All’s quiet on the American waterfront — at least for the next few years.

Dockworkers and employers on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts avoided a lengthy strike earlier this year, agreeing on a six-year labor agreement that will raise wages by 62% over that period.

Shipping interests held their collective breath when a tentative agreement was announced just after the new year, but they needn’t have worried: In the end, the new master contract was ratified by nearly 99% of the members of the International Longshoremen’s Association.

“We now have labor peace for the next six years,” said ILA president Harold Daggett. “It was a tough contract to negotiate and even took a three-day coast-wide strike in October 2024. The ILA stayed strong and unified throughout and successfully won the greatest contract in ILA history and maybe the strongest Collective Bargaining Agreement ever negotiated by any union.”

Of particular significance was a provision in the new contract that prohibits the introduction of certain automated systems on the docks, defined as equipment that is “devoid of human interaction.” That means Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports won’t be seeing autonomous trucks and cranes, such as are in partial operation on the U.S. West Coast and elsewhere in the world, anytime soon.

“Semi-automated” cranes are permitted under the contract, provided that operators add one human job for each new piece of equipment.

To outside observers, the biggest eye-opener is the size of the wage increase. (The current West Coast dockworkers’ contract, which runs until 2028, includes an increase of 32%, just under half of what their Atlantic and Gulf Coast counterparts will be getting.) But at a time when supply chains are beset by so many kinds of disruptions, terminal employers apparently had no appetite for triggering the one disruption over which they exercise some measure of control.

In any case, the concession “makes it more effective to attract labor in the pool,” said Matt Leach, president and chief executive officer of terminal operator Ports America. He joined a panel on North American longshore labor at the recent TPM25 conference in Long Beach, California.

In the end, Leach said, it’s the shipping companies that pay. “They control the vote, and make up the final decision.”

Another stevedoring executive on the TPM25 panel, Patrick Burgoyne, chief operating officer of Logistec, said carriers today have much more say over port affairs than decades ago. Now, the complexity and sensitivity of supply chains mean that a disruption on the docks carries “the risk of shutting down a global network.” Carriers are therefore highly motivated to ensure peace on the waterfront, even if that means absorbing the cost of higher wages (or, realistically, passing it on to shippers).

Burgoyne said the ILA contract actually brings Atlantic and Gulf dockworker wages roughly into line with those at Pacific ports. And Leach said the pact “is about a catchup to a six-year discounted contract — not some crazy price they’re paying for labor.” In the end, he added, “there had to be a reset.”

Historically, ILA-represented dockworkers at Atlantic and Gulf ports have been much less open to automation then West Coast members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The latter’s acceptance of technology dates all the way back to the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement of 1960, which gave terminal operators the green light to begin installing automated systems on the docks. But it was never ILWU’s intent to allow the wholesale replacement of humans with machines. And recently, West Coast workers have been voicing negative opinions about technology that align them closer with the views of their ILA-repped brothers and sisters.

Still, speakers on the TPM25 panel stressed that the ILA’s stance on technology doesn’t preclude some degree of automation. “There’s a clear path for marine terminals to use technology to deliver better performance for our customers,” Leach said. Replacing people with automation, he added, “was never the intent. It was really about how to use technology in the 21^st century to optimize performance [and service] to the customer. There are very clear pathways to that.”

The message that dockside labor and management want to deliver today is one of harmony. Despite “jousting back and forth in the press, both sides are trying to avoid anything that harms growth opportunities at the terminal,” said Carl Bentzel, chief executive of the National Association of Waterfront Employers.

What they’re really trying to avoid is anything that brings the whole operation to a grinding halt. “We’ve realized that this industry from a global commerce perspective is too big to fail,” Burgoyne said at TPM25. “You can’t shut it down.”