The International Longshore and Warehouse Union locals in Los Angeles-Long Beach elected new officers recently, and importers and exporters should take note of what they intend to do.
The officers of Local 13, the general longshore division, and Local 63, the marine clerks’ division, after only a month on the job, offered waterfront employers an innovative plan to reduce port congestion during the upcoming peak shipping season.
The new officers want their locals to play an important role in improving productivity at the nation’s largest port complex. They also intend to put an end to the practice of calling wildcat strikes over social-justice issues that have nothing to do with working conditions at West Coast ports. Employers should take note of this new attitude and should attempt to form a closer working relationship with these ILWU locals.
Changing more than 60 years of adversarial tension will not be easy. There will be bumps in the long road ahead. And this initiative covers only Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Indeed, while the ILWU leadership in Southern California was developing a policy of cooperation, ILWU crane operators in Oakland, 400 miles to the north, were engaging in slowdowns. They were trying to force employers to grant them the same type of costly side deals that crane operators in Los Angeles-Long Beach and Seattle have with their local employers.
Nevertheless, the ILWU is a coastwide labor organization that grants a significant amount of autonomy to its locals. If the new officers of Locals 13 and 63 have a plan to improve productivity and reduce congestion in Southern California, employers should take a close look at it. Dockworkers see first-hand each day what causes congestion at marine terminals. Their views on how to reduce congestion and improve productivity can be valuable.
The ILWU plan addresses one of the main problems faced by busy marine terminals – container dwell time. Imported containers often sit for days at the terminals before they are trucked to local warehouses. Export loads and empties likewise spend too much time on the terminals.
Dwell time reduces productivity because longshoremen must sift through piles of containers to pull out the boxes that are ready to move to their destination.
The ILWU leadership is proposing to work with waterfront employers, the ports and the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach to locate off-dock sites that can be used to store containers until they are ready. The sites would be secured, and kept open 24 hours a day. This would allow the containers to be trucked during off-hours, when freeways are not congested.
To be sure, there’s something in the proposal for the dockworkers’ union, too. Something that’s important to any union: jobs. ILWU drivers would be used to truck the containers to and from the off-dock sites.
But here, too, much thought has gone into the plan. Terminals would be expected to set up special expedited gates so ILWU drivers could get four or five turns a day, thus justifying the high pay they would receive compared to the owner-operators who do most of the harbor hauling today.
While this plan would require cooperation between employers and the ILWU locals, the new leadership is also proposing to take unilateral action in another important area, the practice of calling work stoppages to press for social justice around the world.
The ILWU shut down West Coast ports at the end of November in solidarity with demonstrators at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. In the past, its members have boycotted shipments from South Africa to protest apartheid, and grapes from California to express solidarity with the United Farm Workers. The list goes on and on.
The leaders of Locals 13 and 63 have not lost their social conscience, nor do they intend to turn their backs on the principles upon which the ILWU was founded. However, the officers, many of whom are college-educated, are aware of the important role Los Angeles-Long Beach plays in moving about one-third of the nation’s containerized imports and exports in a just-in-time environment.
The local economies in the Northeast, South and Midwest depend upon this busy port complex just as much as the Western states do. “Commerce has changed. We have a responsibility to that cargo,” said Local 13 President Mike Mitre.
The leaders are sending a clear message to importers and exporters throughout the Pacific Rim that port productivity is a top priority to them. They are also rightly telling the members of their locals that improved productivity is critical to them, too. It means more cargo, and more cargo means more work.
This is the kind of approach that can lead to success for shippers, carriers and waterfront labor alike. Everyone can win.
