Power struggle at the docks

By Nancy Cleeland
Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — The labor dispute playing havoc with West Coast docks has never been about pay or benefits.

Cargo cranes were idle Friday after the association representing shipping lines locked out longshore workers at all West Coast ports. Associated Press

For four months, the titans have been wrestling over questions that, when viewed individually, may seem insignificant, even petty.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association have spent weeks on arcane language that spells out how to introduce equipment such as scanners and sensors rather than such traditional issues as wages.

Tempers have flared over the union's insistence that a few hundred computer operators be brought under the contract that already covers 10,500 dockworkers.

Taken together, however, these issues will determine who controls the crucial information that is the life-blood flowing through modern ports. And one thing on which both sides agree is that, in an age of computers, bar codes and remote cameras, such knowledge is power.

"We know this technology is coming," said one union official who asked not to be named. "We want to anticipate how it's going to be used and be sure we're involved in it. We're talking about our survival."

Carriers and stevedoring companies that annually move billions of dollars of goods through the ports say they are desperate to improve efficiency, the key to cutting costs. They argue they could achieve that if the union would allow them to use available technology.

"A lot of information, such as the content of containers, is on Web sites already," said Tom Edwards, a PMA area manager in Northern California who has been directly involved in negotiations. "It can be sent electronically from shippers and enters the terminal's data base, so that when the container arrives at the terminal, all the information is there, and they can change that information at any time electronically. It's done seamlessly."

Such faster information is important to speeding up the flow of traffic through the terminals. Under the current longshore contract, however, all documentation in the terminal must originate with union clerks. That language, which shipping lines consider archaic, has been used repeatedly by the union to justify retyping cargo information into the terminal computer system — even if it is already available electronically. Shipping lines have fought the rekeying issue for years through arbitration but have repeatedly lost.

In what it described as a major concession, the union agreed in the current negotiations to give up some language so that information could flow freely from shipping lines around the world to port terminals.

Once there, however, the union wants guarantees that only union clerks could review, correct or change information. Carriers "want that somebody else can get into the operating system and start doing the work even after the information comes into the terminal," said ILWU spokesman Steve Stallone.

"If they're allowed to do that, then our clerks don't have any work anymore," Stallone said. "We lose the control over the information, which is a significant part of the power of the union and a major part of our jobs."

The fight over the flow of information in the terminal is just one of several thorny and complex issues that both sides have deadlocked on in recent months, all centering on control.

The union also wants the shipping lines to expand union jurisdiction to certain planning jobs, such as the layout of containers on a ship. Many of those jobs are now performed remotely, as far as Utah or Arizona. The union insists such planning jobs are part of the documentation chain, and thus belong in the union.

The shipping lines disagree, and say such planning jobs were never part of the union's jurisdiction.

The dispute involves only about 80 jobs, but they are key to the orderly departure and arrival of ships — and both parties say the item is non-negotiable.