President Biden and Vice President Harris may find themselves in an increasingly difficult position the longer the International Longshoreman Association (ILA) strike on the East and Gulf Coasts continues.

Biden could put workers back at the docks by invoking the Taft-Hartley Act, but doing so would anger progressives and labor weeks before an election where Harris needs strong turnout from the Democratic base.

Yet if the strike does start pinching the economy in the next couple of weeks, it risks undoing some of the progress Harris has made in polls on perhaps the most critical issue in the election.

Shipping and logistics experts told The Hill that the timing of when exactly prices could start going up in the economy as a result of the strike were hard to know.

“The things that are going to be impacted first [are] really the perishable stuff, the flowers and the food and the pharmaceuticals – the type of things that are shipped in refrigerated containers and have pretty narrow parameters within which they are good,” Kent Gourdin, director of the global logistics and transportation program at the College of Charleston, told The Hill.

The Freightos Baltic Index is down around $4500 with just 1 percent volatility, having eased to that level from $5,500 in August.

For consumer goods prices, Gourdin said he thought price impacts could “be a little while because so many of the large retailers … had anticipated this and started stocking up months ago.”

As the strike continues and price pressures travel further upstream toward the production end of the pipeline,........

© The Hill