Issues around not getting paid for time lost during the blizzard
And issues with the port corruption monitors fing around with collective bargaining stuff
Since Journal of Commerce is the most reliable logistics industry news source, obviously taking an anti-worker pro-boss perspective, here's their take on it:
NY-NJ port terminals reopen after ILA wildcat strike
Joseph Bonney, Senior Editor | Jan 29, 2016 7:38PM EST
Container terminals at the Port of New York and New Jersey resumed operations Friday night after International Longshoremen’s Association members staged a one-day wildcat strike that was clouded by confusion and blamed on a variety of issues.
The surprise walkout at 10 a.m. Friday disrupted the East Coast's busiest port, which was still trying to catch up after being idled for four days by Winter Storm Jonas and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday the previous week.
The New York Shipping Association moved quickly to secure an arbitrator's award declaring the work stoppage a violation of the NYSA-ILA contract's no-strike provision. The ILA then issued a statement urging union members to return to work.
"During this time, discussions took place between the ILA and NYSA with regard to outstanding issues concerning chassis, jurisdiction, hiring and technology," the NYSA said in a statement. "It was agreed to expeditiously seek solutions to these longstanding issues."
The strike caught terminal operators and truckers flat-footed. There was no official explanation for the walkout, which was unaccompanied by picket signs. As rumors swirled, several union sources said the walkout was aimed at the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, which regulates port hiring and has worked with federal authorities on criminal investigations related to the ILA.
ILA spokesman James McNamara confirmed that the strike seemed to be "directed at the Waterfront Commission and its interference in hiring and harassment of ILA members.” He said dockworkers also were concerned about chassis jurisdiction and technology.
NYSA President John Nardi learned of the strike via email while on an airplane. He said the walkout was unexpected and that employers "had absolutely no indication" of its cause. He said subsequent discussions indicated that the work stoppage was triggered by a "compilation of a lot of unresolved issues" that he said the two sides agreed to address.
In its prepared statement, the ILA said its leaders had told members: “We have heard your voices, we have heard your concerns, and we have taken action on your behalf... We urge all ILA members to return to work and will continue to report to you on the progress we make resolving all concerns of our hard-working and dedicated ILA workforce.”
The ILA and NYSA have battled the Waterfront Commission for years, and filed an unsuccessful lawsuit accusing the commission of illegally interfering in their collective bargaining agreement. An appeal of the case is pending before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
Chassis maintenance and repair is another long-festering issue. In recent years, container lines that are signatories to the union's coastwide contract have transferred most of their chassis to leasing companies that aren't contract signatories. Though the lessors have pledged to continue to use ILA labor for their maintenance and repair, ILA President Harold Daggett wants to tie them to a contract.
The issue of chassis M&R jurisdiction has emerged as one of the stickiest points in exploratory talks about a long-term extension of the union's current coastwide contract, which expires in 2018. Insiders report that the chassis issue has slowed momentum toward early negotiations on a new agreement. Technology is another longstanding ILA concern.
Why these issues suddenly erupted into a strike Friday remains unclear. What is clear is that the walkout caused port-wide disruption. When workers suddenly walked out, many drayage drivers already were inside terminals or waiting outside terminal gates.
Trucking company dispatchers advised drivers to avoid joining queues outside terminals. The port authority soon after issued a similar request. However, some drivers who were already inside terminal gates said they had to wait for hours to get permission to exit terminals.
More than two hours after ILA members walked out, some trucks were still queued up outside terminals. Some drivers waited on side streets near the port hoping in vain that the work stoppage would be short-lived.
The disruption virtually guarantees heavy traffic and delays next week at the port. Though terminals' ship and yard operations run 24/7, terminals' truck gates normally are closed on Saturdays. GCT Bayonne said it will keep its gates open as previously planned on Sunday, and will operate Sunday gate hours through February.
The shutdown also is likely to produce hefty demurrage and per-diem detention bills for late pickup and return of containers. During previous port shutdowns, these charges have been waived by terminals and container lines in some but not all cases.
Friday’s walkout apparently began with ILA mechanics in Local 1804-1. Word quickly spread that terminals would be shut down. At the APM Terminals gate at Port Elizabeth, more than 100 ILA members milled around, waiting to see whether they would be called back to work.
Several said they followed instructions passed along by fellow workers to walk out at 10 a.m., but were uncertain why the strike was called.
“All that I know is it’s cold,” one heavily bundled dockworker said.
[taken from here, behind the journal's paywall: http://www.joc.com/port-news/longshoreman-labor/international-longshoremen%E2%80%99s-association/ny-nj-port-terminals-reopen-after-ila-wildcat-strike_20160129.html]
A comrade asked me privately to confirm the issues in the wildcat. While I can't know for sure, this is what our project has learned from our close friends in the ILWU who closely watch the situation of their fellow workers in the ILA on the other coasts.
The main issues are: 1. chassis 2. ship size 3. jurisdiction 4. hiring and 5. technology
1. Chassis
From the beginning of the intermodal era, ocean carriers regularly provided chassis as a free service (see the photo above for a stack of chassis). Carriers are businesses that provide transportation services (railroads and trucking firms are carriers too). In this case, these are the steamship lines that transport the containers, like Maersk, APL, CMA CGM, Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd, etc., etc. So it used to be simple: the ocean carriers provided the chassis along with the container and the truckers just hitched both to their rigs and dropped them off at the appropriate destination. On the return trip, they usually ended up at the terminal aligned with the carrier.
But in 2009, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration passed an omnibus transportation bill that included a rule that chassis providers were required to register and keep maintenance and repair records with the agency. The intent of this was ensuring the "roadability" of the chassis, which is a genuine safety concern.
Since then the ocean carriers have dumped the chassis onto other sectors in the portside supply chain, creating chaos. In the post-2008 crisis, trade volume tanked and the ocean carriers faced overcapacity which they tried to alleviate with mergers and alliances. With the added regulation by the FMCSA, this seemed to be a purely economic move to shave costs.
3. Ship size
At the same time, the size of container ships kept getting larger (see my photo above of CMA CGM's 18,000 TEU Benjamin Franklin on it's inaugural voyage to the Port of Oakland on December 31, 2015, making it the largest container ship to ever call at a North American port). North American port terminals are scrambling to accommodate these megaships, with the most obvious long-term solution being automation (for more on this, see below), since their current technology is based on ships no larger than around 13,000 TEUs. Not only have the steamship lines been merging and creating alliances, but the terminal operators at various ports have been streamlining too. For example, the Port of Oakland had 11 terminals ten years ago; today it is down to 5, with one global terminal operator -- Ports America -- recently having decided to pull out of its lease at Outer Harbor in Oakland. To cope with overcapacity of container ships, terminal operators are merging their operations into mega-terminals, but not always successfully --- as demonstrated on the West Coast during ILWU rank-and-filers doing work-to-rule actions during contract negotiations in 2014-2015, which were able to completely grind some ports to a near halt. Part of the reason for this paralysis was that chassis, with various owners, were scattered all over the whole port complex and some port truckers had to endure wait times as long as 6 hours to get in and out of terminals. Of all the factors adding to these inefficiencies, which are already economically externalized onto the port truckers, was the recent breakdown of the system of assigning chassis to containers.
3. Jurisdiction
For this aspect, I stand to be corrected, but I believe that the carriers no longer providing chassis opened up questions about longshore worker jurisdiction. A few companies filled the vacuum left by carriers, such as Direct ChassisLink, Flexi-Van Leasing, and TRAC Intermodal, to own and lease chassis. But these weren't the only companies, just the major ones. But with just three major players, their chassis were proprietary and had to be returned to the proper "chassis pool," which is the companies with leasing rights aligned with each of the three. This transition proved chaotic, so these three chassis providers proposed "gray chassis" pools (also known as a "pool-of-pools") so that nearly 80% of all chassis operating in and out of ports of the U.S. would be interchangeable. This gray chassis pool got included for the 29 ports on the West Coast under the recent ILWU longshore contract in 2015. The only problem is the neither of the three chassis providers, nor the gray pools, are part of the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the management bargaining unit in contract negotiations. Yet PMA made the "maintenance & repair" of chassis the jurisdiction of longshore workers in the ILWU as a contract concession in bargaining because under the previous arrangement, with carriers owning the chassis, the union did the M&R work. So this guaranteed union work is not legally enforceable. The ILA will be bargaining a similar new contract in 2018 with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) for its represented Atlantic and Gulf coast ports, with the same jurisdictional issue -- and the same legal ambiguity. Both the ILWU and ILA consider this a struggle against losing their jurisdictions for union work under the new chassis arrangement.
4. Hiring
On the West Coast the ILWU slogan is "An Injury to One is an Injury to All," showing the Wobbly influence that remains -- although tentatively -- to this day. Howard Kimeldorf's excellent book Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront shows the divergent influences, west and east. The ILA has always been mobbed up, just watch Elia Kazan's 1954 film On the Waterfront to see a pretty accurate fictional depiction of this.
Because various mafioso families, like the Gambinos, have controlled the ILA the legislatures of New Jersey and New York created the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor in 1953 to "root out vestiges of organized crime." The commission conducts criminal investigations, licenses dockworkers, and regulates the size of the port's ILA workforce. It is that last power that creates much of the conflict because the agency's decisions at times contradict the collective bargaining agreement between the ILA and NYSA. Between 2014 and 2015 volume at the NJ-NY port complex increased 10%, so the commission's slowness leaves the docks understaffed.
More importantly, the ILA historically entirely controlled the hiring process. But given the union's corruption, this led to nepotism and gangsters in the union. A few years ago, the Waterfront Commission created a formula where 51% of jobs are earmarked for military veterans, 25% to ILA referrals, and the last 24% for recommendations from the NYSA.
ILA President Harold Daggett constantly turns up the rhetoric, calling the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor a "blood-sucking . . . evil empire" who subject the union to "Nazi-type abuse." He points out that the commission operates on a $12 million annual budget from a 2% assessment on port companies' payroll.
5. Automation
Right now, the Virginia International Gateway, along the Elizabeth River in Portsmouth, Virginia, is the only fully-automated container terminal in the Western Hemisphere. It has all the latest specs for maximum capacity to handle the largest ship. Its cranes can handle post-Panamax class vessels and its channel has a 50-foot draft.
Currently, Berths 135-147 of the TraPac Container Terminal at the Port of Los Angeles are partially automated, towards the goal of full automation. Trailing slightly behind is the Long Beach Container Terminal at Middle Harbor of the port in that adjoining city, which should open its automated docks sometime this year.
Asia has 3 ports are are fully automated terminals at Pusan Newport in South Korea, Hong Kong International Terminal 6 & 7, and Kaohsiung Evergreen Terminal in Taiwan. But Europe is at the cutting edge of this technology, with 5 ports: Euromax Terminal, Rotterdam in the Netherlands (which is the model most other ports strive to emulate), DPW Antwerp Gateway Terminal in Belgium, Container Terminals Altenwerder and Burchardkai in Hamburg, Germany, and TTI Algeciras in Spain.
As with the container revolution that replaced the labor-intensive system of break-bulk loading and unloading ships, the automation revolution will further expel dockers from the work process. The writing is on the wall and docker unions everywhere are trying to find ways to not lose their entire workforce. On the Staten Island and New Jersey side of the NJ-NY harbor, automation of the docks can't happen until the completion of the $1.3 billion project to raise the height of the Bayonne Bridge from its current 150 feet to 215 feet, in order to accommodate Super Post-Panamax class ships -- which reach as high as 175 feet. This could be finished by 2017, but with the present ILA contract expiring in 2018 the ILA is clearly anxious about the implications of automation to the size of the unionized workforce.
This analysis is based on our Supply Chain Research group's watching these developments from afar (but based on participants who are active and retired ILWU members), so corrections to any of this are welcomed and encouraged.
I'm, here in the affected area. Fast read the stuff relative to the ILA, seems mostly on target. I'm not a lonshore person, know a few (not within the juridiction of the wildcat), but this seems bout right.
Seems like the wildcat may have started amonst the mechanics and spread to others via usual and electronic forms of communication.
Seems like the wildcat may have started among the mechanics and spread to others via usual and electronic forms of communication.
Thanks, fellow worker.
There was a wildcat at the Port of Oakland last year, sparked by mechanics protesting their loss of some Maintenance & Repair work on the chassis. Sounds like it was the same in NJ-NY.
By way of nackground, the whole issue of ILA members doing chasis maint & repair goes back a long time. ILA members believe a deal was struck during the last round of nego, yet feel this is being challanged and want real, written guarantees that the deal is the deal (see background to 2011 from west coast bosses JOC : http://www.jocsailings.com/MaritimeNews/NewsArticleDetail/tabid/74/ArticleId/10513/ILA-Retains-Chassis-Pool-Maintenance-and-Repair.aspx )
Seems like the wildcat may have started among the mechanics and spread to others via usual and electronic forms of communication.
Thanks, fellow worker.
There was a wildcat at the Port of Oakland last year, sparked by mechanics protesting their loss of some Maintenance & Repair work on the chassis. Sounds like it was the same in NJ-NY.
Sure thing.
Similiar.
Down in Philly, the ILA and the Machinists (IAM) have duked out the craft work in the past.
Seems like the IAM is the sweatheart whore for lower wage wtarefront deals down along the Philly-South Jersey area. The whole shitstorm with Dole a few years ago was movement on Philly ILA work to a back hole Souh Jersey lower paid IAM port. Even a mobbed up union can't get a bosses break these days.
Issues around not getting
Issues around not getting paid for time lost during the blizzard
And issues with the port corruption monitors fing around with collective bargaining stuff
Thanks syndicalist
Thanks syndicalist
The Empire Logistics folks or
The Empire Logistics folks or Hieronymous may know more. You could try PMing them?
Since Journal of Commerce is
Since Journal of Commerce is the most reliable logistics industry news source, obviously taking an anti-worker pro-boss perspective, here's their take on it:
NY-NJ port terminals reopen after ILA wildcat strike
Joseph Bonney, Senior Editor | Jan 29, 2016 7:38PM EST
Container terminals at the Port of New York and New Jersey resumed operations Friday night after International Longshoremen’s Association members staged a one-day wildcat strike that was clouded by confusion and blamed on a variety of issues.
The surprise walkout at 10 a.m. Friday disrupted the East Coast's busiest port, which was still trying to catch up after being idled for four days by Winter Storm Jonas and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday the previous week.
The New York Shipping Association moved quickly to secure an arbitrator's award declaring the work stoppage a violation of the NYSA-ILA contract's no-strike provision. The ILA then issued a statement urging union members to return to work.
"During this time, discussions took place between the ILA and NYSA with regard to outstanding issues concerning chassis, jurisdiction, hiring and technology," the NYSA said in a statement. "It was agreed to expeditiously seek solutions to these longstanding issues."
The strike caught terminal operators and truckers flat-footed. There was no official explanation for the walkout, which was unaccompanied by picket signs. As rumors swirled, several union sources said the walkout was aimed at the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, which regulates port hiring and has worked with federal authorities on criminal investigations related to the ILA.
ILA spokesman James McNamara confirmed that the strike seemed to be "directed at the Waterfront Commission and its interference in hiring and harassment of ILA members.” He said dockworkers also were concerned about chassis jurisdiction and technology.
NYSA President John Nardi learned of the strike via email while on an airplane. He said the walkout was unexpected and that employers "had absolutely no indication" of its cause. He said subsequent discussions indicated that the work stoppage was triggered by a "compilation of a lot of unresolved issues" that he said the two sides agreed to address.
In its prepared statement, the ILA said its leaders had told members: “We have heard your voices, we have heard your concerns, and we have taken action on your behalf... We urge all ILA members to return to work and will continue to report to you on the progress we make resolving all concerns of our hard-working and dedicated ILA workforce.”
The ILA and NYSA have battled the Waterfront Commission for years, and filed an unsuccessful lawsuit accusing the commission of illegally interfering in their collective bargaining agreement. An appeal of the case is pending before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
Chassis maintenance and repair is another long-festering issue. In recent years, container lines that are signatories to the union's coastwide contract have transferred most of their chassis to leasing companies that aren't contract signatories. Though the lessors have pledged to continue to use ILA labor for their maintenance and repair, ILA President Harold Daggett wants to tie them to a contract.
The issue of chassis M&R jurisdiction has emerged as one of the stickiest points in exploratory talks about a long-term extension of the union's current coastwide contract, which expires in 2018. Insiders report that the chassis issue has slowed momentum toward early negotiations on a new agreement. Technology is another longstanding ILA concern.
Why these issues suddenly erupted into a strike Friday remains unclear. What is clear is that the walkout caused port-wide disruption. When workers suddenly walked out, many drayage drivers already were inside terminals or waiting outside terminal gates.
Trucking company dispatchers advised drivers to avoid joining queues outside terminals. The port authority soon after issued a similar request. However, some drivers who were already inside terminal gates said they had to wait for hours to get permission to exit terminals.
More than two hours after ILA members walked out, some trucks were still queued up outside terminals. Some drivers waited on side streets near the port hoping in vain that the work stoppage would be short-lived.
The disruption virtually guarantees heavy traffic and delays next week at the port. Though terminals' ship and yard operations run 24/7, terminals' truck gates normally are closed on Saturdays. GCT Bayonne said it will keep its gates open as previously planned on Sunday, and will operate Sunday gate hours through February.
The shutdown also is likely to produce hefty demurrage and per-diem detention bills for late pickup and return of containers. During previous port shutdowns, these charges have been waived by terminals and container lines in some but not all cases.
Friday’s walkout apparently began with ILA mechanics in Local 1804-1. Word quickly spread that terminals would be shut down. At the APM Terminals gate at Port Elizabeth, more than 100 ILA members milled around, waiting to see whether they would be called back to work.
Several said they followed instructions passed along by fellow workers to walk out at 10 a.m., but were uncertain why the strike was called.
“All that I know is it’s cold,” one heavily bundled dockworker said.
[taken from here, behind the journal's paywall: http://www.joc.com/port-news/longshoreman-labor/international-longshoremen%E2%80%99s-association/ny-nj-port-terminals-reopen-after-ila-wildcat-strike_20160129.html]
A comrade asked me privately
A comrade asked me privately to confirm the issues in the wildcat. While I can't know for sure, this is what our project has learned from our close friends in the ILWU who closely watch the situation of their fellow workers in the ILA on the other coasts.
The main issues are: 1. chassis 2. ship size 3. jurisdiction 4. hiring and 5. technology
1. Chassis
From the beginning of the intermodal era, ocean carriers regularly provided chassis as a free service (see the photo above for a stack of chassis). Carriers are businesses that provide transportation services (railroads and trucking firms are carriers too). In this case, these are the steamship lines that transport the containers, like Maersk, APL, CMA CGM, Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd, etc., etc. So it used to be simple: the ocean carriers provided the chassis along with the container and the truckers just hitched both to their rigs and dropped them off at the appropriate destination. On the return trip, they usually ended up at the terminal aligned with the carrier.
But in 2009, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration passed an omnibus transportation bill that included a rule that chassis providers were required to register and keep maintenance and repair records with the agency. The intent of this was ensuring the "roadability" of the chassis, which is a genuine safety concern.
Since then the ocean carriers have dumped the chassis onto other sectors in the portside supply chain, creating chaos. In the post-2008 crisis, trade volume tanked and the ocean carriers faced overcapacity which they tried to alleviate with mergers and alliances. With the added regulation by the FMCSA, this seemed to be a purely economic move to shave costs.
3. Ship size
At the same time, the size of container ships kept getting larger (see my photo above of CMA CGM's 18,000 TEU Benjamin Franklin on it's inaugural voyage to the Port of Oakland on December 31, 2015, making it the largest container ship to ever call at a North American port). North American port terminals are scrambling to accommodate these megaships, with the most obvious long-term solution being automation (for more on this, see below), since their current technology is based on ships no larger than around 13,000 TEUs. Not only have the steamship lines been merging and creating alliances, but the terminal operators at various ports have been streamlining too. For example, the Port of Oakland had 11 terminals ten years ago; today it is down to 5, with one global terminal operator -- Ports America -- recently having decided to pull out of its lease at Outer Harbor in Oakland. To cope with overcapacity of container ships, terminal operators are merging their operations into mega-terminals, but not always successfully --- as demonstrated on the West Coast during ILWU rank-and-filers doing work-to-rule actions during contract negotiations in 2014-2015, which were able to completely grind some ports to a near halt. Part of the reason for this paralysis was that chassis, with various owners, were scattered all over the whole port complex and some port truckers had to endure wait times as long as 6 hours to get in and out of terminals. Of all the factors adding to these inefficiencies, which are already economically externalized onto the port truckers, was the recent breakdown of the system of assigning chassis to containers.
For this aspect, I stand to be corrected, but I believe that the carriers no longer providing chassis opened up questions about longshore worker jurisdiction. A few companies filled the vacuum left by carriers, such as Direct ChassisLink, Flexi-Van Leasing, and TRAC Intermodal, to own and lease chassis. But these weren't the only companies, just the major ones. But with just three major players, their chassis were proprietary and had to be returned to the proper "chassis pool," which is the companies with leasing rights aligned with each of the three. This transition proved chaotic, so these three chassis providers proposed "gray chassis" pools (also known as a "pool-of-pools") so that nearly 80% of all chassis operating in and out of ports of the U.S. would be interchangeable. This gray chassis pool got included for the 29 ports on the West Coast under the recent ILWU longshore contract in 2015. The only problem is the neither of the three chassis providers, nor the gray pools, are part of the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the management bargaining unit in contract negotiations. Yet PMA made the "maintenance & repair" of chassis the jurisdiction of longshore workers in the ILWU as a contract concession in bargaining because under the previous arrangement, with carriers owning the chassis, the union did the M&R work. So this guaranteed union work is not legally enforceable. The ILA will be bargaining a similar new contract in 2018 with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) for its represented Atlantic and Gulf coast ports, with the same jurisdictional issue -- and the same legal ambiguity. Both the ILWU and ILA consider this a struggle against losing their jurisdictions for union work under the new chassis arrangement.
4. Hiring
On the West Coast the ILWU slogan is "An Injury to One is an Injury to All," showing the Wobbly influence that remains -- although tentatively -- to this day. Howard Kimeldorf's excellent book Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront shows the divergent influences, west and east. The ILA has always been mobbed up, just watch Elia Kazan's 1954 film On the Waterfront to see a pretty accurate fictional depiction of this.
Because various mafioso families, like the Gambinos, have controlled the ILA the legislatures of New Jersey and New York created the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor in 1953 to "root out vestiges of organized crime." The commission conducts criminal investigations, licenses dockworkers, and regulates the size of the port's ILA workforce. It is that last power that creates much of the conflict because the agency's decisions at times contradict the collective bargaining agreement between the ILA and NYSA. Between 2014 and 2015 volume at the NJ-NY port complex increased 10%, so the commission's slowness leaves the docks understaffed.
More importantly, the ILA historically entirely controlled the hiring process. But given the union's corruption, this led to nepotism and gangsters in the union. A few years ago, the Waterfront Commission created a formula where 51% of jobs are earmarked for military veterans, 25% to ILA referrals, and the last 24% for recommendations from the NYSA.
ILA President Harold Daggett constantly turns up the rhetoric, calling the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor a "blood-sucking . . . evil empire" who subject the union to "Nazi-type abuse." He points out that the commission operates on a $12 million annual budget from a 2% assessment on port companies' payroll.
5. Automation
Right now, the Virginia International Gateway, along the Elizabeth River in Portsmouth, Virginia, is the only fully-automated container terminal in the Western Hemisphere. It has all the latest specs for maximum capacity to handle the largest ship. Its cranes can handle post-Panamax class vessels and its channel has a 50-foot draft.
Currently, Berths 135-147 of the TraPac Container Terminal at the Port of Los Angeles are partially automated, towards the goal of full automation. Trailing slightly behind is the Long Beach Container Terminal at Middle Harbor of the port in that adjoining city, which should open its automated docks sometime this year.
Asia has 3 ports are are fully automated terminals at Pusan Newport in South Korea, Hong Kong International Terminal 6 & 7, and Kaohsiung Evergreen Terminal in Taiwan. But Europe is at the cutting edge of this technology, with 5 ports: Euromax Terminal, Rotterdam in the Netherlands (which is the model most other ports strive to emulate), DPW Antwerp Gateway Terminal in Belgium, Container Terminals Altenwerder and Burchardkai in Hamburg, Germany, and TTI Algeciras in Spain.
As with the container revolution that replaced the labor-intensive system of break-bulk loading and unloading ships, the automation revolution will further expel dockers from the work process. The writing is on the wall and docker unions everywhere are trying to find ways to not lose their entire workforce. On the Staten Island and New Jersey side of the NJ-NY harbor, automation of the docks can't happen until the completion of the $1.3 billion project to raise the height of the Bayonne Bridge from its current 150 feet to 215 feet, in order to accommodate Super Post-Panamax class ships -- which reach as high as 175 feet. This could be finished by 2017, but with the present ILA contract expiring in 2018 the ILA is clearly anxious about the implications of automation to the size of the unionized workforce.
This analysis is based on our Supply Chain Research group's watching these developments from afar (but based on participants who are active and retired ILWU members), so corrections to any of this are welcomed and encouraged.
I'm, here in the affected
I'm, here in the affected area. Fast read the stuff relative to the ILA, seems mostly on target. I'm not a lonshore person, know a few (not within the juridiction of the wildcat), but this seems bout right.
Seems like the wildcat may have started amonst the mechanics and spread to others via usual and electronic forms of communication.
syndicalist wrote: Seems like
syndicalist
Thanks, fellow worker.
There was a wildcat at the Port of Oakland last year, sparked by mechanics protesting their loss of some Maintenance & Repair work on the chassis. Sounds like it was the same in NJ-NY.
By way of nackground, the
By way of nackground, the whole issue of ILA members doing chasis maint & repair goes back a long time. ILA members believe a deal was struck during the last round of nego, yet feel this is being challanged and want real, written guarantees that the deal is the deal (see background to 2011 from west coast bosses JOC : http://www.jocsailings.com/MaritimeNews/NewsArticleDetail/tabid/74/ArticleId/10513/ILA-Retains-Chassis-Pool-Maintenance-and-Repair.aspx )
Hieronymous
Hieronymous
Sure thing.
Similiar.
Down in Philly, the ILA and the Machinists (IAM) have duked out the craft work in the past.
Seems like the IAM is the sweatheart whore for lower wage wtarefront deals down along the Philly-South Jersey area. The whole shitstorm with Dole a few years ago was movement on Philly ILA work to a back hole Souh Jersey lower paid IAM port. Even a mobbed up union can't get a bosses break these days.