Making Waves on the Waterfront

On one side of the table sits a tough, deliberative, tradition-bound union determined to protect some of the last great blue-collar jobs in America.

On the other is an increasingly powerful and impatient group of multinational corporations driven to move merchandise ever faster as transpacific trade explodes.

The gulf between them--which has grown through years of distrust, resentment and misunderstanding--at times seems as wide as the ocean that separates California and Asia.

That divide now colors every move in the high-stakes contract negotiations between the Pacific Maritime Assn., representing ocean carriers and stevedoring services, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Talks covering 10,500 dockworkers along the West Coast began a month ago in San Francisco, but have yielded little. The current contract expires at 5 p.m. Monday.

Each side has gripes: Ocean carriers claim the union operates under cumbersome, 40-year-old rules and has been slow to accept technological changes that could save them millions of dollars. Workers claim the shipping lines want to chip away at their strength by moving highly paid jobs to nonunion contractors, reducing health benefits and eliminating the union’s revered hiring halls.

Some of the toughest points, however, are ambiguous and emotional, and they cannot be resolved with a clause in a contract. That became clear during two recent tours of a major Los Angeles port terminal, guided alternately by representatives of management and labor with the intent of clarifying contract issues.

From the start, it was evident that these were starkly different cultures. High-level union officials debated for a week before agreeing to the tour and establishing ground rules. The PMA made arrangements in a day, with only one condition: The shipping line that opened its doors could not be named. “If we say anything that makes the union mad,” a supervisor said, “they can make life hell for us.”

The foreign-owned line operates one of the largest and most modern of 14 terminals in the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex. Covering 300 acres, it can accommodate three mega-ships at a time, each one carrying several thousand steel containers the size of railroad cars.

On a recent Thursday morning, the terminal hummed with activity. Trucks rumbled along lanes of containers, which were stacked three-high by machines resembling giant forklifts. At the water’s edge, long-limbed cranes plucked multi-ton boxes from ships’ decks, then set them down on a truck chassis with a thunderous boom. Two minutes later, the same crane dropped another load. Then another and another.

Strict Work Rules

The scene was noisy, outsized and frenetic. Then, at 11:30 a.m., it came to a sudden halt. Time for lunch.

Industry consultant Frank Hanley, who was leading the management tour, chuckled and shook his head. He couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration of the union’s power.

As the average U.S. workweek grew through the 1990s, and 24-hour operations and staggered shifts became routine, the ILWU managed to maintain work rules much as they existed a generation ago. They include a common hour-long lunch break, double-pay for night shifts and the guarantee of a work pace that the union calls healthy and sustainable, but the shippers deride as simply slow.

ILWU members are among the highest-paid blue-collar employees in the nation, with basic longshore workers earning an average of $80,000 last year, including overtime, and union foremen taking in $158,000.

“That’s not middle income, that’s upper income,” said Hanley, who once managed terminals in Hong Kong and Oakland for a U.S. ocean carrier, but left the company several years ago after it was bought by a Singapore-based freight line. Part of a wave of consolidations that shifted most major shipping lines on the West Coast to foreign ownership, the sale nudged many veteran employees such as Hanley into early retirement.

His task that day was to show how new electronic devices could speed up the freight-moving process, boosting productivity and profits and making way for the growth of international trade. The PMA says the union has blocked such technology to protect jobs.

First stop was the terminal’s main entrance. On an average day, trucks pass through its gates 3,000 times to deliver containers for export or, more commonly, empties that once carried consumer goods from Asia.

Each “gate move” must be documented, and the driver assigned to a spot on the crowded terminal grounds. How that transaction happens is one of the most contentious issues in the contract talks.

Shippers claim most of the information, such as origin, destination and contents of the container, could be collected electronically by optical scanners that read codes stamped on the side. But they say the union insists on manually keying in much of the data, and staffing the gates as they have for decades: with one highly paid clerk for each of the 10 entry lanes.

“Four or five could handle what 10 are doing today,” Hanley said, “but they won’t allow it.”

An incremental step, he said, was the installation of cabin-height printers at each gate, which allow truckers to tear off their own documents rather than taking them from a clerk. The union resisted that change for months, Hanley said. Meanwhile, clerks insisted on tearing out orders from the printers and handing them to drivers, who had to park and walk to get them. Those steps added 40 seconds to each transaction, he said.

Union representatives say printers now are being used as intended, and that they simply needed time to study the change.

“They have the right to introduce new technology. It’s already in the contract,” said Peter Peyton, a third-generation longshoreman. Section 15 of the contract that expires Monday states, “There shall be no interference by the union with the employers’ right to operate efficiently and to change methods of work and to utilize mechanical, electronic or other labor-saving devices.”

There are just two caveats: The technology can’t be used to make the work more difficult, or to move it outside the union’s jurisdiction.

Tough Negotiations

Shipping lines say the union uses those conditions to block the technological changes they need. Workers say without them, the use of scanners, remote cameras and computers could allow shipping lines to move jobs to nonunion contractors in low-wage states. Peyton said the union has proved through the grievance process that several shipping lines have done just that.

Such fundamental disagreements marked each stop on the two tours and illustrated the reason negotiations have been so tough.

When Hanley discussed technology, it became clear that the shipping lines’ primary motivation is to sharply reduce the number of highly paid clerks employed at the ports. Although no union members would be fired, he said, some clerks might have to be trained in less desirable work.

Comments from an operations manager who went along on the tour, but asked not to be identified, also indicated a resentment of the union’s perceived arrogance. “The ILWU has never punched a clock,” he said in claiming that some members report late for work. Later, nodding toward a line of battered dock trucks, he said, “Look at the way they treat our equipment.”

The flip side of that resentment is a fear of the ILWU that is all but unknown in these days of shrinking union membership and weakened labor power. In a major dispute, the union could shut down the entire Western waterfront. But even a small offense could have subtle repercussions. For example, the manager said, union dispatchers with a grudge could assign less experienced “casual” workers to the terminal, slowing production.

Partners, Not Employees

For their part, union representatives said they merely want to be treated as respected partners in port development, not compliant employees. “If they listened to us, we could save them millions,” Peyton said.

Passing through the same terminal a week later, he pointed out several union-inspired innovations that have helped the shippers’ bottom lines, such as labor-saving quick-release locks on containers.

A college-educated computer aficionado who defies the stereotype of a burly dockworker, Peyton said terminal operators could boost productivity by installing a shared central computer system. They won’t, he said, because of competitive concerns. “One time, I had to wait two hours for three containers to come over from another terminal because the computers were incompatible,” he said. “Someone literally had to drive over to pick up the paperwork.”

Peyton, whose clerical job is a prime target for shipping lines, also challenged the idea that faster gate transactions would speed the flow of containers. He said it would just move congestion from outside the gates to inside the yard. “It’s already like dodge ball in here,” he said as trucks plowed past each other.

Ultimately, Peyton’s arguments came down to philosophy. Why shouldn’t dockworkers share in the bounty of global trade? Why is it archaic for a blue-collar worker to live comfortably and support a community’s economy? Why does high productivity trump solid jobs?

His grandfather worked the docks before the union was born in 1934. Through family lore, Peyton knows how dangerous and humiliating those days were. Men lined up on the waterfront to bribe foremen with money and offers of women. Once hired, they were worked to the point of exhaustion.

It wasn’t until many failed attempts, and finally a brutal strike in 1934, that the union was born and employers were forced to negotiate.

Union members along the coast commemorate that strike, known as Bloody Thursday, every July 5 with marches and speeches. Some ports close for several hours. In San Francisco, painted outlines mark the places where two bodies fell.

In the frenetic, cutthroat, fast-changing world of global trade, such reverence for history might be seen as a sign of everything wrong with the ILWU, proof that the union is archaic and inefficient.

To dockworkers, however, the past informs the future, and ultimately, they believe that’s what keeps their union strong.