The International Longshoremen's Association is suspending its three-day strike until Jan. 15 to provide time to negotiate a new contract. The union and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents ports and shipping companies, said in a joint statement that they have reached a tentative agreement on wages.
"Effective immediately, all current job actions will cease and all work covered by the Master Contract will resume," the ILA and USMX said in a joint statement Thursday evening.
Over at Port Elizabeth, the lights were back on, but as of 6 a.m. Friday there were no ships in the port yet. There had been none anchored there at the beginning of the strike.
It can take up to three hours for a container ship to make its way from the Verrazano Bridge to Port Elizabeth but entrance lanes at the port are ready.
Port Director Beth Rooney says it is "all hands on desk to reopen the port and restart the flow of cargo."
There are 24 ships anchored offshore waiting to get into port, including 19 container vessels, four car ships and one other specialty vessel. There are 35,000 import containers on 19 container vessels, including "all types of consumer goods that we use on a daily basis."
That is addition to the 21,000 import containers that were at the terminal when it closed Monday. Eleven of those vessels are being brought into port so cargo can begin to be unloaded.
Cargo operations, discharging containers and automobiles, and then reloading export containers onto the ships, will begin Friday at 7 p.m. and work around the clock.
Following the discharge of the cargo, two of the terminals will open over the weekend for trucks to pick up cargo and the remaining terminals will open Monday at 6 a.m.
"I do expect by this time next week we will have serviced all of the vessels that were delayed and that cargo will be flowing into the economy," Rooney said.
Truck traffic is expected to increase in the Newark Liberty Airport area creating some backups on the New Jersey Turnpike at exits 13A and 14. Those are the main entrances to Port Newark and Port Elizabeth.
Those trucks will be looking to move the goods out of the area that had been delayed to start to clear the backlog.
Tentative agreement reached
The tentative agreement would increase workers' wages by 62% over the life of the six-year contract, sources familiar confirm to ABC News.
This represents a significant increase from the shipping industry group's offer of a 50% wage increase earlier this week. The union had been pushing for a 77% pay hike over six years.
The tentative agreement would bring the hourly wage for a top dockworker to $63 per hour at the end of the new contract, up from $39 per hour under the expired contract.
The Maritime Alliance increased its offer amid public pressure from the Biden administration to put forward a contract offering higher wages.
The tentative agreement does not resolve differences between the union and shipping companies over the use of automated machinery, sources said. That will be a key focus of negotiations between both sides from now until January 15.
"I want to applaud the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the United States Maritime Alliance for coming together to reopen the East Coast and Gulf ports. Today's tentative agreement on a record wage and an extension of the collective bargaining process represents critical progress towards a strong contract," President Joe Biden said on the agreement.
"I want to thank the union workers, the carriers, and the port operators for acting patriotically to reopen our ports and ensure the availability of critical supplies for Hurricane Helene recovery and rebuilding. Collective bargaining works, and it is critical to building a stronger economy from the middle out and the bottom up," he continued.
Dockworkers take to the picket lines
Tens of thousands of U.S. dockworkers had walked off the job early Tuesday morning, clogging dozens of ports along the East and Gulf coasts.
ILA members started to set up picket lines at shipping ports up and down the Atlantic and Gulf coasts as of 12:01 a.m. Tuesday in the union's first coastwide strike in nearly 50 years.
The ILA, the union representing 50,000 East Coast and Gulf Coast dockworkers under the contract at issue, was seeking higher wages and a ban on the use of some automated equipment.
"ILA longshore workers deserve to be compensated for the important work they do keeping American commerce moving and growing," the ILA told ABC News in a statement on Monday. "Meanwhile, ILA dedicated longshore workers continue to be crippled by inflation due to USMX's unfair wage packages."
A prolonged work stoppage of several weeks or months could have rekindled inflation for some goods and triggered layoffs at manufacturers as raw materials dried up, experts said.
The last time East Coast and Gulf Coast workers went on strike, in 1977, the work stoppage lasted seven weeks.
In 2002, a strike among workers at West Coast ports lasted 11 days before then-President George W. Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act and ended the standoff.
(ABC News and the Associated Press contributed to this report)
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