Did striking dock workers get back to work because they knew Ron DeSantis wouldn’t back down from their demands?
The Governor isn’t saying no, telling a friendly radio show host that he used his “megaphone” to effectuate desired results when it came to the recent work stoppage from the International Longshoremen’s Association.
“I knew we would be able to get this stuff resumed,” Florida’s Chief Executive said Friday.
When Dana Loesch suggested that a “lot of people are giving (the Florida Governor) a lot of credit for bringing that to a close or at least bringing them back to the negotiating table,” DeSantis said he used his “megaphone” to sound the alarm that his state wouldn’t tolerate the short-lived strike by the folks at the ports.
“I think I was the first major elected official to actually lean in on it in a way that benefited the public. I think a lot of other people have been kind of tiptoeing around it. A lot of people were justifying what was happening. And I’m just thinking to myself that is not in the best interest of Florida or this country,” DeSantis recounted Friday.
Among his actions announced just hours before the ILA got back to work: deploying the Florida National Guard and Florida State Guard “to critical ports affected to maintain order and, if possible, resume operations which would otherwise be shut down during this interruption.”
While Floridians never got to see the spectacle of DeSantis’ armed forces working to “ensure order” against organized labor, he alluded to a “lot of other moving parts behind the scenes” Floridians never got to see come to fruition.
It was “crunch,” he added, for storm recovery, given the “inordinate amount of supplies compared to what you would normally use in a given area.”
“So this stuff can get backed up under the best of circumstances. Just imagine if you stop bringing in the key materials that we need to make all this happen, it would have been a total disaster,” DeSantis added.
The Governor said he was “confident we would be able to mitigate with what I had done” and “even more confident just the optics of this to have people suffering and basically be told that you’re just S.O.L. that this was not going to be something that was sustainable.”
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