LOS ANGELES — This year’s West Coast longshore contract negotiations already are proving costly to terminal operators, harbor trucking companies and cargo consolidators.
Even though the International Longshore and Warehouse Union continued to work past the July 1 expiration of its previous contract, ILWU work slowdowns in recent days have caused cargo delays that have rippled through the transportation chain.
Negotiations for a waterfront contract resumed Friday after a five-day hiatus, but job actions by ILWU locals continued at all major West Coast container ports. Longshoremen were arriving late, refusing to work extended hours or reducing container lifts per hour by 20% to 30%.
Harbor trucking companies used adjectives such as “disastrous” and “brutal” to describe the situation at marine terminals at Long Beach and Los Angeles, the nation’s largest port complex.
Hundreds of trucks backed up at terminal gates, with drivers waiting four or five hours to pick up loads at some terminals.
Longshoremen “used to come in at 7 a.m. Now they come in at eight. They stop for a break at 10. They stop at noon. They stop at 2 p.m.,” said Greg Owen, president of Tri-Modal Distribution Services, Carson, Calif.
But Los Angeles-Long Beach was lucky compared with Oakland, where ILWU locals refused to load or unload ships for two days while they pressed employers to assign an extra worker to each crane. Although longshoremen resumed working ships Thursday, at least four vessels left the port without working or with partial loads.
By Friday, 16 ships were either waiting for berths at Oakland or were expected at the port soon, said Dan Westerlin, the port’s manager of strategic marketing. It would probably take until early this week to clear out the backlog, he said.
The slowdowns that began in the California ports last Tuesday did not reach Seattle and Tacoma until Thursday. According to the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents West Coast shipping lines and terminal operators, crane productivity dropped and longshoremen stopped working “flex” gates, a shipping industry term for extended hours at marine terminals.
“They’re going by the letter of the law. It’s had an impact,” said a trucking executive in Seattle.
The ILWU job actions had a cascading effect on cargo consolidators and intermodal rail companies. “We’re not getting the (truck) turns we had been getting,” said Cobb Grantham, managing director of Distribution Services Ltd., a consolidator in Southern California.
Consolidators such as DSL respond to disruptions at the ports by sending more drivers to the harbor or storing containers at outside yards. “It results in extra costs,” Grantham said.
Container flows were also affected at the huge Intermodal Container Transfer Facility which Union Pacific Railroad operates near the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor complex. Cargo volume into the facility was reduced, and shipments were thrown off schedule because of routing changes by vessel operators, said Mike Furtney, a Union Pacific spokesman.
Exporters, trucking companies and cargo consolidators said the unexpected slowdowns are hard to monitor.
“The worst aspect of this is dealing with the uncertainties and rumors,” said one exporter. Traffic managers must respond instantly to reports of port slowdowns or work stoppages. If the reports turn out to be inaccurate, they end up diverting cargo needlessly.
ILWU headquarters in San Francisco said the job actions are not related to the contract expiration, but shippers don’t believe it.
They say that in recent negotiations the PMA has given the union everything it wants, and that waterfront employers should strike a deal quickly so everybody can get on with the job of moving cargo during the peak season for Asian imports.
“If they’re going to capitulate anyway, they could have saved us all a lot of stress by doing so on July 1,” one traffic manager said.
Harbor trucking companies, and especially the owner-operator drivers they hire, have been hit the hardest by the ILWU job actions. The drivers, who aren’t affiliated with the ILWU, are paid by the trip. They need at least three, but preferably four, round trips a day to earn a profit.
“If they get two turns now, they’re lucky. Three would be extraordinary,” said Tri-Modal’s Owen.
Trucking executives said they know the situation is getting serious when importers and exporters agree to pay truckers “stand-by” time when the drivers must wait in line at marine terminals.
Because congestion at terminals is common at busy ports such as Los Angeles-Long Beach, trucking companies are constantly pressing their customers or marine terminals to pay stand-by time. In normal times, those requests invariably are turned down.
Last week, however, some shippers were so desperate to get their containers that they agreed to pay truckers $35 to $50 an hour when they had to wait in line at the terminals.
