Dockworkers walked out of every major port on the US East and Gulf coasts for the first time in nearly 50 years, staging a strike that could ripple across the world’s largest economy and cause political turmoil just weeks before the presidential election.

Nearly 50,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) are on strike Tuesday against the nation’s East and Gulf Coast ports, according to the Associated Press, choking off the flow of many of the nation’s imports and exports in what could become America’s most disruptive work stoppage in decades.