By James Spinosa
ILWU International President

Last summer and well into the fall West Coast ports went through a phase when we had 30 or 40 or more vessels a day sitting in the LA harbor. We didn’t have the manpower or the training to accommodate that surge coming at us from Asia. The employers tried to lay the blame on the ILWU in the media and in our communities. They claimed we were part of the problem, that we weren’t answering the call to the job, and they branded us as a fat workforce that was overpaid, under-worked and not willing to cooperate with the industry.

But the record showed we had been calling for more registration, more casual hiring and more training for months before the backup in the harbor. The port infrastructure was so overwhelmed that it was obvious to any honest observer of the industry this was not a union problem. Eventually the employers succumbed to the wisdom of our proposals and registered some 2,000 new Local 13 members and worked with us to develop a new system for selecting more casuals, and hired and trained some 5,000 of them. Clerks’ Local 63 has increased membership too, going from 1,000 to nearly 1,300 members, and more foremen have been taken in.

We’re continuing to beef up our workforce to accommodate this year’s surge which industry analysts suggest will be even greater. Tacoma alone is expecting a 30 percent increase and Los Angeles/ Long Beach will grow from 12-18 percent or higher.

Given this situation, the employers have to work with us to accommodate the long-term needs of the industry. But instead they have been taking a band-aid approach. They are hot to trot when the cargo is at the doorstep, but the minute it slows down, rather than build for the next surge, they back off to save pennies and then throw away millions of dollars when cargo hits and they’re not ready. That’s the short-sighted approach they used last summer. They carried out mass registrations and were trying to build up the workforce to accommodate the need for those couple of busy months. But now they have backed away from their commitment in Southern California to register more workers and to bring in the proper number of people into the casual pool to be trained and ready for the next surge. Their penny-wise, dollar-foolish approach threatens to bite them again this year with a shortage of truck drivers because they refuse to pay them enough to keep them on the job.

We still have all the basic infrastructure problems that initiated last year’s crisis. The railroads are still not up to speed. The PierPass system that was supposed to be ready last November to speed up movement of trucks through the ports has been pushed back month after month and is now scheduled for June in the most optimistic scenario.

So as we approach this year’s peak season we have to be more mindful than ever of the hazards the cargo surge and dock congestion bring. We’ve lost three people on the docks already this year and the East Coast International Longshoremen’s Association is losing people with the problems they are having with surges of cargo. We need to take steps to protect ourselves and we need to bring the employers with us.

We need educational programs on the proper ways to work safely. We need better traffic controls on the docks so we don’t have workers being run over and killed. We need to have better training facilities and training more acclimated to our actual work environment on a longer basis. Giving a person a one-day UTR training and putting them out in the traffic hauling containers isn’t sufficient. We need to have facilities made available for such training, but the employers are so bogged down in keeping their equipment available to handle the cargo movement they don’t have big enough facilities with sufficient equipment for us to simulate real working conditions. When everyone is better trained and working more safely, cargo will be expedited more efficiently.

Traffic control is needed under the hook. Often we now have three, four and five cranes working a vessel. Proper lanes and lane changes become problematic and cargo is floating over drivers’ heads. At the gates when truck drivers come up to a clerk and the clerk is servicing a container, walking around it looking for different things, the trucker has to turn his engine off. But when you go under the hook, everything is running while people are circling the truck. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

To make all this work, we need the employers to step up. But all they seem interested in is speed, not safe working conditions. When we put safe work conditions on the table, they turn around and hide and play games with the safety book.

We spend years putting together a safety contract for everyone to adhere to, and the employers try to use it as some kind of subterfuge rather than live up to what they agreed to. Their compliance teams strictly look at a certain narrow-minded production approach to the work. They won’t take into consideration that the union has put together a team of workers to look at safety and the total contract. The employers refuse to hook up with the union to enforce and regulate the contract in its total—safety being a big part of that—because they don’t want to slow down the cargo movement.

With the surge of cargo coming soon it is very important to get the message out to work safe. Don’t drive at 40 miles an hour to meet the hook. You have to work safe and follow the safety book. Do that for your own good and the good of your co-workers. We must stop losing people on the waterfront.