Six months after it sent a letter to the Pacific Maritime
Association and International Longshore & Warehouse Union urging them to
hammer out a labor contract, the National Retail Federation has done so again.
In a letter sent to both management and labor, NRF President
and CEO Matt Shay said “the lack of a new labor contract between PMA and the
ILWU is having a big impact on port productivity, particularly in Southern
California.”
He also suggested that at a minimum, both parties should extend
the expired contract through November “in order to reinstate arbitration
agreements, which are preventing many issues at the ports from being
addressed.”
“Finalizing a new labor contract is an absolutely critical
component to working through the backlog of shipping containers now piling up
at West Coast ports,” Shay wrote. “We are deeply troubled by the fact that no
apparent progress has been made in the negotiations since August, when the PMA
and ILWU announced a ‘tentative deal’ on health benefits.”
“Whether intentional or not,” Shay wrote, “the fact that
neither the PMA nor ILWU has made any public progress report in more than a
month is sending a very troublesome and disconcerting signal.”
The PMA and ILWU have been negotiating a new six-year
contract since mid-May. The previous six-year labor pact, which covered almost
20,000 longshore workers at 29 ports up and down the West Coast, expired at 5
pm on July 1, but although no contract extension has been ratified, both sides
initially agreed to keep operating under the provisions of the recently expired
contract.
The NRF’s Oct. 10 letter came six months after a mid-April
letter to Pacific Maritime Association Chairman and CEO James McKenna and
International Longshore & Warehouse Union President Robert McEllrath
written on the behalf of the millions of businesses the NRF represents, urging
the two sides to come to a quick agreement for the sake of the U.S. economy.
