Paul Berger of The Wall Street Journal tells his readers the decision means the South Carolina port will have to use union dockworkers at its new container terminal. He writes:
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by South Carolina’s ports authority, letting stand a lower-court ruling that effectively requires the Port of Charleston to use an all-union labor force at a new container terminal.
The decision on Tuesday caps a long-running battle over labor rules at the site and diminishes hopes in South Carolina and Georgia, both right-to-work states, that they can sidestep the International Longshoremen’s Association while expanding cargo-handling at some of the country’s biggest ports. […]
Georgia’s Port of Savannah, which operates under a similar model to Charleston, said in an October 2023 brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that the NLRB and the lower court rulings jeopardize its plans to build a 395-acre terminal that will allow it to handle an additional two million containers per year. The state-run authority said extra costs, such as higher salaries, “would result in lost revenues and increased costs totaling nearly $600 million in just the first year of the new terminal’s operation.”
A spokesman for the Georgia Ports Authority said: “Georgia Ports has been talking with the ILA and this will not jeopardize our plans.”
Read more here.
