By Mark Edward Nero
The Pacific Maritime
Association on Jan. 3 accused the International Longshore & Warehouse Union
of engaging in a work slowdown in order to gain leverage in the ongoing
contract talks between the two parties.
“The union, and
Local 13 in particular, has led a sustained campaign over the last two months
to withhold critically-important, skilled longshore workers from
their shifts on the docks,” the PMA said in a statement that alleged that crane
operators, who receive and deliver containers, were being held back.
“By withholding them,
the union has negatively impacted cargo-handling operations
throughout Southern California,” the PMA said while alleging that
the union’s work actions started at the end of October, when
contract talks began to stall.
The PMA said
it estimates that the average number of shifts for qualified crane
operators has dropped from an average of more than 110 per day to under
35 daily, something that has resulted in “tens of thousands
of containers available for discharge sitting on the docks at the twin
ports.”
Employers put in
orders for the number of operators needed, and the ILWU unilaterally
cut back those orders by two-thirds, the PMA claims.
“Removing qualified
yard crane drivers from terminal operations is the equivalent of a football
coach sending out 10 players and no quarterback. You can’t run the play
effectively,” PMA spokesman Wade Gates said. “The congestion in the
terminals is near a breaking point.”
The PMA says that in
order to focus efforts on clearing containers from terminal yards and get them
moving to their final destinations, it has been reducing the
number of workers ordered to unload ships on night shifts,
thereby avoiding the prospect of creating gridlock that the additional unloading
of ships would create.
“It makes no sense to
maintain the pace of removing containers from ships when there’s no room
for them on the terminals,” Gates said. “If a parking lot were full, you
would clear out empty spaces before bringing in more cars. The same rule
applies here.”
“It’s not solely the
number of longshoremen the union is making available that matters,
it’s the type of workers themselves,” Gates said. “Without qualified yard
crane drivers who play a critical role in loading and offloading
cargo containers from trucks, the congestion problem is made far worse at
terminal yards.”
In response, the ILWU
on Jan. 3 denied that it has been withholding labor and said the congestion
issues at the Southern California ports were due to larger vessels bringing in
an ever-increasing number of containers, plus a shortage of chassis’ used to
haul the containers to and from the port terminals.
The PMA and ILWU have
been in negotiations since May 2014. The previous six-year labor pact
between the two sides, which covered almost 20,000 longshore workers at 29
ports up and down the West Coast, expired July 1.
