Longshoremen are on strike at ports along the East and Gulf Coasts. These are the workers who unload and load cargo, and they’re demanding better pay and limits to the use of automation.

At the Port of Baltimore on Tuesday — one of the biggest auto ports in the country — about a hundred striking longshoremen were marching. Trucks and car haulers cheerfully tooted their horns at them.

One of the longshoremen on strike is 68-year-old Glenn Young, who’s spent more than four decades working at the Port.

Part of Young’s job is to help secure containers on to cargo ships, and he’s worried about how his younger colleagues could be affected by increased automation. 

“I mean, it’s all around the world, you know, eventually it’s coming, but you don’t just dump it on you,” Young said. “You work it in.”

The group representing their employers, the United States Maritime Alliance, said in a statement that it had done its part to avoid a longshoremen strike. And that its “current offer of a nearly 50% wage increase exceeds every other recent union settlement.”

The last time there was a coast-wide strike by longshoremen in this part of the country was 1977.

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