Are West Coast longshoremen spoiling Christmas?

Submitted by solidarity on Mon, 12/08/2014 - 14:00

Are West Coast longshoremen spoiling Christmas?
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/are-west-coast-longshoremen-spoili...
By MIKE ELK 12/8/14 4:01 PM EST
There’s trouble a-brewin’ in Santa’s supply chain.
The choke point is the ports of the west coast, two of which — Los Angeles and Long Beach — move 40 percent of all containerized goods that enter the United States. The National Retail Federation, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce claim that West Coast dockworkers are disrupting a holiday shopping season that’s already well underway.

But the International Longshore and Warehouse Union says the business groups are exaggerating, and that any pileup in dock warehouses of unshipped Zoomer Dinos, Longchamp Totes, or Samsung LED flat-screen TVs is not the union’s fault.
Since June 30, more than 20,000 ILWU members employed by the Pacific Maritime Association have been working at ports along the West Coast without a contract. The retailers, the manufacturers and the Chamber allege that the ILWU is engaged in an illegal work slowdown to pressure the PMA into signing a contract.
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If action isn’t taken immediately to stop the slowdown, the business groups allege, there will be tears on Christmas morning. “We are hearing from folks that they are having issues with some of the last-minute hot items that are still stuck at the ports,” said the National Retail Federation’s Jon Gold. “It used to take cargo two to three days to get out of the ports. Now it’s taking seven to ten days, and that has an impact.”
The PMA agrees. “The best holiday gift we can give the nation is a contract agreement,” said PMA’s Wade Gates.
Both sides of this dispute are in a poker game in which it’s hard to tell a threat from a bluff.
The trade associations emphasize that the situation is dire because they want President Barack Obama to resolve the standoff. If he did, time constraints would likely force a settlement that favored the retailers.The ILWU, meanwhile, says it’s doing nothing illegal, that it has no intention to strike, and that no Christmas emergency, if any, can be blamed on them. Obama, the strikers say, doesn’t need to involve himself in this private sector dispute.
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At the center of the conflict is “work to rule,” a labor tactic in which dock workers are encouraged to follow written company production rules as literally as possible, bypassing the many everyday shortcuts typically taken to get a job done in the real world. Workers comply maximally with the rulebook in order to comply minimally with the practical imperatives of speed and efficiency. If a don’t-do-it-if-it’s-stupid exception isn’t spelled out in the rulebook, you follow the not-really-necessary rule anyway, because, well, hey, it says here I’m supposed to.
The ILWU doesn’t exactly deny it’s engaged in work to rule. ILWU spokesman Craig Merrilees says that while the union and its officers don’t endorse the tactic, members frustrated with working conditions may wage individual work-to-rule campaigns. “Longstanding port congestion problems caused by bad decisions within the industry have made the docks much more dangerous,” he says, “so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that dockworkers are becoming frustrated.”
The National Labor Relations Board has not, thus far, charged the ILWU with an illegal slowdown. With work to rule it’s usually difficult to make such charges stick. NAM thinks that shouldn’t matter. “The congestion and the slowdown are real,” said Robyn Boerstling, NAM’s director of transportation and infrastructure policy. Boerstling said shipments that took two to three days to leave the port this summer are now taking six to seven days.
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ILWU Merrilees strongly disagrees: “It’s a simple scapegoating fantasy that ignores problems of their own making.”
Both sides agree that whatever slowdown exists is caused at least partly by the ever-larger size of shipping vessels, which simply take longer to unload. Both sides also agree that shortages of chassis to transport cargo containers around the port, of port truck drivers, and of rail cars equipped to carry ship containers — this last caused by a surge in demand from oil producers in North Dakota and Canada — slow things down.
“The press release the ILWU put out [on Nov. 10] lining up all the issues, we agree with,” said Gold. But the congestion issues, he said, can’t be addressed until a new union contract is in place.
For its part, the White House isn’t eager to wade in. White House spokesman Frank Benenati told POLITICO that the Obama administration was “monitoring the situation.”
“Just last year,” Benenati said in November in an email to Bloomberg, “there was a long negotiation at the East and Gulf Coast ports. And just as the two sides in that case were able to resolve their differences through the time-tested process of collective bargaining, we’re confident that management and labor at the West Coast ports can do the same thing.”