SAN DIEGO — As the cargo backlog continues to build at West Coast docks, the dockworkers union has until noon today to respond to charges that it is purposely slowing down the unloading of ships, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
In a letter to the International Longshore and Dockworkers Union Friday, the Justice Department warned that it “will not tolerate interference” with clearing the docks, which have been snarled since employers along the coast imposed a 10-day lockout last month.
If the Justice Department determines that the union is engaging in a purposeful slowdown, it could file civil charges against the leadership.
But the union blames the employers, represented by the Pacific Maritime Association, or PMA, because they have declined to take such steps as adding extra shifts or training new supervisors to oversee the unloading.
“The employers were the ones who did the lockout,” said union spokesman Steve Stallone. “The employers did all this damage to the economy. And then the Bush administration imposed the Taft-Hartley Act, giving the employers exactly what they were seeking all along.”
The long-running labor dispute at the ports erupted into a national crisis on Sept. 29, when the PMA locked workers out of the docks, accusing them of a work slowdown. On Oct. 8, the Bush administration reopened the docks under the Taft-Hartley Act, which imposes an 80-day cooling-off period.
But the backlog at the ports caused by a massive backlog of shipments during the 10-day lockout continues to have severe repercussions for U.S. manufacturers and retailers. A number of factories especially auto manufacturers have been slowing or shutting down production lines because of a lack of parts. And some retailers fear that they may have empty shelves as the Christmas rush begins.
“This is serious. And this needs to be settled,” Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told a group of business leaders in South Carolina yesterday.
O’Neill said that manufacturers that rely on just-in-time delivery of parts are particularly vulnerable.
Noting that the BMW plant he visited in Greenville had only enough inventory to keep operations running for four hours, O’Neill said that many factories “don’t have a lot of flexibility any more.”
In a filing with the Justice Department last week, the PMA accused the union of purposely slowing down work after Taft-Hartley was imposed. The PMA said that as part of a “concerted, systematic work slowdown,” productivity had fallen 34 percent in Oakland, 29 percent in Portland, 27 percent in Seattle, 19 percent in Tacoma, and 9 percent in Los Angeles and Long Beach.
“We’ve done a shift-by-shift comparison of what normal productivity has looked like in the past couple of years and what it looks like now,” said PMA spokesman Steven Sugerman. “We’re seeing significantly lower productivity now.”
But union members as well as academics who have studied the ports say that much of the drop in productivity can be attributed to the docks crowded with a maze of containers, the trucks snarled in traffic jams, and the bottlenecks created at rail depots.
“It’s a flow problem,” said Steven Erie, an infrastructure specialist at the University of California San Diego who has written a history of the state’s ports. “The union’s going by the book, but there’s still stuff that’s being input in Asia into the supply chain. The new shipments are replacing the containers that are slowly being unloaded.”
Erie said the backlog was understandable, because ships are coming from Asia as fast as they are being unloaded.
“When I’m driving to Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway these days, I feel like I’m on the beaches of Normandy at D-Day,” he said. “It looks like there’s an invasion fleet out there.”
David Olson, a University of Washington professor specializing in labor issues, suggests that the PMA may share some of the blame for the backlog at the docks.
“Productivity is not just a consequence of workers’ behavior,” Olson said. “It also has to do with arrangements at the terminals, how the ships are positioned at their berths and the call for a work force.”
Olson said the PMA has more control over those factors than the union, since the employers determine how many extra workers to call, whether to introduce a third shift or what size the work crews should be. Despite the massive backlog, most of the shipping and stevedore employers along the coast have decided to maintain only two shifts.
Regardless of who is at fault, Olson adds, the PMA is using an inaccurate standard if it is comparing current productivity to the average productivity.
“The situation on the docks since Oct. 8 has not been normal,” he said.