Deal reached in port labor talks; news welcome in San Bernardino County

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Story By Andrew Edwards, Press-Telegram and Karen Robes Meeks, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin | The San Bernardino Sun | Redlands Daily Fact

After a nine-month stalemate that threatened to cripple cargo movement along the West Coast, and which shook the Inland Empire economy, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Pacific Maritime Association on Friday reached a tentative five-year contract, sources said.

“Finally, our ports can get moving again and everyone’s feeling great that there’s an agreement,” Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said in a phone interview shortly after word of the deal came out.

Details of the agreement are not yet known. The ILWU’s some 20,000 members must first ratify the deal for it to go into effect. Leaders and businesses across Southern California were still learning about it, but they liked what they were hearing.

Among them was Assemblyman Marc Steinorth, R-Rancho Cucamonga, who has been hearing from concerned constituents about the effect the stalemate and the potential strike were having on Inland Empire businesses.

“I’m enthusiastic that both parties have been able to reach an agreement,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the resumption of the free flow of goods to and from our ports.”

But he also stressed the need for a longstanding agreement that will protect the region’s economy from the effects of future impasses.

The Pacific Maritime Association, which handles labor deals for West Coast port employers, and the ILWU were under deadline to complete contract negotiations by the end of Friday, or else have their representatives shuttled to Washington, D.C., under the orders of Labor Secretary Thomas Perez.

The two sides have been operating without a contract since July, but it was not until this month that President Barack Obama sent his labor secretary on a mission to facilitate an agreement. Negotiations have been publicly strained since the PMA began to reduce orders for night work in late December. The PMA subsequently suspended night operations at the harbor and also announced plans to cancel work during a four-day period that ended Monday.

The union has accused the PMA of unfairly denying work to its members and the PMA has responded that their actions became necessary only after the ILWU refused to dispatch skilled crane operators needed for shifts to be worthwhile.

What is indisputable is that the labor conflict has seriously slowed activity around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and in the Inland Empire, where an economy based on logistics and warehouses store cargo from those ports.

Friday’s agreement comes after PMA CEO Jim McKenna told reporters that West Coast ports were on the “brink of collapse” and detailed its latest proposal, which included raising pay by about 3 percent annually, maintaining employer paid health care and pushing the maximum pension benefit by 11.1 percent to $88,800 annually. A work stoppage could drain $2 billion a day from the U.S. economy, according to the National Retail Federation, National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“The system can only take so much,” McKenna said. “At some point, this will collapse under its own weight.”

And Larry Stewart, president of W Packaging , a box company in Colton, which employs about 40 people, was feeling it.

“It’s really started to get serious in the last 60 days,” he said. “If we can’t get anything in, we can’t ship what we need to our customers.”

What’s more, the National Retail Federation was so rattled Friday morning that the trade group sent a statement out at the beginning of the day calling on the president himself to intervene and possibly avert further supply chain disruptions to U.S. firms.

Garcia, however, said he began his Friday with a comparatively hopeful outlook on the prospects for a resolution.

“I was pretty optimistic. I talked last night to the labor secretary, and he felt that we would get a deal (Friday),” Garcia said.

The road to contract resolution has been a bumpy one. Since May, both sides had been working on a new contract that would cover longshore workers along the West Coast, including the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s busiest seaport complex handling 40 percent of U.S. imports.

In the beginning, talks seemed to go smoothly, with both sides imposing a media blackout regarding labor discussions and issuing joint statements vowing that business would not be disrupted while talks were ongoing.

Still, customers weren’t taking chances and began shipping goods in the months leading up to the July expiration of the contract.

While negotiations yielded a tentative agreement on health benefits over the summer, talks soured last fall when both sides began blaming each other for creating slowdowns at the ports already dealing with congestion from the arrival of bigger ships bringing in more cargo, the uneven distribution of trailers needed to tow cargo containers and a shortage of rail cars.

The weeks-long delays prompted customers to divert cargo to other ports or ship products by air to bypass the West Coast congestion.

PMA said they were forced to cut ship unloading night shifts in early January after the union refused to dispatch skilled crane operators to move cargo for weeks.

Meanwhile, the union countered that employers refused to hire and train workers needed to operate the specialized equipment and blamed employers’ mismanagement for congestion problems that have been going on for years.

Talks were so contentious that political leaders and trade associations whose members rely on the ports rallied for the involvement of a federal mediator. On Jan. 5, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service assigned the agency’s deputy director, Scot Beckenbaugh, to the talks at the request of PMA and ILWU.

On Jan. 26, both sides reached a tentative agreement on what had been a sticking point in negotiations — the issue of maintaining and repairing chassis, over which the ILWU secured jurisdiction.

Many speculated that contract talks would be resolved soon after the chassis agreement. This week, ILWU officials said both sides were “very close” to a contract resolution, but McKenna said six issues remained unresolved, including whether the union should have unilateral right to remove a local arbitrator.

Garcia said he would let the negotiating parties handle the release of details, but did say the hangup over the arbitrator was the last problem to be solved before Friday’s announcement could be made.

“This was unacceptable. To hold this up for one small issue was inappropriate,” he said.

Read the original article at Inland Valley Daily Bulletin | The San Bernardino Sun | Redlands Daily Fact

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Staff Writers Beau Yarbrough and Ryan Carter contributed to this report. So did The Associated Press.
Story By Andrew Edwards, Press-Telegram and Karen Robes Meeks, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin | The San Bernardino Sun | Redlands Daily Fact

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