by Tom Price

Large scale growth continues in Washington State small ports as new facilities come on line and union jobs multiply.

Through lean times the ILWU held on to jurisdiction in small ports with low work opportunity and negotiated keeping a minimum of 10 registered longshore workers at each port. Now, as trade expands, holding that jurisdiction has paid off in jobs for longshore workers and their community in the ports of Everett, Olympia and Vancouver, Wash.

The Port of Everett, located on the mouth of the Snohomish River about 40 miles north of Seattle, recently activated two gantry cranes, hand-me-downs from the Port of Seattle that will bring new container work and additional vessel calls.

The port lost aluminum ore shipping, but has recently found new uses for the aluminum facilities.

“We loaded alumina [ore] out of here for years,” longshore Local 32 President Mark Sullivan said. “We have a machine that sucked out ore out of ships. Now they believe it can suck out cement.”

The Port of Everett signed a 20-year contract with Lehigh Northwest Cement to lease the 120-foot high dome that formerly held alumina. The facility will directly employ 35 people and create 100 jobs for tug operators, truck drivers and longshore workers when it opens next spring, according to the port.

The port also signed agreements in April with two shipping lines to take breakbulk loads, including large-scale mining equipment to Russia and empty containers to Japan.

“We’re booming, compared to four or five years ago,” Sullivan said. “We came awful close to the 10-man limit. We were able to increase casual hours to get six B registrations, added 12. Now we have 18 or so B registrants and we got them mainly in last couple years. We even have travel gangs in.”

The Port of Olympia, on Budd Inlet at the southern tip of Puget Sound, was once a major log port. Back in 1970, longshore Local 47 workers loaded a million tons of cargo, 98 percent of it wood. Then lumber dried up and the port fell on hard times.

But the port refused to die. Longshore workers worked with the port to diversify cargo options and lobbied union-endorsed Washington U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell (D) and Patty Murray (D), plus U.S. Representatives Adam Smith (D–WA) and Brian Baird (D–WA). Last year, with their help, Congress appropriated $2 million to improve rail service at the port. That will greatly reduce congestion along Interstate 5 and nearly double the port’s cargo processing capacity. Longshore workers will discharge containers directly to rail cars, and the port is studying increased barge loading facilities.

Last July the port signed a deal with the Port of Tacoma to lease a 745-acre site near Olympia that Tacoma had recently bought to set up a logistics center to handle cargo overloads and transfer cargo to trains and trucks. The two ports will share in the use of the facility.

“We just finished on-dock rail for terminals and, in phase two, we will increase our rail car storage capacity,” Local 47 Secretary-Treasurer Robert Rose said. “We are paving the berths and we will have a new log customer, Weyerhaeuser, mid-next year.”

The Port of Vancouver, Wash. commissioned the North America’s largest mobile crane in a ceremony Sept. 8. On the same day, Vestas, the world’s leading builder of electricity generating wind turbines, announced it would use the port exclusively for its deliveries to the North West.

“The crane is capable of hoisting a Boeing 757 jet liner,” longshore Local 4 President Brad Clark said. “It’s very maneuverable with 80 wheels the size of pickup tires and it moves very fast.”

That’s a capacity of 140 metric tons, to those who haven’t hoisted an airplane lately. The Austrian-made crane weighs 500 tons and has a boom length of 174 feet. Its 12-cylinder Diesel can use biodiesel fuel.

The Columbia River port will now have extreme heavy lift capacity. This will come in handy as the area has received more federal grants to build wind electric generating plants, in part do to lobbying activities with Senators Murray and Cantwell, and Representatives Smith and Baird.

“Federal programs like the wind production tax credit have helped fuel the growth in wind farm projects,” Baird said at the crane dedication ceremony. “I commend the Port for its investment in this growing, clean industry.”

Work at the port has expanded significantly. Bulk and breakbulk tonnage grew by 40 percent for 2005, and the port signed long-term contracts that year with eight breakbulk companies. Also in 2005, scrap steel exports to China and Korea hit a record 180,000 metric tons, up from 45,000 tons the year before. Port officials are hopeful that the trend will continue through 2006.

So far, only five longshore workers have been trained on the crane, with more coming, Clark said. Before the crane arrived, vessels had to be untied and turned so the cranes could reach across the beam and pick up loads.

“We used to have operating engineers on the docks running cranes,” Clark said. “But now we have the crane, and all the work, from discharging from the ship to loading onto the truck, is ILWU work.”