Bernd Becker 
The West Coast ports are in serious need for labor, with chronic issues of congestion and low productivity. The latest strategy is to start hiring workers at the Ports of LA and Long Beach starting on April 1st 2022. This process will take place every 12 months, but there has been no solution put forth yet for how to keep people employed long-term when they become too old or too sick.
The labor talks are set to start in 2022 at congested West Coast Ports. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) wants a renewed contract for workers on the ports of Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, Seattle and Tacoma. If negotiations fail again they will strike
The “west coast ports backed up” is a problem that has been present for a while. The labor talks to start in 2022 at congested west coast ports.
As dockworkers and marine terminals prepare for discussions on a new labor contract, US shippers grappling with supply-chain bottlenecks on the West Coast will have fresh issues in the next year.
The private companies that operate port facilities from Washington state to Southern California are expected to begin negotiations with the union representing 22,400 dockworkers next year on a multiyear contract to replace the contract that expires in July 2022, potentially igniting new wrangling over a topic that has been highly contentious in previous years.
The previous round of discussions with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which takes place every six years, resulted in serious labor disruptions and shipment delays in 2014 and 2015. This time, the talks, which are expected to start early next year, will come in the wake of some of the worst seaport congestion in recent memory, as a pandemic-driven surge in imports has overwhelmed container terminals and caused record backlogs of container ships off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
“I don’t see an end in sight,” Caryn Blanc, managing partner of the Triangle Group in Kearny, N.J., a logistics business that offers ocean shipping, transportation, and storage services to big retailers, said.
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This month, the union rejected a proposal from port terminal owners to postpone discussions until 2023. Fears that anticipated delays during the discussions might deepen current supply-chain bottlenecks prompted the employers to seek an extension of the present contract.
In a statement released Tuesday, ILWU International President Willie Adams stated that instead of predicting doom, everyone should celebrate the possibility of collective bargaining as “essential to the well-being of our ports.”
Importers brought items in early and transferred cargo to Gulf and East Coast ports during previous bargaining sessions to avoid supply-chain delays. Because cargoes are already substantially held up at seaports and throughout interior supply lines, their alternatives are more constrained this year.
Shippers are caught in a dilemma as a result of the ongoing gridlock. They risk increasing the vessel backlog if they bring in goods early or relocate to different gates. “What if they wait and see whether there’s a disruption?” asked Jonathan Gold, the National Retail Federation’s vice president of supply chain. “They don’t want to be caught off guard,” says the narrator.
The ILWU contract includes 15,400 full-time dockworkers and 7,000 part-time dockworkers at ports from Bellingham, Wash., to San Diego. The majority of staff aren’t hired directly by the terminals. The facilities hire unionized staff for shifts throughout the day or night, depending on demand.
Negotiations, which include 70 employers at 29 ports, might take months to complete. Previous conversations have resulted in shipping bottlenecks due to disagreements. Employers have blamed workers for slowdowns, while employees have argued that their bosses are mismanaging operations.
Hundreds of ships backed up off the coast of Southern California during the discussions, which started in 2014 and extended into 2015, creating delays that cost individual shops millions of dollars in higher prices and missed sales. Employers held out employees for ten days in 2002 until President George W. Bush used the Taft-Hartley Act, which governs union activity, to reopen ports.
Mr. Adams of the ILWU advised dockworkers to conserve money ahead of the next discussions during an appearance on a union-focused podcast called “The Docker” in August 2020. “It’s possible there may be a war in 2022,” he remarked. “Always be ready.”
Mr. Adams said the union is focused on transporting freight as rapidly as possible while also safeguarding worker safety in a recent statement to The Wall Street Journal.
The negotiations are taking place at a time when ocean carriers, who operate many of the West Coast’s port facilities, are making record profits. The shipping company A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, whose APM Terminals unit operates one of the major container terminals at the Port of Los Angeles, reported a profit of $5.44 billion in the most recent quarter, almost doubling its net result for the whole year 2020.
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The Pacific Maritime Association, which represents terminal operators in labor discussions, anticipates talks to start in early spring, ahead of the contract’s expiry in July, according to Jim McKenna, CEO of the Pacific Maritime Association. According to him, the federal government normally doesn’t pay attention to the discussions until the possibility of interruption rises after the contract expires.
The negotiations are being laid out at a time when the White House is already under fire for supply-chain snarls that are delaying the delivery of retail and industrial items and are being blamed by experts for increasing inflation.
“Pressure will mount on the parties to ensure that we do everything humanly possible to ensure that nothing disrupts a delicate supply chain,” Mr. McKenna said.
According to Mr. McKenna, main concerns during talks are frequently automation and perks. In prior contracts, the terminals obtained freedom to extend their use of technology, while the union got salary and pension benefits increases.
In 2019, the typical dockworker with over five years of full-time experience earned about $190,000. Several supervisors made $500,000 or more that year. According to PMA statistics, benefit expenditures for most full-time dockworkers climbed to almost $110,000 per worker from $82,500 in the ten years leading up to 2019.
As terminal operators explore for methods to speed up the flow of containers, questions over how automation is used may get more heated in the next year. During the pandemic, as Covid-19 outbreaks in the area cut down the work force, the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports were overwhelmed by the influx of imported boxes, and the terminals were handicapped in managing imports.
Only two of the Southern California gateway complex’s 13 terminals, the TraPac LLC Los Angeles port and the Long Beach Container Terminal LLC, employ robots significantly right now.
Union representatives oppose further automation, claiming that it is expensive to deploy, wasteful, and eliminates employment. Mr. McKenna expects the problem to be “front and center” of the negotiations, particularly in Los Angeles and Long Beach, where a record 86 container ships were waiting for dock space offshore on Nov. 16.
Nearly 40% of the nation’s seaborne container imports pass via the nearby ports, which have limited potential for development. Mr. McKenna said, “Automation enables you to quadruple your capacity in the footprint.”
Tower Textile Inc., a tiny Los Angeles-based importer, is owned by David Kerendian, who says if labor discussions turn sour, he’ll be stranded since he can’t afford to ship via other ports. “If sluggishness sets in, forget it,” he advised. “It will last till the end of 2022.”
Paul Berger can be reached at [email protected].
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The “ilwu contract extension details” is a labor talks that will start in 2022 at the congested West Coast Ports. The talks are to discuss the contract of ILWU members who work at the ports.
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