At midnight on Monday this week, 45,000 dock workers, operating 36 ports across America walked off the job as part of their union's first strike since 1977.

These ports handle trillions of dollars' worth of trade every year and are an essential bottleneck in global supply chains.

This will affect everything from the fight with inflation, to manufacturing jobs, to just your ability to buy some junk off Temu.

And I don't know if you have noticed, but this is also happening right before an election.

The accusation has been made that this is just an opportunistic money grab directed at the most vulnerable part of the economy, made by workers who are already earning much more than the national average.

So why are these workers striking? And what happens now that they are? Workers from the port of New Orleans say they were on the picket line at 12:01.

Union reps say they're demanding fair wages and an end to the use of robots.

Tonight, crucial ports that fuel the American economy from New England to the Gulf Coast at a standstill after tens of thousands of Union dock workers walked off the job.

The current standoff is between the international Longshoreman's Association which is a union representing dock workers and the US Maritime Alliance which is negotiating on behalf of the ports.

The Union is asking for the standard renegotiation of pay and conditions, but the Maritime Alliance is arguing that their demands have gone too far.

And I can't believe I am going to say this but they might have a point.

According to the Associated Press, the union's demands are a 77% increase in pay across all workers to be implemented over the next six years, and a complete ban on automation which could replace workers jobs.

The pay demands are high, especially considering that longshoremen earn well above the national average to begin with.

According to the current agreement, the most experienced dock workers make $39 an hour, which is a base annual salary of just over $81,000 a year.

That's before overtime though, which at these ports can be plentiful.

With the 2020 report by the Waterfront Commission suggesting that about a third of all these workers are making about $200,000 per year.

The union is arguing that despite these earnings the pay increase is not unreasonable, considering this is just an opening offer which is already being negotiated.

And it's meant to be an incremental increase across six years, which means their pay will only increase by around 9% year to year.

That's probably a lot more than you are getting as a regular pay increase for your own job.

But the union president Harrold Daggett said in a statement that this is only to make up for the inflation spike in the last few years.

If you still think that's a pretty sizable pay bump, it's probably a good sign that you should look into a union.

If workers' wages had kept up with productivity, $200,000 wouldn't be a crazy income for someone putting up with overtime at a tough job.

Anyway, according to reports by ABS and the Associated Press, the Union has already rejected a compromise offer from the shipping alliance of a 50% pay increase over the same time period.

So as heated negotiations continue, their pay raise will be somewhere between these two numbers. Either way, it will be a big win for the workers.

But surprisingly, pay is not the biggest thing that the maritime alliance and the Longshoremen's Association is butting heads over.

The central focus of the Union's demands is on blocking automation technologies.

American ports already trail their Asian and European counterparts in terms of technologies to increase efficiency by automating tasks that otherwise need to be done manually by dock workers.

Analysts have noted that most US ports take longer to unload ships than these Asian and European ports.

This represents a major additional cost to shipping companies, who not only have to pay higher fees to ports that are paying 20 men to do what could have been the work of one man with the modern automated machinery,

they are also stuck in port longer, instead of making more crossings in a given year.

American workers on average are also paid better than their peers working the docks in Europe and especially Asia, because of the generally high incomes in America and because of the strong negotiating power of this Union.

This means that American dock workers are more expensive and less efficient because of their historic resistance to automation.

The associate director of supply chain resilience at Texas A&M University said in a report published by PBS that

if shipping ports get much worse, shippers might send more cargo to Mexican or Canadian ports and then on to the US by rail or truck, circumventing the union altogether.

The ports have also offered the union a continuation of the language around automation which is present in their current contract.

But the union is pushing back on this since technology has changed so much since the last contract was signed.

That has become difficult to predict how workers jobs could be undermined with this new wave of AI and advanced robotics.

Union workers believe that they are in a fight for the future of their jobs and the ports are desperately trying to catch up with other global rivals.

And it's unclear how either of them are going to back down from their non-negotiable positions.