Longshoremen serving U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports went on strike today.
I have been searching in vain for one simple statistic:
How much do the wages of these longshoremen add to the cost of goods imported into the U.S. through these affected ports?
Near as I can tell, nobody has this pre-calculated. So I’m going to roll my own.
Before I do, take your best guess. Is it roughly:
- 2.5%
- 0.25%
- 0.025%
The commonly cited numbers are:
- $3.5T in imports annually (from this government source).
- About half of that flows through affected ports.
- About 45K longshoremen.
- Average wage of East Coast longshoremen of (say) $35 an hour.
So, assuming that all longshoremen put in one shift per day, 365 days a year, the wage bill for the longshoremen serving these ports is ($35 x 45,000 *8 =~) $12.6 million dollars a day.
By contrast, the typical daily value of goods imported through these ports would be ($3.5T/365/2 =~) $5 billion a day. This is also a widely-reported figure, typically described as “damage to the U.S. economy).
So the answer is b). As a fraction of value-of-goods-imported, that’s ($12.6M/$5B =) 0.25%. Currently, the cost of U.S. longshoremen adds about a quarter of a percent to the cost of good imported through these ports.
And the difference that’s keeping the two sides apart appears to be about $10 in hourly wages. So the actual money at issue is on order of 0.1% of the cost of imports.
I dunno. Maybe it’s just me. But it seems like this would be a relevant number to know, as you form an opinion about this strike.
Given the value of goods at issue, and the relatively small difference between asked and offered wage (I read it as $60 versus $50 an hour, five years from now), and given that West Coast longshoremen already make a wage at about that level, and yet the U.S. economy has not collapsed, I’d like to think that this is going to be a relatively short strike.
