‘They Can’t Survive Too Long’: The Union Boss Who Shut Down the Ports Is Playing Hard Ball

Nearly two decades ago, Harold J. Daggett was accused of being part of the mob’s efforts to control a powerful union, the International Longshoremen’s Association.

He was a midlevel official of the union. After a high-profile trial, a jury acquitted him of fraud and extortion conspiracy, and he joined reveling supporters outside the Brooklyn federal courthouse. Motioning toward the building, he asked onlookers, “What doorway do I have to go through to get my reputation back?”

Now, after 13 years as the union’s president, Mr. Daggett is seeking a different type of victory.

He is leading a strike that began on Tuesday, shutting down most trade at a dozen big ports on the East and Gulf Coasts. The union, whose members move containers and other cargo on and off ships, is demanding much higher wages, improved benefits and limits on labor-saving technology.

Mr. Daggett has cast the strike as a battle against large multinational corporations that earned outsize profits during the pandemic-related supply chain chaos. He has asserted that his 47,000 members have the upper hand because their work is essential to the automakers, retailers and other businesses that depend on the ports.

“We’re going to win this thing,” Mr. Daggett, 78, said on Tuesday, along with an expletive, as members picketed outside a port terminal in New Jersey. “They can’t survive too long.”

Some labor experts say Mr. Daggett is well positioned to get a good deal. “If they stop working, the goods stop moving,” said William Brucher, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. “They have real economic power and leverage.”