Longshore Workers Seeking an Even Keel

A blue-collar union man who spends his working days operating a dockside crane at the Port of Long Beach, Elijah N. Hall readily admits that he has done very well for himself.

Hall, 61, who earned about $130,000 last year hoisting cargo, says years of making big money on the docks have enabled him to accumulate eight cars, two motorcycles, a plump stock portfolio and four homes--one of which, he notes with a grin, is on Easy Street in Long Beach.

“It’s a joy to have the freedom to do that,” he said.

For the much-coveted work that provides such financial security, Hall--and thousands of others employed at West Coast ports--can thank the fabled International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. On a Labor Day when organized labor is battling to make a comeback in American political and economic life, the pint-sized ILWU stands as a symbol of old-fashioned union clout.

It has even won the grudging admiration of shipping industry management. “One thing I’ve always respected is the way they handle business. It may seem slow and methodical, but sooner or later, they get their way on things,” said Robert Kleist, an advisor to shipping giant Evergreen America Corp.

These days, however, the ILWU’s 8,400-member longshore division--the core of the union--is worried that rougher waters lie ahead. Longshoremen fret that a new wave of automation and modernization could cost the union precious jobs at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s busiest waterfront complex, and elsewhere on the West Coast.

In fact, internal tensions over how to preserve work for the ILWU contributed to the longshore division’s initial rejection last month of a contract proposal negotiated with the Pacific Maritime Assn., the management group representing shippers and terminal operators.

Most observers discount the possibility of a full-fledged waterfront strike any time soon, even if the contract proposal goes down to defeat again in follow-up balloting in two weeks. Still, they say, the outcome of the contract negotiations will help determine whether the ILWU’s longshore future will be as successful as its past.

Records show that last year longshore laborers earned, including overtime, an average of $66,260. A couple of notches higher on the pay scale are unionized longshore foremen, who made an average $125,167. And some workers such as Hall, who says he puts in 70 hours a week, earn more with extra overtime and night and holiday pay.

Together with the shipping industry, the union has helped turn the Los Angeles-Long Beach waterfront--where the San Francisco-based ILWU has its largest contingent of longshore workers--into one of the region’s main economic engines. The local waterfront, capitalizing on international trends that have consolidated more traffic at bigger ports, boomed even during the recession of the early 1990s.

Good luck and smarts have combined over the years to give the ILWU’s longshore division its heavyweight stature. The good fortune comes from being in a business that has thrived on the West Coast.

In contrast, other unions, such as the United Auto Workers, have been jolted repeatedly by foreign competition and the whims of the marketplace. Even within the ILWU, the division covering warehouse workers--beset by nonunion competition and related issues that the longshore workers generally don’t face--is struggling.

Although shipping executives sometimes disagree, the ILWU’s longshore leaders also are widely credited with having the foresight over the years to embrace new technology that has boosted employers’ profits. “They understand the market realities of the industry, and they look after the industry,” said Daniel J. B. Mitchell, a labor economist at UCLA.

The longshore unit’s strength--it has the power to shut down the West Coast’s ports--has given the ILWU leadership the ability to overcome periodic internal divisions, as well as the luxury of indulging in pet political causes.

Even though it is a small union with no more than 60,000 U.S. and Canadian members, the ILWU was the first U.S. union to declare its opposition to the Vietnam War, and it boycotted cargo from South Africa when that nation practiced apartheid.

This year, the ILWU was one of a cluster of unions behind a new national political party, the Labor Party, that advocates such ideas as cutting the full-time workweek to 32 hours and raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour.

On the other hand, the union blossomed into a diverse organization only after discrimination lawsuits forced open the cargo bays to more blacks and women.

In addition, the ILWU this spring disappointed some labor officials by providing only nominal support to a strike by immigrant truck drivers who serve the ports and who were organized by the Communications Workers of America. Without the ILWU’s muscle, the strike failed.

One steamship executive, who asked not to be identified, ridiculed the union’s supposed political idealism. “These are guys with fat wallets,” the executive said. “They’re more worried about their boats than they are about causes.” (ILWU President Brian McWilliams declined to be interviewed.)

The union has long been held together by an attachment to tradition. Families from San Pedro, Wilmington and Long Beach encouraged their children to work on the waterfront.

“Growing up in the harbor area, that was one of the main jobs. In junior high and high school, most of my friends’ fathers were in longshore,” said David Aproda, 45, a lifelong Wilmington resident who did casual labor on the waterfront intermittently for 15 years before getting his long-awaited chance to break into the ILWU.

“They always said it was hard work, but that it was a union that would take care of you when you get older.”

Still venerated by many members is the late Harry Bridges, the Australian-born labor militant who launched the union by organizing the San Francisco docks in the 1930s and who led the ILWU until 1977. Unlike the East Coast’s International Longshoremen’s Assn., which Bridges broke away from in 1937, the ILWU has long enjoyed a clean reputation and remained free of financial scandal.

The union’s history is also noteworthy for its record of collaborating with management on modernization programs. That dates to 1961, when Bridges guided the union into a landmark pact with the PMA known as the “mechanization and modernization” agreement.

Back then, cargo arrived in boxes, and there were no sophisticated cranes to handle the loads. But union officials recognized what was on the way: a shift toward steel cargo containers that could be transferred from boats to rail cars to trucks.

ILWU officials “were certainly fearful of [containerization] because they could foresee what has [now] happened. Instead of a ship spending a week at the port of L.A. and Long Beach unloading one package at a time, today the ship comes in, offloads some containers, puts on some more and off it goes,” said Kleist, the Evergreen America advisor. “The number of longshoremen required to a work a ship compared with 25 years ago is substantially less.”

In exchange for a no-layoff commitment from employers and improved pensions and wages, the ILWU cleared the way for port operations to be automated, allowing more cargo to move through. As improved efficiency over the years has reduced the number of workers needed, cutbacks have been handled through early retirements and attrition.

In the 1990s, ever more sophisticated technology threatens the union’s hold on the waterfront. Longshoremen are concerned about the day when the West Coast follows the lead of the Dutch port of Rotterdam--perhaps the world’s most sophisticated--where cargo is moved by driverless, computer-controlled vehicles. Automated cranes are also being introduced.

Even more modest advances allowing containers to carry bar codes would, by eliminating paperwork, pose a threat to at least some of the 1,360 well-paying clerical jobs.

On the Los Angeles-Long Beach waterfront, union insiders are wary of various rail projects under construction or in the planning stages. The projects--particularly the proposed $1.8-billion Alameda Corridor linking the ports to a rail hub near the city of Vernon--could bring more business to the waterfront, but ILWU members fear that the changes will provide transportation companies with openings to use cheaper nonunion labor or to work with other unions, such as the United Transportation Union.

LAXT Inc., a consortium planning a new $130-million coal terminal at the L.A. port, has said it plans to start using nonunion labor to load rail cars and store coal on the site.

To battle back, the union is pushing for language in its PMA contract that would put new rail-related jobs in the ILWU’s hands.

“If automation comes, we don’t want to stop progress. We want to be part of it,” said Joe Cortez, president of ILWU Local 13, which represents more than 3,000 longshoremen in the Southland and is the biggest ILWU local on the waterfront.

A push is also under way to recruit and negotiate for more truck drivers and office workers in the union’s ranks.

The ILWU will continue to draw on some of the time-honored traditions that pulled it together and gave it bargaining strength in the past. One is the longshore hiring halls, introduced in the 1930s to replace the old “shape-up” hiring system. Under that system, longshoremen looking for work would line up early in the morning and the boss would choose from the crowd, with the jobs sometimes going to the men who provided kickbacks.

Today’s hiring halls are intricate operations run by dispatchers answerable to both the PMA and the union. Although some longshoremen have steady arrangements with individual employers, most receive work assignments at the hiring halls and float from job to job. Their loyalties are more likely to rest with the union than with a particular employer--making it tougher for a shipping line to mount a union-busting campaign.

At Local 63’s hiring hall in Wilmington, dispatchers manage the morning’s job assignments using a complex paper-shuffling system that invites comparison to a stock-exchange floor. The ambience is far from the scruffy, tough-guy image associated with the longshore trade. Due to years of mechanization, many of the jobs no longer require brute strength, and given the high pay, many college graduates today go to work on the waterfront.

On a typical day, hundreds of men and women in T-shirts and shorts or jeans spill into the gymnasium-size hall to check their prospects. Four dispatchers in a microphone booth call individual workers from the crowd in a “low man out” system that allows those with the fewest hours on the job that week to get the first assignments.

Still, savvy longshoremen often jockey at the hiring hall to land much-prized “shorties”--one-day assignments of five hours or less that bring a full day’s pay.

Much as in the old days, the ILWU still can throw its weight around when it comes to watching out for its immediate economic interests. Its leverage is the enormous cost that a port shutdown can impose on the shipping industry. “You want to get that ship in and out of there as soon as possible, so if you have to pay a little more for labor, so be it,” said Jack Kyser, research director of the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County.

No major strike has been launched by the union since 1971, when workers walked off the job for four months, costing shippers and their customers millions of dollars.

Although observers don’t expect the current contract snags to turn into a strike, tensions have been running high within the union this summer. The complicated three-year agreement with the PMA, which will be voted on again in two weeks and faces an uphill fight, has been criticized on a number of counts. It would replace a deal that expired July 1.

There is concern among much of the membership that the pact would not provide strong enough assurances that new rail-related jobs would go to the ILWU.

Perhaps more importantly, the pact would curb the lucrative “side deals” between individual longshoremen and shipping companies under which workers avoid the hiring hall and report directly to an employer. These deals, relatively widespread locally, bring in extra pay that has helped make longshoremen in Southern California the best-paid in the union.

Many of the “steady” workers and their friends are voicing opposition to the proposal, making Wilmington-based Local 13 a bulwark of dissent. If the big local again overwhelmingly votes down the agreement in this month’s follow-up balloting, it will likely kill the current deal, but the union’s bargaining position is expected to remain strong.

“No one is going to sit here and say, ‘We won’t pay you $30 million over three years,’ because they can cost us $10 million in a weekend,” said a shipping executive who declined to be identified.

Or, as Domenick Miretti, vice president of the Southern California ILWU District Council and a professor specializing in trade issues at East Los Angeles College, put it, “What bodes well for the union is that everyone realizes the muscle that is there.”

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West Coast Shipping

The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union has benefited from the rise of the shipping business on the West Coast in several years. The growth has been particularly brisk at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together make up the nation’s business waterfront. Growth at Los Angeles-Long Beach, in millions of tons:

Los Angeles-Long Beach Tonnage Handled

1985: 52.1

‘95: 96.5

Source: Pacific Maritime Assn.