We saw dramatic reductions in the costs of loading freight, and we saw a reduction in the need for dock workers because now you can take one of these shipping containers to the factory, load the cargo, use a crane to put it on top of the ship. It can be moved around on the back of a truck. It can be moved around on a rail system. There's this sort of seamlessness to it.

Dock workers today are operating in this tradition that extends all the way back to the beginning of containers. When they say, "We don't trust innovation, it's a threat to our livelihoods."

Brigid Bergin: That shift to containerization was something that they looked down on even back then, and now we're talking about a new phase in automation. It sounds like a key sticking point in the negotiations relates to this. My colleague Liam Quigley from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom was down at the port this week, and he got this sound from the union president, Harold Daggett, talking to dock workers over a megaphone. I want to play a little clip of it and then Peter, I want to see if you can help unpack what he's talking about. Again, this is about 20 seconds of Daggett talking about automation in the industry.

Harold Daggett: Saw what happened over on the West Coast? Merce Line put a fully automated terminal out there. 800 to 1,000 men lost their jobs. Their outside defense looking in now and now it's all fully automated. That ain't never going to happen on the East Coast. I'm not going to allow it.

Crowd: Yes.

Brigid Bergin: Some strong feelings among those dock workers about not letting what happened on the West Coast happen here on the East Coast. Peter, what are they talking about there?

Peter S. Goodman: They're talking about one of the terminals at La Long Beach. Los Angeles and Long Beach, that's the gateway for 40% of all imports reaching the US by container. It's the most important port in North America. Very reluctantly, the ILWU, which is the West Coast Port Workers Union, agreed to this automated terminal in exchange for higher wages and job guarantees for its own members. There was a study that was financed actually by the union that found a reduction of a couple of percent in the workforce at those terminals in the years after this one terminal was fully automated.

Now there are experts who say that that is by no means a foregone conclusion in terms of automation elsewhere. There's a port in Virginia that's actually seen growing ranks of dockworkers since automation went in. It's really a question of who's in control of the automation and what happens to workers who are displaced. A lot of this, when we talk about automation in the US. we're really talking about different aspects of our own economic system. I've spent time talking to dock workers in the Netherlands about automation. I've spent time visiting miners at places where self-driving cars were going to be deployed in Sweden.

In both of those instances, workers weren't totally happy about losing their jobs, but they had a sense that they'd be trained for other jobs. Their healthcare wasn't on the line, their ability to keep kids in college not on the line. In the US because we don't have national healthcare and because we have very minimal supports for workers who are made unemployed by cheap imports, we have this thing called trade adjustment assistance. It's always underfunded. We don't do a particularly good job training people who are displaced by technology, by trade.

There is this deep suspicion that's based on lived experience that if I lose my job, nothing good will come of this, and it's potentially a long way down. The thing is though, most people, if you talk to them honestly, even doc workers will acknowledge that automation is both inevitable and it's really just a natural outgrowth of the human inclination to take jobs that are dangerous and unpleasant and hand some of that work over to machines. Again, the question is, who's in charge of the process and what do the workers get?

For the most part, this hardline stance against automation is probably just the drawing of a bargaining position. What are we going to get ultimately in exchange for agreeing to the inevitable future?

Brigid Bergin: Peter, it's interesting. One of our listeners texted something that I think you're speaking to. In that answer, the listener writes, if the doc workers' job is so dangerous, then why are the union workers against automation? Seems like they want to be paid extra for the danger, but they don't want to eliminate the risks. If I heard you correctly, I think part of what you're saying here is it's a two-pronged issue. One, it's a bargaining position, and two, it's about who controls the automation. Is that right?

Peter S. Goodman: Yes, that's right. I think that's a very good point that the listener is making. It's true that one of the outgrowths of containerization and further automation is that it's a lot safer. I visited with these dock workers at a fully automated terminal in Rotterdam. This is the largest container port in Europe. They were sitting, controlling these joysticks from inside a temperature-controlled office, instead of down where these giant stacks of containers are getting whipped by the wind and potentially crushed by falling boxes. It was clearly a better lifestyle for them in that respect.

It's really just about who's in charge of this process and can dock workers feel assurances that they can support their families.

Brigid Bergin: I want to go to Artie in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Artie, thanks for holding. Make sure you turn us down.

Artie: Yes. Can you hear me?

Brigid Bergin: We can hear you. I understand that you're related to this, but not directly. What's your connection to the strike?

Artie: Kind of. I'm a truck driver and I work for a logistic company that were in and out of the ports, and I just so happened to switch jobs. I left the ports because I got totally sick of it, sick of the politics, sick of how, number one, they make very good money. They have no reason to protest and say that they need more money. Number two, the truck drivers are always delayed. They're not doing their job. They're on their phones, they're protected by their union so they really don't care what happens. They make our job longer and harder.

When we do a double, I'm gonna make this very brief. A double is you bring it in the empty and take out a load or vice versa. You're not supposed to wait five hours to do a double move, and that's the waiting time. Why? Because they don't care. They're sitting there. They're sitting on their hysteresis. Now, the guys that take the containers off the ship, that's another story. I don't deal with them, but what I deal with is the people that work inside the ports that take out the containers, and they put the loading containers, they take out the empties and put the loads.

Those people are the worst. Very disrespectful. They don't care about the people that they're working with. They're on their phones. They take the breaks whenever they want. If you don't know anything-- let's say you're lost. They don't take the time out. Don't you think if a driver is lost, to take the time out and show him where he's going so he could get out of there, so the ports won't be congested?

Brigid Bergin: Artie, thank you for that perspective, and it's an important one. That's the perspective of the truck driver. We also have a dock worker who's just called in, Joe, who's a dock worker in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. Joe, we want to hear your story, and if you have any reaction, if you heard of some of what Artie was saying, he's a truck driver who has worked in and out of ports. Thanks for calling. WNYC.

Joe: How are you doing? The truck driver is inaccurate in a few points. Accurate to the sense that, yes, they can at times wait for boxes, but if there's 10,000 drivers, somebody's got to wait. You can't give them all the boxes at the same time. With the fact that he's saying that nobody's going to help him. You got to deal with, understand there are workers that work for the ship, there are workers that work for the truck drivers, there are workers that do empties. There's a lot of facets of the job. When he says we don't care, that is just blatantly false.

Then when I called in and I was listening to your excerpt being spoken as far as the gentleman was saying about the California side of it, the workers out there made such a gigantic mistake. They got dollars in their eyes, and that was that. They lost 1/3 of their pay. They dropped 1/3 of what they made the year before by being automated. By the way, we've done multiple tests. There's been five or six test studies done. Manpower beats horsepower every time. Every time the manpower wins. This strike isn't solely about money. The volume in which that we do in New York and New Jersey far exceeds probably every port except the Long Beach.

Although the last three counts, we did have more moves than Long Beach.

Brigid Bergin: Joe--

JoeL My point being is that-- yes, go ahead, ma'am.

Brigid Bergin: I want to ask you, and then I want to give my guest, Peter S. Goodman from the New York Times, who reports on the global economy and has focused on this particular strike, in particular. I want to get a sense from you what you feel like the experience of making the decision going on strike is like and how long you feel like you're willing to be on the line to reach the contract you think you deserve.

Joe: Great question. As long as it takes is that answer right there. We're committed, and that's that. The 77%, like I said, 30% of that is just to get caught up with inflation and thereafter that. A lot of this is to deal with the other ports in the country that get treated like dogs, where the companies really rule with an iron fist, and they don't have that ability in the New York and New Jersey area. That's where we excel in getting the ships in and getting ships out. I'm willing to discuss whatever this gentleman economist that you have to say. I'll answer any questions that he has.

Brigid Bergin: Joe, thanks so much. Peter. I want to give you a chance to respond to both of those callers. Really interesting. Very divergent perspectives there.

Peter S. Goodman: This is a very typical divergence and perspective. I've spent time with dock workers both on the East Coast and on the West Coast, and I've spent time riding around with so-called dray operators. These are the truck drivers who move containers between warehouses and ports. I can tell you that the truck drivers are very resentful of the dock workers. Part of this, you could argue, is function of the fact that there's very minimal union representation left in the United States. At this point, we've got fewer than 10% of the us workforce represented by a union.

If you're in a union, you're typically doing better and nonunion people who are dependent upon your labor resent it when you withhold your labor. Part of it is just the reality that dock workers are paid by the hour, truck drivers are paid by the load. You will hear truck drivers say again and again, "I'm stuck in my truck for five, six, seven hours waiting to pick up a box. The dock workers don't care." This is not me saying that. I'm telling you what the truck drivers will say typically. "They can be rude to us. We want to use the restroom. They don't let us use the restroom. They act like they own the place."

That's part of the dynamic here. Part of what makes this really curious is that the dock workers are mobilized to try to demonstrate their value to the global economy by causing harm to the economy. If there's nobody to load and unload the ships, then cargo sits, and there are effects. The problem is that the people who are getting hurt by that are people like truck drivers who are generally non-union. They're independent contractors. I spent the first day of the strike at a truck stop near the port of Newark talking to truck drivers who were saying, "I got my containers that we picked up yesterday while the port was functioning.

I'm taking them to their final destination, and then I've got no work, and I'm really unhappy about it." The people who the union is ostensibly trying to cause harm to as a way of getting some leverage, the actual operators of the ports. The operators of the ports are these foreign shipping companies who are, in fact, potentially benefiting from this strike through higher prices. Don't take my word for it. That's something that the Federal Maritime Commission chair, Dan Maffei, told me the other day. It echoes what I've heard elsewhere, that the shipping companies are actually cutting service to lots of East Coast ports.

They're effectively taking capacity out of the system, which allows them to raise prices. They're sticking surcharges on cargo as supposed compensation for the challenges of the strike. They could end up profiting from this.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Just one further note from one of my producers regarding how few people are actually covered by unions. A statistic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage of workers represented by a union was just 11.2% in 2023, which is a pretty stunning number. We need to take a short break. When we come back, we're going to talk a lot more about this historic dockworker strike with my guest, Peter S. Goodman from the New York Times, and more of your calls. Stick around.

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Good morning again. This is the Brian Lair show, and I'm Brigid Bergen filling in for Brian today. My guest is Peter S. Goodman, a reporter who covers the global economy for the New York Times and author of the book, How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain. It came out just earlier this year. Very well-timed. Peter, just to put a fine point on it before we move on to other impacts of the strike, how is the union trying to address the threat of automation through its contract?

Peter S. Goodman: It wants language, and we're not privy to the details of the language, language that basically stops automation from going into ports. Presumably, that's something that would then have to be discussed with the assent of the union. Their public position is war against automation. Automation is a job killer.

Brigid Bergin: Then let's talk about some of the other parts of the economy that will be impacted by the strike. We just heard from a truck driver who takes goods to ports and other places. What are some of the other supply chain and consumer impacts? At this point, I feel like the media has been talking a lot about bananas. Potential shortage. What's going on there?

Peter S. Goodman: Get your bananas while you can. The most immediate impact is perishable products. Anything that comes in a refrigerated container. We're talking not just bananas, cherries, coffee, meat. Anything perishable is potentially in harm's way because if it's sitting off of one of these ports, and as we speak, there's about three dozen container ships that are just floating off of ports on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast of the United States. That's going to go bad, refrigeration or none. That's the first place we're likely to see impacts.

Beyond that, we've got farming interests as I was mentioning earlier. If you're a soybean farmer, you depend upon containers to take your crops out of East Coast and Gulf Coast ports to your customers around the world. If we're not unloading ships at these ports, there are no containers available, and it'll be harder and harder to get a container to load, to say nothing of getting a ship to pull in to actually take your cargo. Other industries, automotive, this is an industry that is really governed by so-called just-in-time manufacturing.

Instead of keeping lots of inventory on hand, they don't want to spend money doing that. They have suppliers deliver parts and components to their assembly lines as they need them in real-time. They're typically sitting on just a few days of inventory. This shutdown of ports, we've got a lot of auto parts coming into East Coast ports. We've got a lot of finished autos coming in from Europe to East Coast ports. We could see scarcity there, or at least much higher shipping costs for companies that are able to pay them to get their stuff to their factories by way of West Coast ports, where we're worried about congestion popping up as a result.

It's really a question of how long this strike lasts. If we get a deal in the next few days, it probably won't be that big a deal. If it goes on for weeks, it could be a very significant problem.

Brigid Bergin: I mentioned the cleanup after Hurricane Helene, and we've already heard about gas and water shortages there. I'm wondering, do you have a sense of whether this strike could have any impact on the cleanup and how many ports and workers are in that region that might be dealing with both of these issues, the storm's aftermath, and then also the strike?

Peter S. Goodman: No question these east coast ports are critical ways the construction materials come in. In terms of the rebuild, if this strike goes on a long time, we could definitely slow the rebuild. No doubt, port workers who are contending with the storm's damage in places like the Carolinas, Georgia, to an extent, are dealing not only with being out of work, but they're also attending to homes that have been destroyed and jobs that they can't go to.

Brigid Bergin: You made a really good point just a moment ago about the length of this strike, how long it could potentially go on. So far, President Biden has said he's going to stay out of it. What could he do, and is there any sense that he will get involved?

Peter S. Goodman: There's a 1947 law, the Taft-Hartley Act, that gives the president the power to wade in when national security's on the line and declare an 80-day cooling-off period during which the two parties are supposed to go back to the negotiating table while workers have to go back to work. Here's the question, though, so we'll put aside the politics for a second. If Biden were willing to do this, and he said he's not willing to do this for reasons we'll get into in a minute, how hard would dock workers really work if they don't want to be at work and they're supposed to go back to work?

Anybody who knows the ports knows that there are all sorts of ways they could show up to check off that box legally but slow the pace of cargo. This happens typically in the run-up to new contracts as the two sides are negotiating. They could do that again, but the politics for Biden and for Harris are really fraught here, in that labor is, of course, a key democratic constituency. The optics of shutting down a strike and undermining the bargaining position of a large union as it's trying to get a better deal for itself would be very bad. Moreover, there are memories of when Biden waited into the threatened rail strike two years ago.

This was under a different law that predates the Taft-Hartley Act. Rail is a special industry under US law, and Biden imposed a settlement on rail workers that gave them slightly smaller wage increases than they wanted and critically, did not give them what they sought most eagerly. That was paid sick leave. That left a really bad taste in the mouths of those workers and organized labor in general. The perils of shutting down this strike would be great. On the other hand, the perils of letting this strike go on are enormous.

We are, of course, weeks away from a presidential election that could hinge on economic sentiments. There's a lot of anger over increased prices, even though inflation, the pace at which prices are rising, has cooled tremendously. Many people have said it's mission accomplished in terms of squeezing out inflation. If suddenly we get giant floating traffic jams off of ports and product shortages and increased shipping costs, we could be talking about inflation again, which is not what Kamala Harris wants to be doing. There's no good options on the menu for the political class.

Brigid Bergin: In that vein, we have a listener who texts, I am a wife of a dock worker, the union overhired to get their children in. The president of the union is an ardent Trump supporter, and this is a stunt to upend the economy so President Biden will look bad. Peter, wondering what your reaction is to that. Certainly, the politics of this moment are very dynamic and could be very dangerous for the current administration.

Peter S. Goodman: This is a widespread perception out there. Daggett has posed for photos with Trump. He met with Trump last year to press him for his support on the stance against automation. The extent of Daggett's support for Trump is not entirely clear. If Trump wins, there's a widespread assumption that he'll be less friendly to organized labor than Biden, who fancies himself the most pro-union president in history. Certainly, the appearance that Trump is the beneficiary of a strike is there for the simple reason that this strike, the longer it goes on, the more likely it is to revive inflation.

That's got to be bad for Biden and by extension, Vice President Harris, in terms of dealing with people who are angry about the high cost of living.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Paul in Brooklyn, who has a historic question. Paul, thanks for calling WNYC.

Paul: Thanks so much. Peter, when I was living in Carroll Gardens in the 1990s, there was a pension fund building that was well-known around the neighborhood as a Gambino social club, more or less. I'm curious about the history of the ILA and organized crime. I know that as opposed to the West Coast unions, which were very kind of left-leaning in the '50s, the ILA has historically been pretty conservative and I think known as a pretty momed-up union. I'm curious if that's still the case and what your thoughts are there.

Peter S. Goodman: Certainly, to your point, the history is full of incidences of corruption and threatened violence. That is part and parcel of how the ILA has operated over the years. Prominent officials at the ILA have been prosecuted for corruption. That's not something that we talk about in the contemporary setup, but certainly, there is that whiff, that question, as we note the fact that the politics of this particular strike are fraught, and you've got this perception of ties to Trump.

Brigid Bergin: Peter, I'm wondering, we started this conversation off with another historical note, that this is the first time this union has gone on strike since 1977. I wonder if you could give us a little comparison between that moment and now, both in terms of how long that strike played out for, what the workers were able to achieve, and do you see any parallels to this moment in terms of what these particular workers are willing to do to get what they're seeking?

Peter S. Goodman: I think what's happening now is you've got this moment in which organized labor is on the march and has been successfully mobilizing in industries far and wide. Think about the fact that the warehouse workers in Staten Island, at the Amazon warehouse, managed to organize a union in a very famously anti-union shop. Think about the UAW strike at auto plants in the US, which extracted very significant raises. That resounded as a great victory for the UAW, and it affirmed a strategy that some people thought was quite reckless. The UAW took a very confrontational approach to the big three.

They noted lots of profits, lots of share buybacks, and dividends and said, "It's time for our piece of the action," and some people said, "You're overplaying your hand." In the end, not so. Look at industries like Hollywood, where the Screen Actors Guild and the writers took a hard-line stance, and they eventually won out. This is a moment where we've had very low unemployment. We've had tremendous disruption through the pandemic. A lot of workers who feel like they've been getting a raw deal over decades, but they haven't had an alternative, have gotten alternatives and have concluded that it's a good time to push for better working conditions and better wages.

The ILA is operating in that context. Now, the key difference between now and 1977 that gives them additional leverage is that globalization has carried on quite dramatically. 1977 is long before NAFTA. It's long before China enters the World Trade Organization. We're now in a moment where these shipping containers, they're not just carrying finished products. They're carrying often 40% parts and components. There are 30,000 parts that go into many finished automobiles. A lot of those parts will cross the ocean multiple times to get a process here, get attached to another component there.

Then they'll come back across the border from Mexico to be turned into a final part that might then get shipped back to Mexico to get turned into a finished vehicle that gets sold in the US. There's so much complexity to the global supply chain. These dock workers are withholding their labor at a time when any bottleneck in any particular place has ripple effects that go far beyond single nations. If these ships don't get unloaded in Newark today, there could be an exporter in Brazil waiting for a ship to come and carry away soybeans or iron ore, or apparel that's stuck in a floating queue off Newark, waiting for a resolution to this strike. They can't go pick up those goods.

That Brazilian exporter doesn't have a way to ship their product, which means they might be diminishing their orders for the raw materials they might need in Argentina or Bolivia, and on it goes. There's so much greater global integration now than there was in 1977, and that's part of what gives the union leverage.

Brigid Bergin: Just briefly, Peter, I'm wondering, is there something, in particular, you're watching for beyond just a settlement as a key moment as we move forward here?

Peter S. Goodman: I think the key question is, what would it take for the Biden administration to step in? There's certainly lots of pressure on the Biden administration. For now, I think the perils of intervening against organized labor are still the thing that's winning out. The longer this goes on, the greater the economic damage, the more the pressure will build for the politicians to craft a solution here.

Brigid Bergin: My guest has been Peter S. Goodman, reporter for the New York Times and author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain, which came out earlier this year. Peter, depending how long the strike goes on, we may need to have some more insight into that global supply chain, which you clearly know a lot about. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. It's really been fascinating.

Peter S. Goodman: Oh, it's my pleasure. Call me anytime. Thank you.

 

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