Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Thursday that the port strikes could have a real impact on the economy during an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"The longer this goes, the more economic impact you're going to see. Look, if you just think about the pace of ocean shipping, obviously something you're expecting to get overnight isn't something you're sending in an ocean liner. But it doesn't take long for this to really have an impact. Our supply chains are all interconnected," Buttigieg told host Willie Geist.
The International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) began its first strike since 1977 after its six-year contract with the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents port employers, expired Monday night.
"A lot of the retailers, the stores, they did see that this might be coming. This is an issue we've been tracking for months. And so some of them rerouted to the West Coast or they frontloaded their orders and got more things into the warehouses earlier this year," he added.
Buttigieg explained that the dockworkers' union was negotiating for better wages because shipping companies have had their profits increase by "about 350%" over the last eight years. He said the wages of the workers have only gone up about 15%.
"They're negotiating for better wages and other issues, and they have not been able to come to terms, them and the ocean carriers and ports, in order to reach a new contract. That has resulted in this strike, the work stoppage," he said.
"It's a big issue, this needs to get resolved," the transportation secretary added. "We've been in touch with the different parties urging them to bridge their differences, in particular urging these ocean carriers, which again, have become extremely profitable in recent years to put forward an offer that is enough to bring the union back to the table and get this hammered out."
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The ongoing union dockworkers' strike has left several U.S. ports on the East and Gulf Coasts at a standstill for days, halting trade at the hubs that collectively handle about half of U.S. imports.
Major retail and business associations are sounding the alarm over the impact the work stoppage could have on the broader economy, and new data shows which companies have shipped the most goods into the affected ports over the past year.
The companies that imported the most volume into East Coast and Gulf Coast ports from September 2023 to September 2024 are General Motors, Walmart, LG Electronics, Mercedes Benz and Ikea, according to the latest data from ImportGenius shared with FOX Business.
Fox News' Breck Dumas contributed to this report.
