by Marcy Rein
California’s newest port could be humming in the high desert within five years, if the City of Victorville and its corporate partners make good on their plans. The city owns the site of the former George Air Force Base. The site, now called the “Southern California Logistics Airport,” holds a 5,000-acre business complex that includes office, manufacturing and industrial space as well as an international all-cargo airport. For two years now, Victorville has been working with the Pasha Group, a logistics company which manages terminals at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. They plan to develop a full intermodal yard, a distribution center and other port facilities some 100 miles from LA/Long Beach Harbor, in the back yard of ILWU mine-mineral processing Local 30 in Boron. That could spell trouble, said Trinidad Esquivel, ILWU International Executive Board member from Local 30.
“People in the high desert will work for $8 an hour,” Esquivel said. “If the ILWU employers could move the ocean from LA to the desert, they would do it.”
Esquivel spoke at the Dec. 8 meeting of the new ILWU Elected Leaders Organizing Task Force. That meeting brought together members of the IEB, leaders from the ILWU’s warehouse and marine divisions, staff from the International Organizing Dept. and top organizers from the AFL-CIO. They took a hard look at the strategies and resources the union will need to organize successfully in the face of a hostile government, feeble labor laws and a rapidly changing economy. Recognizing that winning strategies will have to be grounded in an understanding of the ways the cargo-handling industry is changing, the Task Force spent part of the day reviewing research done last year for the Longshore Division by a team from the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California. That team included Peter Olney, now back at the ILWU as International Organizing Director; Amy Willis, now an International Organizer/Researcher for the union; and Arin Dube, Rhonda Evans, Peter Hall, Van Swearingen and Goetz Wolff. The information below comes largely from that research.
Globalization, deregulation, and changes in technology and retailing have spurred ongoing change in the cargo-handling industry. Information and information workers are playing a greater role. Companies with long histories in the industry are taking on new functions and new kinds of companies are popping up. Work is moving inland and out of ILWU jurisdiction.
The ILWU works at a key link in the cargo-handling chain. The chain brings raw materials and manufactured products into the U.S. and brings goods produced in this country to ports for export. The major links in the cargo-handling chain include water and rail transportation, trucking, warehousing and distribution, and “services incidental.”
Workers in the “services” sector include brokers, freight forwarders, reservations agents and many others who deal with information and arrangements. They make up the fastest-growing part of the industry.
ILWU employment in West Coast ports held steady at about 10,500 between 1980 and 2000. But in that time, the amount of cargo moving through those ports more than doubled and overall employment in cargo-handling grew by nearly 50 percent. There’s work. It’s just not ILWU work.
In fact, it’s not union work at all. The chart above shows employment trends in the five parts of the cargo-handling industry. The number of workers employed in “services incidental” grew by nearly 80 percent between 1983 and 2002. The number in warehousing grew by around 70 percent and the number in trucking by 60 percent.
Rail and water transportation lost workers. The numbers employed in railroad shrank by nearly 40 percent and those in water transportation by 20 percent. These shrinking parts of the cargo handling industry have the highest union density (percentage of workers who belong to unions). They also paid the highest wages. West Coast railroad workers earned and average of $21 per hour in 2001, and water transport workers an average of $24.
Union density in the fastest-growing parts of the cargo-handling industry declined steadily from 1983 to 2002. Density fell from 31 percent to 14 percent in warehousing, from 35 percent to 24 percent in trucking and from seven percent to four percent in services. The percentage of people with steady jobs in warehousing has gone down too. Employers rely more and more on temporary workers to staff distribution centers and warehouses.
“Wages, working conditions and unionization have all suffered from degradation on the local front of global logistics,” U.C. Riverside Professor of Sociology Edna Bonacich wrote. (New Labor Forum, Summer 2003). “And the last bastion of labor strength, the ILWU, faces serious challenges.”
Some of these challenges showed in the coordinated attack by the employers and the federal government during the 2002 Longshore Division contract talks. The outcome of last November’s election signals an even fiercer battle in 2008. “As a lame duck, Bush can do a lot of damage between now and then to labor’s ability to organize and bargain,” ILWU International Vice President Bob McEllrath said.
NOT YOUR FATHER’S SHIPPING LINE
Not so long ago, most employers in the cargo-handling industry managed a single link in the supply chain. They operated trucks, or warehouses, or ships.
Now most cargo-handling companies control many links of the chain at once. A typical company may have a branch that helps manufacturers plan the best way to send goods, one that owns ships and one that runs the distribution center that holds the goods before their final trip to the retail store. Maybe it also owns an airfreight operation and a trucking fleet.
“The giant employers who are signatories to the PCLCD (Pacific Coast Longshore Contract Document) are all becoming fully integrated logistics firms,” according to the ILE report.
“Logistics” gets defined many different ways. According to the Council of Logistics Management, it means “the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods, services, and related information from point of origin to point of consumption for the purpose of conforming to customer requirements.” In other words, it covers the information and planning parts of moving goods as well as transportation and storage.
A new type of company called the “third party logistics” provider (3PL) has sprung up over the last 15 years. These 3PLs may be branches of other firms. APL Logistics and the container shipping company American President Lines both belong to the NOL Group, for example. Many 3PLs grew out of freight forwarders and NVOCCs. (NVOCCs, non-vessel operating common carriers, make arrangements and take responsibility for cargo that travels on vessels owned by other companies. But 3PLs may not own any ships or trucks or warehouses. These “non-asset based firms” use information and contacts to help other companies use the cargo-handling chain as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
Deregulation and the evolution of technology have made integration possible and necessary.
continued in Desert Docks, Part 2
