Longshoremen’s strike poses a fresh threat to the US economy

East and Gulf Coast dockworkers are set to go on strike at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, shutting down 36 ports from Maine to Texas that handle about one-half of US ocean imports, and so threatening to reduce US economic activity by $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion a week if the closures are prolonged.

And the International Longshoremen’s Association’s central demand is a total ban on automation involving cranes, gates and the loading and unloading of freight containers — leaving US ports stuck in the last century while the rest of the world moves on.

Once again, a powerful union seeks to strangle innovation that would benefit everyone else: Robots can do most dock-cargo work better, faster and cheaper.

West Coast longshoremen, represented by a different union that wasn’t as vehemently opposed to automation, won a 32% pay increase that averted a walkout last September.

But West Coast ports can’t possibly pick up the slack of an East Coast shutdown, especially when global shipping is already crippled by Houthi attacks in the Red Sea that force countless vessels to spend extra weeks at sea, heading around Africa to reach Atlantic ports.

The walkout by 85,000 ILA dockworkers would slam the US economy just before the November election, adding extra inflationary pressures and potentially leaving store shelves emptier in advance of Christmas shopping, while also delaying US exports, risking spoilage of agricultural ones.

Which puts the Biden-Harris administration in a pickle: It likely can’t make the United States Maritime Alliance, which runs the ports, agree to never automate, while pay hikes to bribe the ILA out of its “no robots, ever” stance could be inflation-drivers in their own right.

But will the self-declared “most pro-labor president ever” invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to stop the strike, as President George W. Bush did after 11 days in 2002?

Heck, Biden’s pro-union boasts are a big reason the ILA’s willing to go out in the first place.

Maybe he should send in his vice president to end the standoff: If joy and word salads don’t do the trick, surely the dockworkers will bend when Kamala Harris tells them she grew up middle-class?