Eight-Day Walkout Hits Southern California Ports

This story appears in the Dec. 24 & 31 print edition of Transport Topics.

For labor and management, 2012 was short on contracts and long on rhetoric. During the year, the only agreement that affected trucking was between a division of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Southern California waterfront employers.

The announcement on Dec. 6 ended an eight-day walkout that halted harbor trucking in the Los Angeles area.

Meanwhile, at year-end a larger spotlight shined on talks between the International Longshoremen’s Association and the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), terminal operators representing ports on the East and Gulf coasts. Those talks cover 15,000 dockworkers and affect as many as 10 million truck shipments annually.

As those talks proceeded against a Dec. 29 contract expiration, the Teamsters talks with UPS, the largest union employer, continued.

In those talks, which cover about 250,000 package and less-than-truckload carriers, the rhetoric was more controlled. The parties vowed to reach agreement in March, four months before the current pact runs out.

ILA union president Harold Daggett set the tone for the port talks in a March speech, saying, “When situations around you place you in a fight for your lives, you tend to clench your fist a bit tighter and prepare to defend yourself. That’s where we are today. We will not be bullied.”

It took the intervention of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to prolong talks beyond the original Sept. 30 contract expiration. The tone of those talks didn’t appear to change much as negotiations resumed in early December.

James Capo, head of USMX, charged that ILA viewed “bargaining as a one-way street that leads only in their direction. It’s incredible that they continue to defend antiquated work rules.”

In his comments, he responded to Daggett’s statement that management was engaging in “misleading rhetoric and scare tactics.”

Talks between UPS and the Teamsters lacked the same level of public contentiousness. UPS declined to discuss contract issues publicly.

Union leaders said in a statement they would not make an agreement without addressing potential job cuts from a company deal with the U.S. Postal Service, alleged harassment and the sub-contracting of work at the UPS Freight LTL unit, the second-largest union carrier.

Ken Hall, the union’s lead negotiator, described those three issues as “serious.”

YRC Worldwide, the largest union LTL carrier, was free of disputes, thanks to a Teamsters contract extending into 2015.

In the West, clerical workers and management at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., reached an agreement after the workers stayed on the job for more than two years before walking out on Nov. 27.

Before talks between port and terminal representatives there broke down in late November, these ports, the nation’s largest, had enjoyed a decade of labor peace since a 10-day work stoppage ended in 2002 by President George W. Bush.

Farther north, in Oakland, Calif., work was stopped for a day because of protests linked to the Occupy movement and halted another day by a Service Employees International Union contract-related protest.

In the Pacific Northwest, several labor disputes occurred.

One still-unresolved dispute involved two unions that claimed jurisdiction over the duties to plug electronic power into refrigerated containers and hampered the Port of Portland, Ore., in June. A strike was averted in November by 25 workers who

provide port security there. A separate grain-handling contract remained unsettled.

Also on the docks, the Teamsters union won the right to represent drivers at Toll Holdings, an Australian company with U.S. operations. It was the union’s first win in an effort spanning more than five years to recruit port truckers.

One labor-related milestone was reached before the Teamsters-UPS talks began in earnest.

UPS and the pension fund that represented New England Teamsters reached a deal to restructure pensions for the company’s union workers, including a $1.2 billion withdrawal liability payment.

A contentious battle between the union, YRC Worldwide Inc. and Arkansas Best Corp.’s LTL unit remained unresolved.

An ABF Freight System lawsuit against the Teamsters union and YRC remained in federal court despite rulings that favored YRC and the union’s view that their deal dating to 2009 didn’t violate a national freight contract. The contract violation alleged by ABF was the wage agreement that cut pay 15% for YRC’s workers but not those at ABF.

ABF, the smallest of three remaining unionized LTL carriers, also moved to begin Teamsters talks in advance of a March 31 expiration date of the current contract, known as the National Master Freight agreement. ABF said in August it would negotiate its next pact outside the NMFA.