Loaded container trucks line-up at a gate at the Port of Seattle on Tuesday after seaports on the West Coast that were all but shut over the weekend. POLITICO Pro Obama faces port politics

President Barack Obama may have to intervene directly in the West Coast ports dispute, becoming the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter to impose a resolution on a private labor-management conflict.

The slowdown in shipping comes at an especially awkward time for Obama, who is trying to push through a global trade deal largely opposed by organized labor.


On Sunday, Obama sent Labor Secretary Tom Perez to San Francisco to press both sides toward agreement. A federal mediator previously sent to the West Coast had failed to resolve the matter.

Labor and management both know that, should Perez also fail and the stalemate continue, the next logical step would be for the president to declare a national emergency under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and force a solution. The last president to take such action was George W. Bush in 2002. In that instance, as in this one, the conflict concerned the 29 West Coast ports.

“There’s a fairly significant risk here,” a former Obama administration official said. “One, that the secretary’s not going to be able to get a settlement. And two, if he doesn’t get a settlement, what’s the next step for the president?”

The dispute is simple enough: shipowners and the longshoremen who load and off-load cargo have failed to reach a new contract over a variety of terms and conditions of employment, from wages to health and benefits to the shipowners’ use of contractors for work typically performed by longshoremen.

But “if in the midst of a very significant labor dispute the president intervenes with an injunction in order to keep trade flowing, there’s a risk that that will become emblematic of an anti-labor stance,” the former administration official said.

The Obama administration has been on a pro-labor streak lately. In December, its National Labor Relations Board took a number of notably pro-labor actions, including issuance of a rule preventing management from delaying union elections through litigation. In January, the president proposed a number of labor-friendly policies focused on “middle-class economics,” including mandatory paid sick leave and free community college. And in his State of the Union address he voiced support for “laws that strengthen rather than weaken unions, and give American workers a voice,” a sentiment he repeated in a recent interview with Vox.

But the president’s advocacy for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an irritant to labor unions that were just getting over being placed largely on hold during Obama’s first term, when he declined to spend political capital on the Employee Free Choice Act “card check” bill and refused to grant unions exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s tax on “Cadillac” health insurance plans.

Now the accumulating economic damage from the ports crisis puts Obama in a bind.

“Anything that drives down growth, anything that slows down job creation, anything that hurts workers’ wages, is going to be viewed as a negative by the administration,” said Seth Harris, distinguished scholar at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations who served as deputy secretary of labor in 2013. “So they can tolerate some amount of slowdown on the West Coast ports, but they can’t tolerate an extended period of delay in solving this problem.”

The problem is compounded by increased competition from other international ports — something none of Obama’s predecessors had to worry about.

“We have new competition from a widened Panama Canal coming online, from an improved port in Vancouver, from the Chinese wanting to build a port in Nicaragua,” said Mickey Kantor, President Bill Clinton’s former U.S. trade representative and secretary of commerce, who now consults for the Retail Industry Leaders Association. “I mean, a lot is going on here, and it goes way beyond just the interest, frankly, of either side on the West Coast.”

Ending labor-management conflicts by executive fiat typically favors management’s interest over labor’s, something no Democratic president is ever eager to do. Carter felt compelled in 1978 to halt a coalminers’ strike in the midst of the energy crisis. Ronald Reagan, by contrast, lost no sleep over invoking Taft-Hartley to end the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, firing the striking controllers in the process. (He could do that because they were federal, not private-sector, workers.)

Before Carter, the most recent Taft-Hartley presidential intervention in a private labor-management dispute had occurred in 1971 under Richard M. Nixon — like Bush and Reagan, a Republican. For Nixon, as for Bush (and now Obama), the standoff occurred at the West Coast ports.

The rancorous current disagreement between the shipowners, represented by the Pacific Maritime Association, and the dockworkers, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, has often blurred the lines between fact and public relations fiction. The PMA has accused the longshoremen of slowing down their work to provoke a crisis, while the workers claim the PMA is, in some instances, deliberately locking them out from their work. Both accusations are, as best as an outsider can determine, at least partly true. Both sides have recently agreed to stop discussing the negotiations with the press.

Blame for the gridlock may be difficult to assign with any precision, but its effects are not. Dozens of ships lie anchored off the West Coast awaiting off-loading. California citrus growers can’t export their goods quickly, and auto manufacturers are reducing output. On Tuesday, Honda said it would slow down its production at U.S. manufacturing facilities, citing reduced access to cheap parts imports.

Tensions came to a head over Presidents Day weekend when the PMA shut down the West Coast ports to incoming cargo to avoid paying holiday and overtime rates to dockworkers who they claimed were involved in a slowdown. That prompted Obama to send Perez. Retailers and manufacturers had been urging Obama to intervene for months, but this marked the administration’s first significant involvement in the dispute.

Reportedly, the parties have been near a deal for at least a week or two. But they’re stalled on deciding how to negotiate grievances after a new contract is signed, discord that is reportedly focused on a single arbitrator who is seen as unfairly pro-business. If that’s still the case, a speedy agreement is possible, and the president can score a quick political victory.

“You’ve got a lot of economic and political pressures that have built up and you’ve got the president’s attentions, “ said Harley Shaiken, a labor specialist at Berkeley. “All that speaks to the secretary of labor achieving the compromise sooner, perhaps much sooner, rather than later.”

But if Perez should fail, Obama may have to enter the dispute himself, by either mounting the bully pulpit or exercising his executive authority — all at the same time he’s trying to push through fast-track for TPP.

West Coast dockworkers are highly paid (about $30-$50 per hour for senior longshoremen), partly because of the ILWU’s aggressive bargaining culture and partly because these workers inhabit an enviable choke point in an import-hungry U.S. economy. About 50 percent of all container cargo entering the United States is off-loaded at West Coast ports. That often prompts ire from business groups dependent on uninterrupted trade and politicians keen on accelerating economic growth.

“This is a small union, 20,000 members, with very strong power given where they’re located,” Shaiken said. “But that power is so extensive the union can’t fully use it without provoking federal intervention.”

The ambiguities of the West Coast standoff somewhat complicate the situation. Obama has executive authority to intervene to halt a lockout by management or a strike by labor, but neither is occurring in any overt form. It seems likelier that the PMA would provoke executive intervention by imposing an unambiguous lockout, because intervention would likely favor PMA. Such a move might force Obama’s hand. Far preferable, from his point of view, would be for Perez to clear any obstacles that lie in the path of a quick agreement.