ILWU Security Liaison Gary Brown complained about TWIC's costs to workers.
Story and photos by Bill Orton
Long Beach, CA.—An unusually unanimous choir of waterfront workers, businesses and government officials aired doubts over Bush administration rules to require that every port worker in America carry a sophisticated identity card that few seem to think will work as planned.
“I have yet to see one issue that has so united and often conflicted” the workforce and businesses on the waterfront, said Kathleen Hollingsworth, an aide to Congressional Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), whose district covers the two busiest ports in the nation.
U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) officials sat for hours June 7 during the sole West Coast public hearing on the so-called Transportation Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) as speakers ravaged the proposed regulations on issues of who could be disqualified from working on the waterfront, the program costs, possible delays in the movement of cargo and the security of personal data given by each worker who enrolls for a card.
“No one wants to secure our ports more than the ILWU,” longshore Local 13 member and Director of Port Security Mike Mitre said. “We’re the front line workforce. Most ILWU families live within five miles of the port. If something happens, we’re the ones who are going to get hammered first.”
Mitre and others argued that some workers will be kicked off the waterfront for an old mistake or denied a TWIC card due to inaccurate recordkeeping.
“Disqualifiers in the proposed rule are too broad,” Mitre said “TWIC cannot be allowed to unjustly punish employees for bad decisions made years ago.”
“Because the Coast Guard definition of conviction is much broader than the criminal courts, many people have an arrest still on their record for which they were never convicted,” said Sailors Union of the Pacific spokesman David Connolly.
“Only those crimes that might make someone a terrorism security risk should be included,” said Local 13 President Mark Mendoza, who asked regulators give special respect to military veterans returning to jobs on the docks.
“Some of my members are overseas right now serving in the war,” said Mendoza, who comes from a military family. “They’re going to come back here and now be told they pose a threat to the United States of America? I’ve got a problem with that.”
Union leaders also criticized proposed waiver rules, how privacy is handled and the need to incorporate protections and limits set forth in the original Maritime Transportation Security Act.
“Privacy rights for information collected and generated by the TWIC process is critical,” said ILWU Local 10 and Port Security Committee member Lawrence Thibeaux, who posed a series of questions to regulators. “Are the contractors who collect the information required to go through a criminal background check? What happens to the data? What are the penalties for misuse of our data? Is data stored with the contractor or the government?”
While regulators offered opinions, little is written into the codes to answer the concerns. Nowhere, either, does Maritime Transportation Security Act say that costs should be born by the workers themselves, who will collectively shell out more than $100 million in fees—at $139 per card by 750,000 workers.
Others objected that the proposed appeal system for those denied a TWIC card is more onerous than any previous screening process.
“Background checks run on dock workers during the Korean War included an appeals system with a local board, people familiar with the industry, the operations in the area, including labor representatives,” Local 13’s Richard “Ole” Olson pointed out to the USCG and TSA officials. “What on earth has changed to make you offer us something far worse than we got out of Joe McCarthy?”
Some questioned whether the timeline for the roll-out of a TWIC card can be believed, considering the track record of federal implementation of earlier rules to secure ports.
“How realistic is the schedule of a year-and-a-half projected for the TWIC to impact our work force?” asked ILWU Local 13’s secretary-treasurer Frank Ponce de Leon, who cited rules from 2002 that still have yet to be implemented. “If it is not TSA and the Coast Guard, then who is going to be looking at employers who don’t implement rules that have been passed down years ago?”
Requiring a new identification procedure for 750,000 workers is bound to have serious costs in dollars and delays, industry speakers told federal officials.
“The proposed procedures and technology for access control are alarming in their complexity and detachment from reality,” said Kenneth Keane, Director of Safety and Security for Pasha Stevedoring & Terminals. “Longshoremen would have to swipe a TWIC through a card reader with biometrics and possibly an eight-digit PIN before work starts, then swipe out at lunch, swipe in again after lunch and swipe out at the end of the day.”
“If it takes more than a second or two per person to do this, it will have very adverse intermodal operational and economic consequences,” said William Walker, General Manager of Safety and Health for Marine Terminals Corporation.
“These proposed access control systems will very well impede the flow of commerce,” said Port Facilities Security Officer Michael Brien, from the Port of Oakland.
“Any system and readers that add time to our current access control will delay our entire terminal operations and impede the movement of containers,” said LBTC’s Safety and Security Officer Steve Nott, who estimated daily TWIC traffic through LBTC of 350 to 450 workers, office staff and mechanics and 1,500 trucks.
“Delays impact all modes of transportation. The consequences are rapid, significant and reach far beyond this port,” Keane said. “Any component of this precision choreographed system that stalls, delays or fails, impacts the entire supply chain.”
The prospect of delay in products entering the national economy due to lost TWIC cards or readers failing seems certain, speakers said.
Local 13's Ole Oleson questioned the fairness of the TWIC background checks.“We believe the system will not work, particularly in the marine environment with heat and dirt and those types of things,” said SSA’s Director of Corporate Security Bill DeWitt, who testified as Chair of the Security Committee of the National Association of Waterfront Employers.
“What we have produced is not at all user friendly,” said U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s aide Hollingsworth. “It appears that what we’ve come up with now is something that is system driven rather than people driven.”
“Cards are going to be lost,” said ILWU Local 8’s Leal Sundet. “They are going to be destroyed. Machines aren’t going to work. You know what the contingency plans are going to be when things don’t work? Open the gates and let them in. That’s reality. That’s what is going to happen.”
In addition to potential delays in delivery schedules, industry leaders pleaded with federal regulators to consider the dollar costs of testing a system that most argue is not ready.
Three years ago the Port of Oakland installed readers to test a limited TWIC-like prototype involving only pedestrians. Costs ran $430,000 per terminal, far higher than the official federal estimate of $100,000.
“With gate readers required at all the pedestrian and truck access control pedestals and all our gates, I think the cost will be much higher,” Oakland’s Brien said.
“Complete testing of a prototype system should be a quick phase of the implementation. Otherwise, millions of dollars may be wasted by port authorities and facility owner/operators as they rush to install card and biometric readers.”
Left out from consideration when regulators drew up the TWIC rules were many waterfront businesses that turned out at the Long Beach hearing to introduce themselves to federal officials and say that the proposed rules could drive them out of business.
“We understand the enormous political pressure your departments are experiencing to make the ports secure and safe,” said Ray Lyman, of Catalina Express, that runs a public ferry to the island 26 miles off the coast from Los Angeles. “But it should be even more important to do it right, not to put industries out of business and bring the U.S. economy to its knees.”
According to Lyman, the public nature of Catalina Express—and other small vessel cruise operators—makes it impossible for federal rules to restrict access. He showed slides depicting parking lots, a bike path and buildings that cannot be sealed from the public.
“We can’t even lock the door at night because of the public use for the rest rooms,” he said.
“We have had customers choose other venues because they don’t choose to have their wedding or bar mitzvah on a vessel where there are security measures,” said cruise operator Elizabeth Gedney, Director of Safety, Security and Risk Managment for the Passenger Vehicle Association. Losing a single major one-day event could cost one of her members as much as $25,000.
“A one-size-fits-all approach to employee identification and access within vessel operations in the United States will not be practicable,” Lyman advised.
Also left out when regulations were drafted were tug-tow-and-barge operators. Rules requiring verification of each crew member with a card reader simply defies the close-knit nature of crews serving on the 4,000 tug and tow boats and over 27,000 barges of all types.
“For an unknown person to go unnoticed on board a towing vessel is just not possible,” said Rich Smith, who testified as Pacific Region Chairman for the American Waterways Operators, an industry trade group.
It was an ILWU voice that summed up the day of savage criticism on TWIC.
“Terminal operators, the Pacific Maritime Association itself, tug boats operators, whatever, are saying this isn’t going to work the way you guys have it written up,” Local 8’s Sundet said. “I think you ought to step back and take a look at that, because it’s coming from people who are out there every single day working in the trenches.”
