Although they may not agree on a lot, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have come to terms on who is to blame for the switch reach, which threatens to ruin the economy, and who are the foreign-owned shipping companies.
” This attack is about fairness”, Harris said Tuesday. ” Foreign-owned shipping companies have achieved report profits and increased executive pay. The Longshoremen, who play a vital role transporting important goods across America, deserve a good share of these log income”.
Not to be outdone, Trump released his own declaration, saying,” American workers should be able to communicate for better wages, especially since the delivery companies are generally international flag vessels, including the largest partnership ONE”.
ONE is based in Singapore, and the other big importers, Maersk, CMA CGM, Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd, and COSCO, are based abroad. COSCO has come in for certain disdain, as it is a state-owned Chinese business, playing into nonpartisan worries about that country’s contentious economic practices.
The East Coast work delay comes as Harris and Trump are battling for blue-collar citizens, precisely the kinds of people the International Longshoremen’s Association represents. President Joe Biden, who usually calls himself the most pro-union leader in British history, is so far refusing to summon the Taft-Hartley Act, which could stop the attack against the ILA’s desires.
Biden has even cited the rights of shipping companies by foreigners.
” The president … directed his team to keep urging foreign-owned ocean carriers represented by]the U. S. Maritime Alliance ] to present a strong and fair offer to the ILA”, the White House said Tuesday. The leader believes it is time to make an offer that acknowledges the important input ILA workers have made to their success because these international companies have seen record profits- up off as much as 800 % since the pandemic, when Longshoremen put themselves in danger of keeping ports open- and these international companies have seen record profits.
The White House made the third mention of offshore ownership when it claimed that Biden had instructed his team to look out for “any price gouging activity that benefits foreign ocean carriers.”
Striking employees have also raised the issue, warning that automation will result in even more profits going overseas.
But Scott Lincicome, a trade policy expert at the CATO Institute, said domestic policy is largely to blame for the offshoring trend.
” It’s not an issue at all”, he said. ” It’s a total distraction”.
He points to laws like the Jones Act, which protects American shipping companies from domestic competition but, according to him, makes them uncompetitive abroad. He claims that building a ship in the United States costs four to five times as much as it does abroad, and that this is the reason all of the major corporations have relocated to Europe and Asia since the 1980s.
Unions have pushed for a tariff on Chinese-made ships to be used to pay for American shipbuilding, but Lincicome claims deregulation would help significantly in the revitalization of the domestic sector.
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Whether that approach is politically successful is still to be seen.
As news of the strike spreads, some consumers have resorted to panic-buying items like toilet paper that are n’t affected by the work stoppage. Voters may start clamoring for political action that goes beyond declaring that foreign ownership when stores start to empty out.