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12/17/2024
President-elect Donald Trump has given his support to the International Longshoreman's Association (ILA), which represents dockworkers at ports on the East and Gulf Coasts.
Contract negotiations between the union and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents the port employers, have broken down over the issue of automation, which the union opposes. A strike over a new contract lasted three days in October until it was paused after the two sides agreed to a contract extension that included a wage increase. That extension expires Jan. 15, 2025.
In a post on the ILA website, ILA President Harold Daggett and ILA Executive Vice President Dennis Daggett announced they had met with Trump for two hours on Dec. 12 and that he expressed "strong support" for the dockworkers in their efforts to stop "job-killing automation."
On his social media site Truth Social, Trump shared a Facebook message that Dennis Daggett wrote in which he praised the president-elect for being "attentive to our needs [and] receptive and genuinely engaged in a discussion about the existential threat automation poses."
Trump said on Truth Social that he sympathized with the ILA leaders, The New York Times reported. "I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it," Trump said, according to the newspaper. "The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen."