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    Dockworkers Vote to Accept New Labor Contract

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    Workers at East and Gulf Coast ports who went on strike briefly in October ratified a deal that includes a 62 percent raise over six years.Dockworkers on the East and Gulf Coasts voted in favor of a new contract on Tuesday, ending labor turbulence at ports that handle a large share of U.S. trade with the rest of the world.The dockworkers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, said nearly 99 percent of its members had supported the contract, which raises wages 62 percent over six years and guarantees jobs when employers introduce technology that can move cargo autonomously.The deal was reached after a short strike in October, the first full-scale walkout since 1977, and the intervention of two U.S. presidents.Officials from the Biden administration pushed the United States Maritime Alliance, the group representing employers, to increase its wage offer, which ended the strike and brought the I.LA. back to the bargaining table. After his election victory, Donald J. Trump backed the union, saying he supported their fight against automation.“This is an incredible contract package,” Harold J. Daggett, the president of the I.L.A., said in a statement.Dockworkers have significant leverage in contract talks because they can shut down ports, throwing supply chains into chaos. But labor experts said Mr. Daggett had bolstered the union’s cause by calling a strike and by establishing strong ties with Mr. Trump.“The only way they would have gotten a deal like this was through striking, showing that they had the economic power and, it turns out, the political power,” said William Brucher, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.All 41 members of the Maritime Alliance, a group that includes port operating companies and shipping lines, voted for the contract, which covers the roughly 25,000 longshoremen who move containers on the East and Gulf Coasts.Under the contact, hourly wages will rise to $63 in 2029, from the current $39. That is comparable to the pay for dockworkers on the West Coast, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose wages will rise to nearly $61 in 2027.With overtime and higher rates for working at night, longshoremen can earn well over $200,000 a year.The I.L.A. has long opposed the introduction of automated cranes and other machines.Like the old contract, the new one bars employers from deploying machinery that can operate at all times without a person directing its moves. The West Coast longshoremen’s union has allowed such technology — like driverless container-moving vehicles — at its ports for years.But the I.L.A.’s new contract does not stop employers from adding cranes that can at times perform tasks — like stacking containers — without direction from a human. And the new contract makes it easier for employers to introduce such cranes.Still, the union got a job guarantee that management would assign at least one worker for each additional crane. (Now, one union worker might remotely oversee and operate several cranes at once.) More

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      Hurricane Helene Aftermath: 6 Issues Across the Southeast

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      The worst fallout from the hurricane is in western North Carolina, but at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems. More than a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm, state officials across the Southeast are scrambling to repair damaged electrical lines, roads and bridges affecting tens of thousands across the path of destruction.Helene wreaked havoc from Florida to the Appalachian states after making landfall on the Gulf Coast on Sept. 26. The worst fallout is still in western North Carolina, where, in addition to the mass wreckage of destroyed buildings, teams are searching for dozens of missing people, some areas have no potable water, cellphone communication remains spotty, more than 170,000 customers still don’t have power, and hundreds of roads are closed. But at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems from impassable highways to ruined farmland.President Biden, who surveyed the storm’s toll this week, said Helene most likely caused billions of dollars in damage, and he asked Congress on Friday to quickly replenish disaster relief funds to help. Here are some of the biggest current issues in the Southeast:In North Carolina, an untold number of people are still missing.The remains of a home in Swannanoa, N.C.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesIn the western part of the state, many families’ greatest concern is their unaccounted loved ones. But looking for them in mountain-ringed towns and rugged ravines has been a daunting task for search teams, and the effort has been hampered by poor cell service and widespread power losses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John D. MacDonald Knew a Hurricane Like Helene Was Coming

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      John D. MacDonald was eerily prescient about the risks of human-driven climate disasters in the region.When I learned early Friday morning that Cedar Key, Fla., had been flattened overnight by Hurricane Helene, one of the first things that came to my mind was a song lyric by Jimmy Buffett — early Buffett, before he became a walking tourist attraction. One of his better songs is “Incommunicado,” released in 1981. It begins: “Travis McGee’s still in Cedar Key/That’s what old John MacDonald said.”Buffett didn’t get it quite right. McGee, the tanned, laid-back antihero of John D. MacDonald’s terrific thriller novels, didn’t hang out in Cedar Key. He docked the houseboat he lived in — it was named the Busted Flush, because he’d won it in a card game — on the opposite coast, in Fort Lauderdale.But Buffett clearly knew MacDonald’s own geography. The novelist, who died in 1986, spent most of his adult life in Sarasota and on nearby Siesta Key, just a few hours south of Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast. When Helene scraped ruinously along the central and northern parts of the Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday night, it was taking aim at MacDonald country.There are many reasons to read MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels, which include “The Deep Blue Good-By” (1964), “Pale Gray for Guilt” (1968) and “The Dreadful Lemon Sky” (1974). They’re sly, satirical, tattered around the edges. Kingsley Amis thought MacDonald was a better writer than Saul Bellow. All of the McGee books have colors in their titles. MacDonald was among the first to use this sort of mnemonic device, as Sue Grafton would in her alphabet series, so readers could remember which ones they’d read.Another reason to read MacDonald is that he was eerily prescient. How much so? He saw Helene coming, more clearly than most. Here is a paragraph from his novel “Dead Low Tide,” from 1953:You pray, every night, that the big one doesn’t come this year. A big one stomped and churned around Cedar Key a couple of years back, and took a mild pass at Clearwater and huffed itself out. One year it is going to show up, walking out of the Gulf and up the coast, like a big red top walking across the schoolyard. … It’s going to be like taking a good kick at an anthill, and then the local segment of that peculiar aberration called the human race is going to pick itself up, whistle for the dredges and start it all over again.In his 1956 novel “Murder in the Wind” (also published as “Hurricane”), he wrote about a storm named Hilda — not Helene, but close enough — that destroys the area around Cedar Key. In an author’s note at the front, he urges anyone doubting the plausibility of such a disaster to remember that just six years earlier, a hurricane had put much of the region underwater.“Though the chance is statistically remote,” MacDonald writes, “there need only be the unfortunate conjunction of hurricane path and high Gulf tide to create coastal death and damage surpassing the fictional account in this book.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More