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Time is running out to avoid the first major strike at shipping terminals along the East and Gulf Coasts in nearly half a century. White House officials are calling for dock workers and port operators to settle their differences, but at this point it does seem unlikely. At least that's according to our next guest. Just into Yahoo finance as well, a group of White House officials, including transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and acting labor secretary Julie Su are meeting with United States Maritime Alliance representatives to push for a deal. Joining us now to break down what's at stake, senior fellow at the Burn Center for Social Change and the former top labor policy advisor to President Biden. That is Seth Harris. Seth, thank you so much. So, um, obviously this is a very important economic issue. It's also a very important political issue. So it is interesting here that the Biden administration does seem to be sending proxies. It seems, it seemed initially as though President Biden wanted to be a little hands off here. What do you take, uh, what is this signal that we are seeing some cabinet members start to get involved?

Well, this has been the method that the Biden administration, the Biden Harris administration has used to deal with major strikes, very large scale economically important strikes is they urge the parties to come to the table and to bargain and then they offer cabinet secretaries as sort of cheerleaders, mediators, cajolers, beggars. They're they're trying to just put pressure on the parties to keep the public interest in mind and to try to get to a resolution. Um, so this is fairly typical pattern for the White House. I I don't think it's an indication of anything extraordinary other than that, this is a big important labor dispute, which it self-evidently is.

You know Seth, it sounds like um a potentially tough dance or tough tightrope to walk here because if you're Biden Harris, you don't want a port strike. You don't want to suffer any kind of economic damage, of course, weeks before an election. At the same time, you don't want to alienate union members. How do you kind of walk that line?

Well, the president has been pretty clear about his perspective on this. He has the authority under a law called the Taft Hartley Act, the Labor Management Relations Act, to go to court and seek an injunction that would effectively end the strike. It would create an 80 day cooling off period. And President Biden has said, I'm definitely not doing that. I'm not going to seek an injunction. And so he's made very clear that he wants collective bargaining to work. He wants workers to have their say in their working conditions. He wants them to be able to use whatever economic power they have to get what they feel as owed to them. That has been his position very consistently throughout the administer, the course of the administration. The only exception to that was the national freight rail labor dispute that occurred a couple of years ago. It's a different law. There are different requirements under that law. And also remember, we were in a much more precarious situation back then. Supply chains were broken, they were struggling, inflation was beginning to climb because of those broken supply chains. We don't have that anymore. Supply chains have healed, and so I think he's less worried about the macroeconomic impact of this kind of a strike.

Um, what is your estimation of that macroeconomic impact, Seth?

Well, I haven't run the numbers. That's somebody else's job. I'm a lawyer, not an economist. But my sense is that consumers won't begin to feel any meaningful effects from the strike, uh, in the first week or two, if it lasts for that long. Uh, my expectation is that retailers and manufacturers and other importers, um, have inventories built up that will allow them to withstand some period of strike. Um, I think that if there are pressures on products, it's most likely to be perishable goods that are coming into the United States, although with the kind of refrigeration that we have right now, those goods also can last for a good long time. So I don't think it's going to have an instant effect. If we see prices rise extremely rapidly, I think what President Biden and Vice President Harris will do is urge the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate those who are raising prices for price gouging. That has been a central theme of Vice President Harris's campaign. I don't think they want to see it here. But I think if the strike does last for multiple weeks, then we're going to begin to see some economic pressures in some industries that depend very heavily on imported products and imported inputs into finished products in the United States.