Who Won The Port Strike?

In my opinion, everyone except Donald Trump.

The dock workers picked, politically, a great time to go on strike. They could reasonably expect that Joe Biden wouldn't further damage what the Democratic Party has left of the organized labor vote by invoking the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, aka Taft-Hartley, and order them back to work -- and that he'd sense the opportunity to get back some of that organized labor vote by refusing to.

The port operators were going to have to reckon with contract difficulties and either make concessions or see a strike sooner or later. Better to get at least temporarily through that in a way that gave Biden a boost before the election, because they knew Trump's whackjob tariff/trade proposals would tank their business. Not that Biden's been any better than Trump 1.0 was on the subject, but Trump 2.0 sounds a lot worse.

I'm not saying the short strike / quick resolution was a pre-planned conspiracy, but I do suspect both sides had quick communications from Biden's people pointing out that the more quickly the thing was resolved, and with the least amount of overt government intervention,  the less likely a terrible November outcome for both sides.

A drawn-out strike would have given the Trumpists a month to thunder about how terrible it is that we rely so much on imports, etc., and the GOP's more actively anti-union wing a pretext to whine about how we need a "strong" president who would just conscript those mean ol' workers and force them back on the job (Trump plays "pro-labor" from a protectionist angle, but the larger party not as much).

To the extent the strike gets continuing media play, I expect Democrats to emphasize that the short-term economic panic was just a little preview -- a tiny taste -- of what four more years of Trump would look like, if he got what he says he wants.