California Apparel News

Adding to the cargo congestion at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, longshore workers allegedly started imposing a work slowdown at the largest port complex in the United States.

According to the Pacific Maritime Association, which has been in contract negotiations with West Coast longshore workers for months, the PMA was informed that as of Nov. 3, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union would not dispatch qualified ILWU workers, most of whom have significant experience operating yard cranes that place cargo containers on trucks and rail cards.

“We’ve used the same dispatch procedures for qualified crane operators since 1999,” said PMA spokesman Wade Gates in a statement. “After 15 years, the ILWU leadership has unilaterally decided to change the rules for hundreds of qualified workers who are dispatched daily to help operate terminals at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports.”

The PMA estimates that withholding skilled workers will leave half of the yard crane positions unfilled unless something is done about it.

The work slowdown adds another measure of frustration to apparel importers and others trying to get their merchandise off the waterfront.

As of Nov. 6, there were nine cargo container ships anchored off the breakwater of the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, hoping for vacant berths. This is very unusual for this time of year, said Steve Chesser of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which monitors all ships coming in and out of the two ports.

The time required to extract cargo out of the ports varies by terminal, but in some cases it has been as long as two weeks or more.

“There is still cargo backed up here,” confirmed Phillip Sanfield, spokesman for the Port of Los Angeles. “Meanwhile, you have the labor issues and the lack of a [longshore] contract continues to be lurking over everything up and down the West Coast.”

Contract negotiations between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the companies that employ them at 29 West Coast ports have been going on since mid-May. Progress has been made in significant areas, such as healthcare benefits, which was announced in August. Both sides continue to negotiate a six-year contract that expired July 1, but animosity between the two sides bubbled up recently.

The Pacific Maritime Association—which is negotiating the contract on behalf of the shipping carriers, terminals and stevedores that hire the 13,600 registered longshore workers—earlier accused the ILWU of instigating a slowdown at the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, Wash. The two ports handle about 16 percent of the cargo containers that arrive on the West Coast.

The PMA said the longshore union initially targeted select terminals in Tacoma on Oct. 31 and expanded to more terminals in Tacoma and the Port of Seattle through the weekend. The PMA maintains that terminal productivity has declined on average 40 percent to 60 percent. PMA spokesman Steve Getzug said as of Nov. 6 the slowdowns were still ongoing.

The ILWU countered that the PMA was trying to “smear the union and deflect responsibility from a growing congestion problem that is plaguing major West Coast ports.”

One of those problems has been the lack of chassis, or the frame and wheels attached to cargo containers to transport them. After the shipping lines got out of the chassis business in recent years, three major leasing companies took over supplying 95 percent of the rigs. But that has resulted in too many chassis at one terminal and not enough at another.

On Oct. 30, the shipping line SSA Marine and the three leasing companies, which all together control approximately 100,000 chassis, agreed to set up a gray chassis pool starting Feb. 1 at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The chassis pool means that truckers can pick up and drop off the equipment at any of the 13 terminals in the harbor without being concerned about which company serves which terminal or shipping line.