Meet Harold Daggett, the colorful and controversial union boss leading the port strike

A week ago, few people outside the labor movement or the shipping industry knew about Harold Daggett, the tough-talking and colorful union leader currently on strike at East Coast ports. and the Gulf.

This is certainly no longer the case.

Daggett is the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, which has nearly 50,000 union workers on strike at three dozen different port facilities. The work stoppage has halted the movement of most containerized cargo entering and exiting the United States since Tuesday morning.

This is the union’s first strike in 47 years, but Daggett participated in the previous strike as a rank-and-file dockworker. He had joined the union ten years earlier, in 1967, after serving in the Vietnamese navy.

Today, Daggett is 78 years old and has six grandchildren and two great-grandsons. Sporting gold chains and a diamond ring, he throws swear words into virtually every other sentence while threatening to cripple the global economy.

“Who are the foodies here? These companies in Europe, they don’t care about us,” he told picket members after the strike began Tuesday morning, referring to foreign shipping companies on the opposing side.

“We’re going to show them, they’re going to have to give a damn about us, because nothing will move without us!” he said to cheers. “We’re going to win the damn thing. Trust me. They can’t survive for too long. We’re going to get what we deserve.

Hours later, he returned to the Port of New York and New Jersey at Elizabeth, New Jersey, just after dawn, flanked by his son, ILA Executive Vice President Dennis Daggett, as well than other ILA leaders.

A sea of ​​hundreds of union members parted amid cheers as they headed to the top of a small grassy hill, with unused shipping containers as a backdrop. He addressed members using both a bullhorn and colorful language.

“If we have to stay here a month or two, this world will collapse,” Daggett said.

Unwanted attention

But the growing attention to Daggett and the strike has led to harassment and death threats, according to a union statement.

Daggett earns about $902,000 for positions with the ILA and one of its local chapters – far more than many of his counterparts. His son earns $703,000 from the ILA and the same local. At the United Auto Workers union, which has more than four times as many members, UAW President Shawn Fain received just under $200,000 for his eight months of work last year.

Daggett also has other honors that most union leaders don’t enjoy. The union and several local sections, for example, erected a statue to him outside its headquarters in 2022.

The ILA attributes criticism of him to efforts to get the union to give in to his demands, adding that Daggett “is sickened by these attempts to attack his professional achievements as a union leader and destroy the life he has built for him and his family. .”

Still, there have been allegations of wrongdoing, including federal racketeering charges against him and other union officials in 2005, accusing Daggett and his associates of enriching themselves by siphoning off union funds. But some of these accusations were later dismissed. Daggett was acquitted of the other charges. He has denied any accusations of mob ties.

Political relations

Daggett has ties to former President Donald Trump, a Queens native, with whom he said he had “a long relationship dating back decades in New York,” according to a July post asking ILA members to pray for the former president after an assassination attempt. .

In that post, Daggett also included a photo of himself shaking hands with Trump. This photo is from a meeting at Mar-a-Lago last November, in what Daggett described as a “wonderful and productive 90-minute meeting.” He said they discussed concerns that increased automation at ports could cost union jobs – a key demand of the current strike.

The union did not support Trump. Nor did he follow many other unions in supporting Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris or, earlier in the campaign, President Joe Biden. The ILA, however, endorsed Biden over Trump four years ago, with Daggett at the time touting Biden’s “friendship and support of the ILA (which) goes back decades.”

Daggett also praised Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su’s efforts Tuesday morning to try to negotiate a deal before the strike, even though the union had said it did not want federal mediators involved in negotiations . And the union’s Political Action Committee has donated $115,000 to Democrats in the current election cycle, compared to $5,000 to Republicans, according to data from OpenSecrets, which tracks donations.

Timing of the strike

The timetable for the strike is set by the previous six-year contract, which expired Monday evening, and not by the US presidential election.

The union saw the shipping sector’s recent period of record profitability as an opportunity to secure dramatic wage increases.

Industry profits topped $400 billion between 2020 and 2023, as shipping rates soared during and after the pandemic, according to analyst John McCown. This is believed to be more than the industry has achieved in the entire history of containerized shipping before this.

The union could have delayed a strike until after the election, working under an extension, but the ILA would have lost its bargaining power by delaying any work action until the end of the pre-holiday transportation season . The strike now made sense for the union, regardless of its political impact.

The union is seeking a $5 per hour wage increase each of the six years of the contract under negotiation, which would increase the top hourly wage by 77% over the life of the contract.

When the company came back on the eve of the strike with an offer of $3 an hour that would have raised wages by nearly 50 percent, Daggett said he responded, “Fuck you.”

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