Two Lead Change at Ports During Critical Juncture

If longshore workers are lords of the docks, James Spinosa is lord of lords.

As head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the veteran marine clerk leads 10,500 West Coast laborers who load and unload the raw materials, cars, clothes, computers, toys and other consumer goods that propel the economies of the Pacific Rim.

He rose to power in the late 1990s, during one of the union’s most rancorous periods. Now he presides over the ILWU at a crucial juncture in its history -- just as the union’s charismatic founder, Harry Bridges, did 40 years ago when he supported the containerization of cargo, revolutionizing the maritime industry at the cost of thousands of waterfront jobs.

Today, shipping lines and terminal operators are demanding concessions from Spinosa to allow the use of computers and electronic gear to precisely track containers from ship to customer, which would eliminate hundreds of union jobs.

How such modernization will be implemented on the docks has led to a costly and protracted contract dispute with the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents shipping lines and terminal operators, many of them giant foreign-owned companies with global reach.

On Nov. 1, the union and the employer group reached a compromise on the critical issue of technology, a key break in the stalemate that has disrupted West Coast cargo operations for more than a month.

Specific terms of the deal were not released, but people familiar with the compromise say the tentative agreement basically allows the use of new technology while extending union jurisdiction and guaranteeing jobs for life to workers who might be displaced.

Throughout the negotiations, Spinosa has performed a delicate balancing act between applying technology on the docks and protecting union jobs -- in this case those of hundreds of marine clerks, such as himself, who track cargo through the ports.

“Spinosa has tried to tell the union that taking a Luddite approach is a loser,” said Peter Olney, a former organizing director for the ILWU who helps run the Institute of Labor and Employment at the University of California. “He has taken a lot of political hits for trying to convince the clerks to accept technology. But he will not sign a contract that is the union’s death warrant.”

The labor agreement has not been finalized, and more difficult negotiating might be ahead when both sides return to the bargaining table Wednesday after a one-week hiatus ordered last Tuesday by the federal mediator. The ILWU and the companies are still at an impasse over the issue of worker pensions.

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‘Determined to Win’

Whether the ILWU will prevail in the talks is yet to be seen. But those who know Spinosa, both inside and outside the union, say he is well-suited to lead the union through troubled waters.

“Jimmy is tough, persistent and patient,” said Van Barbieri, 62, of Rancho Palos Verdes, a real estate agent who has been friends with Spinosa since they attended San Pedro High School in the late 1950s. “He is bound and determined to win. Knowing his nature, he won’t back down from anybody.”

Spinosa’s attitude might be summed up by a watercolor cartoon that hangs in his office at ILWU headquarters in San Francisco. Barbieri gave it to him. The rendering depicts a bird that has taken a frog into its large beak and is preparing to swallow it head first. The amphibian’s front legs have the bird’s neck in a stranglehold.

“Don’t ever give up,” the caption states.

Even those on the other side of the bargaining table concede that Spinosa’s 40 years as a dockworker and union official make him a formidable adversary. He might be reserved and inarticulate in public, they say, but he knows the maritime industry, and he knows where he wants to go.

Spinosa “is a shrewd, ruthless guy and good at what he does,” said G. Scott Jones, a shipping company executive who served on the board of the Pacific Maritime Assn. for 32 years. “He is not really a leader like Harry Bridges was a leader. He is more in the back room, pulling the controls.”

Despite repeated requests by The Times, Spinosa declined to be interviewed for this article.

Union spokesman Steve Stallone said the president has been devoting his time -- 12 to 14 hours a day -- to contract negotiations and a pending court battle over whether the union deliberately staged work slowdowns after the lockout.

In his unavailability to the news media, Spinosa stands in sharp contrast to his counterpart in the shipping industry, Joseph N. Miniace, head of the maritime association.

While Miniace has been willing to talk directly to news reporters and answer questions, Spinosa has stuck to prepared statements.

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Public Relations Battle

Some well-placed members of the ILWU worry that the union has been losing the public relations battle with the maritime association. One local at the Port of Los Angeles recently hired a public-relations representative, and the AFL-CIO briefly lent the ILWU a spokeswoman to help with the media.

“We have not been effective getting our message out,” said one ILWU official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Spinosa, a plainly dressed man with a neatly trimmed mustache and thick eye glasses, leads a diverse union with about 60,000 members in Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Canada.

Its contracts cover a variety of trades including shipping, warehousing, health care, agriculture, hotel services and auto mechanics, as well as tug and ferry crews.

At the West Coast ports, the union represents stevedores who handle freight, marine clerks who track shipments in port, and dock bosses who supervise cargo operations.

The 61-year-old Spinosa, who was born in New York City and grew up in San Pedro, became an ILWU member in 1971. In the last 20 years, he steadily worked his way up the union’s political hierarchy and built a base of support that would eventually propel him to the presidency of the union.

In the mid-1980s, he helped organize nonunion workers and created a West Coast program to monitor freight stations, where cargo containers are loaded and unloaded. From 1987 to 1991, he served three terms as president and two terms as vice president of Local 63, which represents about 1,500 marine clerks in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Spinosa, whose daughter is a longshore worker and whose son is a dock boss, served as a coast committeeman from 1991 to 1994. In that position, he participated in contract negotiations and worked directly with the union president.

He was elected vice president of the union in 1997 and headed the negotiating committee for the 1999 contract, which vastly improved the workers’ pension system. He also oversaw the longshore division.

In 2000, Spinosa became president of the union, defeating Brian McWilliams, a marine clerk from the Bay Area, who ruled for six rocky years and fell out of favor with the huge bloc of dockworkers in Southern California.

McWilliams’ opponents complained that he was too concerned with political and social issues to deal with bread-and-butter union matters, such as improving pay and working conditions.

To some of them, McWilliams’ taste for firebrand unionism and social protest was passe.

They also did not like McWilliams’ stance against side deals -- the additional pay offered by terminal operators above the contracted wage to attract steady dockworkers. He thought the practice, which is common at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, threatened union solidarity.

For several years before the election, a powerful faction of dockworkers from Los Angeles and Long Beach launched several efforts to remove McWilliams, casting no-confidence votes against him and urging him to take a leave of absence for the remainder of his term.

“McWilliams was totally hamstrung by Spinosa and the Southern California locals,” Jones said. “The Northwest locals supported Brian, but the dominance of the south prevailed. Spinosa was a key man in all this.”

Although Spinosa has participated in social protests, union members say that with his vast experience in contract negotiations, he appears to be more attuned to dockworker-specific issues than was his predecessor.

“He knows the rank and file, and he fights for the rank and file,” said John Tousseau, a veteran marine clerk from San Pedro who is on the union’s negotiating committee. “His strength is his determination.”

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Receptive to Technology

In his writing, speeches and testimony before Congress, Spinosa has said he supports the implementation of new technology on the docks -- as long as port-related jobs created by the innovations go to union members. That is consistent with the historic Mechanization and Modernization Agreement signed by the legendary Bridges in 1960.

The union, he says, has been receptive to technology, especially containerization, which has done far more to increase productivity of the maritime industry than anything else. Before goods were organized efficiently in containers, they were loaded and unloaded on pallets -- an unwieldy process.

Spinosa contends that the shipping lines now want to use technological advances to move high-paying port clerical jobs to low-wage states and to eliminate the ILWU’s hiring halls, where the union controls the assignment of labor to cargo terminals.

The available innovations also threaten hundreds of well-paid marine clerk positions up and down the West Coast -- although not crane operator and traditional stevedoring jobs, at least for now. Clerks earn an average of $118,000 a year, with overtime and shift premiums. Some terminal operators say they could reduce clerk positions by at least a third using the latest cargo-tracking devices.

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Critics Balk

But technology, Spinosa counters, is not a “silver bullet” that will greatly reduce port congestion and solve the lack of space at West Coast terminals caused by burgeoning international trade.

Vast improvements in moving cargo could be made, he says, if port terminals operated their gates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and if businesses agreed to ship and receive goods around the clock as well.

“Large retail corporations importing thousands of containers monthly must understand that the practice of warehousing containers on marine terminals must cease,” Spinosa told a congressional committee investigating the future of the nation’s ports in May 2001.

Spinosa’s critics say his positions on technology are misleading. Some dockworkers and terminal operators complain privately that Spinosa, as a marine clerk, has tried to protect clerks’ jobs at the expense of stevedores, who represent the lion’s share of the union’s dockworkers. Four marine clerks are part of the ILWU’s inner sanctum, they say, and they work closely with the president.

“Spinosa does not have a real vision” for the union, Jones said. “He wants to protect the clerks and keep the golden goose for those on the inside.”

While Spinosa has held top positions within the union, shipping executives complain, advances in technology have been slow in coming, putting West Coast ports a decade behind harbors in Asia and Europe. Technology was removed from the bargaining table in 1996 and 1999, except for the creation of a joint union-management committee to study the issue.

Spinosa asserts that shipping lines and terminal operators want unfettered power to make technological changes, and that preserving the union’s power on the waterfront will remain his top priority.

“We want jobs that remain in the industry,” Spinosa has said. “Jobs that are ours under the contract.”