Captain William Bradley, President of Local 333 of the International Longshoremen's Association's United Maritime Division, stated two days before the actual strike that a strike vote had been taken the previous weekend, during a breakdown of negotiations with the Employers Wage Adjustment Committee, which represents the port's owners and operators.

[2] James P. McAllister, with a two-day growth of beard, stood inside with the employer's wage adjustment committee, all admittedly groggy from the long negotiations.

Their position is that the employers are unable to offer more money and as to the 40-hour work, they see that as a way to build up more overtime[3] The city of New York made drastic moves to offset the effects that the mayor declared would come to fruition because of the strike.

All coal and oil would be barred from places of amusement, including theatres and movie houses; fuel would be strictly rationed to public utilities, hospitals and other institutions.

[4] The mayor's over-reaction to the situation was solved one week later when the striking tugboat workers returned to work on February 14, 1946.

This was accomplished because both sides agreed to a three-man arbitration panel to determine the final outcome of the contract negotiations.

Most people agreed that the situation would most likely have been solved sooner or not happened at all if a clear-cut policy on wages and prices had not been so long in coming from Washington.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the next eighteen months, some 7 million workers engaged in the largest, most sustained wave of strikes in American history.

The big national strikes were political events involving the federal government and some of the largest, most powerful corporations in the world.

What a few years later would be dubbed "fringe benefits"—health insurance and pensions—were not an issue in any of the strikes, according to a detailed analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Furthermore, the executive branch of the federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike imperiled the national health or safety.