tens of thousands of thousands of dock workers along the East and Gulf Coast walked off the job this morning.

William Bringham has been covering the story, so William, this essentially freezes operations at ports that

handle what half of all U.S. imports and exports?

That's right, Amna. This strike is being called by the International Longshoremen's Association and they believe, analysts believe that this

strike could cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars every single day.

In fact, today the president of a union local in Philadelphia made clear that workers intend to use every

single bit of leverage they have.

We may be 60,000 members from Maine to Texas, but what we can trouble in the economy is billions and billions of

dollars every day, every day, okay? And all we want them to do is share.

So to understand what's behind this and what this means for U.S. consumers,

we're joined again by Peter Goodman.

He's Global Economics Correspondent for the New York Times, and author of how the world ran out of everything.

Peter Goodman, great to see you back on the news hour.

We've got about 50,000 workers on strike

at 14 major ports across the eastern Gulf Coast. What are they striking

about? What is it that they want? Well they want higher wages, they want a piece of the action

after years in which international shipping carriers have racked up record

profits and they also want assurances that there will not be more automation without their permission at major ports. They see automation as a way to

replace them with robots and of course they're not paranoid to have concluded from history that if you go back to the beginning of containerized

shipping in the 1950s, the people who own ships use machinery as a way to make themselves

less vulnerable to work stoppages by labor and they

rather pay machines than human beings who can go on strike, who can be home sick, who can be wanting to do other things than moving cargo.

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