Voices: Labor dispute brings eerie stillness to L.A. port
Try Another
Audio CAPTCHA
Image CAPTCHA
Help
As a contract dispute between dockworkers and their employers continues, international trade is being crippled through West Coast seaports. The slowdown could result in higher coffee and beer prices. (Feb. 19) AP
LOS ANGELES — As someone who grew up around the hum and clatter of the waterfront, driving into the Port of Los Angeles on recent weekends has been an eerie sight.
Giant insect-like cranes that revolutionized the ocean-freight business hover over ships, but aren’t moving a single container. Trucks that normally choke streets hauling containers from dock to railhead are largely out of sight. Offshore, more than two dozen ships lie at anchor, a growing fleet that would look more like an an image from the coast of Normandy on D-Day than the bucolic California coast.
Harbor traffic has ground to a snail’s pace from Tacoma, Wash., to San Diego due to an ongoing labor dispute between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the shipping companies and port terminal operators who negotiate as the Pacific Maritime Association. The slowdown has periodically halted operations at 29 West Coast ports, as it did over Presidents Day weekend. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez has joined the talks in San Francisco because of the dispute’s outsize potential to wreak havoc on the U.S. economy.
The standoff puts a spotlight on the insular world of the waterfront, a place caught between the old and the new. The harbor remains studded with colorful characters and old haunts that recall the romantic age of Steinbeck, tramp steamers and wharf rats. Yet the docks also showcase the best of American innovation, a prime example of how industry can transform itself in a way that benefits workers and management alike. Unloading a single freighter could take a week and involve more than a hundred workers. Now vastly larger ships — and they’re getting even bigger — are unloaded by a handful of workers in a matter of hours.
That efficiency was largely made possible by the union. Around the harbor communities of San Pedro, Calif., and Wilmington, Calif., ILWU members are simply known as the Longshoremen. (No heed is paid to the gender reference). They are generally held in high esteem in the hierarchy of the waterfront because of their high wages and large sway over port operations. At a time when unions are under siege in the U.S., losing members and making concessions, the Longshoremen have held firm. In negotiations, they have brilliantly traded gains in efficiency for big pay.
The association says the average Longshoreman earns $ 147,000 a year. They have no co-pays for health insurance. They earn an annual holiday to recognize Harry Bridges, a Marxist whose farsighted leadership led to the power that the union commands today. Yet in the port towns there seems to be more admiration than resentment for the pay, a sense that even blue-collar workers can occasionally get ahead in an economy that increasingly leaves them behind.
Local institutions like Utro’s Cafe, a burger joint next to San Pedro’s main shipping channel, sport signs in their windows supporting the Longshoremen. ILWU members’ buying power has long made them the port towns’ best customers, not just for burgers and fries, but for fancy houses, cars and other goods.
The port slowdown hasn’t made much of an impact yet on San Pedro and Wilmington, where residents long ago became accustomed to strikes, slowdowns and the general labor strife that go with a strong union. In fact, things are fairly placid by a historical measure. In the 1920s, the International Workers of the World, known as the “Wobblies,” led labor actions on behalf of dockworkers. A San Pedro plaque today commemorates a place called Liberty Hill where muckraking author Upton Sinclair was arrested for a public reading of the First Amendment.
Back then, like so many port towns around the world, Pedro — pronounced PEED-row — as the locals call it, was dominated by sailor haunts and the red light district along Beacon Street. In the 1960s, the downtown was razed of its most notorious businesses — bars like Shanghai Red’s — in a move that many locals now regret.
But the harbor retained its character: For decades, the Norwegian national anthem has boomed over the shipping channel every time a Norwegian-flagged vessel and ships from other Scandinavian countries called on the Port of Los Angeles, courtesy of the Norwegian Seamen’s Church on the hill above. To this day, ships sail past a century-old lighthouse and a stone breakwater that once sheltered Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet.
They steam into a harbor that has been repeatedly expanded, with new piers created from rock and dirt barged 26 miles from Catalina Island. This is the modern port, the creation of surging trade with Asia, where the challenge has been to move more freight. Container ships are growing larger, forcing new ways to find space on docks and move containers out as fast as possible.
Apart from the labor trouble, these are prosperous times on the dock. But with the Panama Canal being expanded to accommodate larger container ships that can reach Gulf Coast or East Coast ports, no one is sure just how long the good times will last.
Woodyard is USA TODAY’s Los Angeles bureau chief
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1AaIOLj
USA NOW
What (and who) to expect at the Oscars
Feb 20, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment