tens of thousands of Union Dock Workers are back at work today getting terminals up and down the coast including those in Newark and Elizabeth at operational status the strike was shortlived lasting just three days but the threat it carried to the economy and the supply chain loomed large Thursday afternoon more than 45 container ships were backed up at major US ports but as labor experts point out the tenative agreement still needs to be ratified by union membership otherwise we could be right back in this position come next year senior correspondent Joanna gagas has the latest three days of picketing and nearly four days of ships sitting idle at the Docks so ends the biggest long shoreman strike in nearly 50 years what we saw yesterday is that the two sides came to an agreement a tentative agreement that is essentially halfway between what the employers had been offering previously and what the union had been demanding previously the international long shoreman's Association was demanding a 77% raise over a six-year term their employer the US Maritime Association had come up to 50% just before the strike their middle point 61.5% over 6 years the two released a joint statement saying they reached a tenative agreement on wages and have agreed to extend the master contract until January 2025 to negotiate other outstanding issues the big one being the automation which the union fears will threaten a lot of jobs of their members uh but the employers agreed to continue talking about that issue so that's still open to negotiation but as this played out economists worried the strike would upend Global Supply chains So Yesterday senior Biden Administration officials intervened calling a virtual meeting with the shipping lines urging the ports needed to reopen especially for Hurricane Helen recovery efforts and acting labor secretary Julie Sue came to New Jersey to meet with union leaders President Biden who had refused to enact Taft Harley saying he believed in collective bargaining released a statement saying that it works and is critical to building a stronger economy from the middle out and the bottom up certainly I got to praise the administration for getting them to talk to each other again that was a big win I got to give them that um but they still ended up if they had been talking where they would have been anyway Ron leedman with mcarter English says you can't ignore the timing of the intervention with an election just 5 weeks away I question how they did this where they basically took sides that was kind of potentially political too because you know they you want Union votes that particular tactic isn't something I would have done but at the end of the day if the if if the result justifies the means then they did a good job because the strike was resolved within a week it's not likely it had much if any impact on inflation but even though these ports are moving again it's going to take about two weeks to dig out of the backlog of shipments that have been sitting all along the east and Gulf coasts since the agreement was reached last night it has been all hands on deck to reopen the port and restart the flow of cargo the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey held a virtual press briefing today to share how they're working to reduce those backlogs and likely beat analyst projections for how long it takes to get through them those cargo operations and in the case of the container traffic reloading uh export containers uh onto the ships will begin tonight at 700 p.m. and work around the clock as is usual on the vessel side uh of the terminals following the discharge of the cargo two of our terminals will open over the weekend for truck activity meaning the ability to deliver the cargo uh out the gates to the warehouses and distribution centers the remaining terminals will open on Monday morning uh at 6:00 a.m. so while systems begin moving again Union delegates will now have to go back to their members to present the wage offer for a vote and they now have 90 days to negotiate the automation piece given the way that these negotiations have already played out do you think it's going to be another struggle in terms of how they negotiate the the remainder of this automation piece yeah I do believe it's still going to be a long and bumpy road over this particular issue lebman says they should look to West Coast Port agreement ments that have struck a middle ground on automation the West Coast agreed to a level of automation it has been and and by the way East Coast some of the East Coast ports have automation too and the truth is in Port La Port Long Beach where they have done that there are now more Ila workers than there were at the time there's been retraining refunction and um I think that is the model that that the Eastern Gul Coast IA should be looking at because it works well but given what we've seen on the picket lines this week that idea is none too popular with these union workers whether they end up reaching some Middle Ground remains to be seen but it's certainly possible we could see another strike at the ports just a few months from now in Bon I'm Joanna gagas and jpot late news [Music]