IWLU Sec-Treas. Willie Adams explains the importance of port funding for creating and maintaing good jobs.
Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Leader of the House, was joined by ILWU Secretary Treasurer, Willie Adams, at a press event on March 5th to protect funding for America’s ports. The budget being proposed by Republicans in Congress includes $680 million in annual cuts to port spending. The cuts include money for security, operations, maintenance and construction.
The speakers at the event included San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee and the executive directors of the Port of San Francisco, Monique Moyer, and Port of Oakland, Omar Benjamin, and Hugh Vanderspek, general manager of BAE Systems San Francisco Ship Repair, which operates the dry dock at Pier 70 . The event took place at San Francisco’s Pier 70, the largest dry dock on the West Coast, the longest running ship repair yard in the United States and was instrumental in the development of San Francisco, Moyer said.
“The budget cuts … would weaken our ports, cost us jobs, and undermine our economic growth,” Pelosi said. “Our first priority is to create jobs … good-paying jobs for our workers.”
“Workers today see the economy as being on life support and needs to be resuscitated,” Adams said. He urged collaboration between business, labor and elected officials to tackle the issue of port infrastructure investment. “Our ports are absolutely vital to our economy. We need to continue to invest in our ports to create good jobs for working class people.”
Oakland Port Director Omar Benjamin underscored the economic importance of the Port of Oakland to the region, stating that the Port creates 50,000 regional jobs.
Benjamin said that $1 billion has been invested in port infrastructure in the last decade, primarily from the private sector, to deepen shipping channels to allow access to modern container vessel, build modern terminals to move more cargo faster and improve rail connection to speed connections to the
“This infrastructure makes American exports more competitive and helps American consumers get the best prices on the imports they need,” Benjamin said.
Port officials say there is a need to constantly dredge water channels to ensure they remain deep enough for large ships to come into the ports.
Pelosi noted that the cruise ship Carnival Splendor – a 3,006-passenger vessel – which recently docked at Pier 70 for repairs, bringing jobs to the Bay Area, could not have docked there had it not been for the maintenance dredging undertaken by the Army Corp of Engineers. Even still BAE’s Vanderspek, said that the Splendor’s keel cleared the channel by less than a foot.
Vanderspek said that with the rate of silting in the Bay, the Carnival would not have been able to dock at Pier had the ship come in just four and the jobs created repairing the ship would have been lost.
“Our challenge is the approaches to the dry dock. We don’t have enough draft, we don’t have enough depth to bring the ships that our skilled work force is capable of taking care of,” Vanderspek said. “Some of the approaches to our dock only have 19 feet deep. Modern ships can have a berth of 30 feet. That’s 19 feet of water and 30 feet of ship. That math doesn’t work.”
“If we are not dredging deep enough with a deep enough draft, we’re missing an opportunity for commerce and jobs,” Pelosi said. “We are missing the boat, literally and figuratively,” she quipped.