Most of you are probably aware of the situation on the docks of the West Coast. The employers locked us out for almost two weeks during the peak season. Everything is totally f*cked up and not getting much better in spite of a 24/7 effort. Now the employers are complaining to the Feds that we are dragging our feet. More like dragging our butts.
My answers will be short and maybe not as prompt as I would like. I’m spending ten hours a day on the computer at work and really can’t devote too much time to it, but I know that there is a lot of disinformation in the media and that people have questions.
Galen, I’ve been following this situation. It seems the management locked out the union because the union guys were not working quickly. The union guys say they’re working as fast as conditions allow. Is there any way to document your claims to show that management is spreading lies? I think the underlying issue is that management wants to utilize new technology to start hiring workers that won’t get paid as much and the union guys want everyone’s job to be unionized. Maybe you all need to hire publicists to get your side of the dispute out to local media.
I have heard that Longshoremen make upwards of $100 000 /yr how much do you make ?
Follow up ( if LSM do make 6 figs). Are they worth getting paid that much?
[RANT] I can think of a hundred ways that money like that could be better spent. Police , Firefighters , Teachers to name a few. No wonder the cost of consumer goods is so much when is cost such huge dollars just to get it off the F$(%ing docks [\RANT]
The right-wing Republican daily rag in my hometown says you’re all making $100K-plus per year. Of course, they don’t point out the difference in living costs between the Coasts and Nebraska.
Having worked at a union plant before, I know that compensation figures given to the press include employer Social Security and unemployment taxes,employer health care contributions based on the most expensive plans in the benefits menu–not the mid-level that most people actually choose, assume that everyone contributes to the sucky 401K to the max (thus qualifying for the maximum possible employer match),and assume that the mythical average worker works every minute of voluntary overtime offered each year. I was near the top in seniority and never came close to making the published average.
What do you make in a normal 40-hour week? Do you get an actual 40-hour week, or are you on-call on your so-called days off?(A lot of “overpaid” people have to have pagers and/or leave contact numbers with their employers). Do you have the luxury of turning down OT, or do you have to come in every time you’re caught by the phone or pager?
During slack times, are you involuntarily laid off? If so, how long do these periods usually last?
I have the feeling that I’m getting employer-slanted information here.
Documenting this kind of stuff is difficult, and though we are trying, most of what we have is antecdotal. We don’t have battalions of PR flacks. Who would pay their salaries?
The employers are trying to break the agreement which was made in ca. 1960. We agreed not to oppose new technology, in this case containerization, in return for a guarantee that all new work is under our jusridiction. That’s our interpretation, anyway.
The bottom line is that we are the only decently paid workers in the long line stretching from the factories in China to the local Wal-Mart. The workers in China make diddly-squat, as you might expect. The sailors are all recruited in the Phillipines and make about 200-300 per month. They can crew a 75 million dollar ship for about $6,000 per month.
The port drivers who haul cargo to and from the docks have no rights at all. They are all poor immigrants who have no benefits or retirement and work long hours for peanuts. These people are really suffering. The courts have declared they are not employees and not covered under labor law. In fact, they are in thrall to the shipping lines and the brokers. I know many of these people personally and feel very bad for them, but there is little I can do except to try to help them negotiate the system as best as I can. A couple of decades ago, most drivers where Teamsters, made a middle class income, and had medical plans and pensions.
The Shipping lines are all based in Asia and do not have an enlightened attitude toward employees. Now they have decided that there is money to be made by squeezing the longhore sector of the chain. They are right.
You know, it’s amazing. I don’t see how this country stays in business. The most high value product exported is refridgerated meat. There is some refridgerated fruit and dry agricultural products from California. Most of this, except the cotton, goes to Japan; but there is a lot of scrap metal and recycled paper going to China. We really don’t ship much of anything of value to China, even though in terms of imports, it is by far the largest source. We joke that we ship a container of recycled cardboard to China and they return it full of DVD players and all the other stuff you see in the Wal-Mart. The Chinese people do not see much of value for all they produce. I think that the owners of the factories basically ship the cash back here and invest it and that is how the books balance.
There really is no preference given to any particular cargo. What is imported may have medical equipment in one container and crap to sell at Halloween in the next. Also, we are jamming the port with all this waste paper which has been piling up in warehouses stateside. Seems to me this should be low priority, but I don’t make these decisions.
Another big export is empty containers shipped to China for more crap to sell at the Wal-Mart. That’s because the trade is so unbalanced.
You can learn a lot about the economy on this job if you know what to look for. We are essentially consuming the labor of the Chinese people and giving them nothing in return. Shocking, but true.
Your figures are basically accurate. Our wages put us in the upper tier of wage earners in the US. Surprisingly, the shippers don’t really complain. They get their $75 million ships turned around in record time.In fact, they are offering a wage increase, even though it would not match the anticipated rate of inflation. They do find it useful, however, to stoke the fires of resentment among the millions they have screwed.
Incidentely, it is the stevedoring companies who are really blocking a settlement. The steamship lines will not gain much because we work for the stevedoring companies and they know that these companies will pocket the bulk of anything that they can extract from our hides.
According to the employers figures, total tonnage increased by five times from 1970 to 2000. Meanwhile, the number of lonshoremen declined dramatically, perhaps by a factor of four or so, although I don’t have those figures. The employers claimed productivity of labor increased 5% per year from 1970-1995 when it leveled off. That is remarkable. No way real wages increased that fast. Total wages are about $900 million per year. That is less that the employers claim the economy lost per day of the lockout! Of course there are benefits to be added to that.
So for this, the economy gets a workforce which handles 10% of the world’s and about half of the total of US trade with a worth of about $300 billion.
Over the past three decades or so, the real wages of most American workers have declined dramatically. How many workers do you know who can own a house and a new car while the wife stays home with the family and who has a 100% company-paid medical plan and a defined benefit pension instead of these chicken shit 401(k) plans. This is the way it was up until about 1970. If you were to extrapolate the wages adjusted for inflation there were tens of millions of workers making wages at the same level as longshoremen. Corporate America stole that away from us.
So our wages and benefits stand out not because they are so high, but because everyone else’s is so low.
You mention teachers, police and firefighters who could presumemly gain if we were paid less. Right. Anything we lost would go down the same rat hole as the wages lost by those American sailors and truck drivers. If they cut our wages in half, it would fund the Pentagon for about 8 hours.
But your point about teachers, police and firefighters is well taken. Our union has a progressive social program which includes decent wages for these people and other workers. The problem is that Reagan/Bush/Bush has so impoverished the public sector that in this outrageously wealthy country, our teachers work for poverty wages.
By the way, do you know that many flight attendants and pilots for these feeder airlines now qualify for foodstamps.
Also , consumer goods are cheap in this country. Just go to Europe or Japan an compare. It is your wages which are too low which make the goods seem expensive.
Ok, I think that is all for tonight. I hope I have helped people understand the situation, even though it really is hard because the West Coast waterfront is a unique work environment and I have barely scratched the surface.
You would have to see the waterfront in action to appreciate this. It runs like an orchestra and the clerks are the people who organize the whole thing. Most of us are not really clerks in the classic sense, but rather most of our titles are Supervisors. Management personel are called Superintendents and are the Second Leiutenants of the waterfront, while the Supervisor Clerks are the seasoned non-coms. We don’t really want superintendents around. They just get in the way, but the employer wants them around even though they do no real work. They are not allowed to issue any orders to the longshoremen. They must go through the foreman known as the Walking Boss or the Supervision, beginning with the Supercargo who has complete control over the vessel operations when the ship is loading or discharging containers. Like I say, it is a very unique system which has worked well for decades, and there is no good reason to seriously disrupt it.
I was laid off from a shipping company (Matson) earlier this year. It’s time to get serious about looking for work… will the ports be doing any hiring? I would love to work for the union after many years on the inside… and I know the technology too
(I would have emailed, but you don’t list your address. Feel free to email me.)
