Dock Hands See Decrease in Cargo Ships as Death Knell : Labor: The struggling longshoremen’s union says the Port District is more interested in developing waterfront hotels than attracting shipping to San Diego piers.

Tim Chavez, president of the Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s International Union, Local 29, talks about a scenario on the San Diego waterfront that no longer seems improbable.

Attrition and the disappearance of cargo ships on San Diego Bay, said Chavez, relating his vision of the future, have finally struck a death knell to the union’s aging and depleted ranks. The piers, long a symbol of work for longshoremen, are replaced by waterfront hotels, and sailboats crisscross the bay where freighters, loaded with goods from all points on the compass, used to maneuver.

“If we ever get any work, we can replace these (union members) who are dying out. But if there’s no work, there’s no sense in replacing them,” said Chavez, returning to the present. “We could be a great contribution to this city if we could get some work.”

But the sad truth is that longshoremen’s jobs are becoming extinct in San Diego. Local 29’s membership now numbers about 75. Twenty years ago, the local, which was chartered in 1937, had about 220 members.

Last year, longshoremen, who earn $19.83 an hour, worked on an average about three days a week on the waterfront. This year, they have been working about 1 1/2 days a week, said Chavez.

“I’ve got guys driving up to Los Angeles and Port Hueneme to work because there’s no work here,” he added.

Chavez and others who depend on marine cargo for their livelihood have predicted the end of longshoremen as they watch what they say is a steady decline of shipping in San Diego.

“Everybody said the handwriting was on the wall. But it’s frightening the way it’s being done. It’s a systematic extinction of all shipping-related work on the waterfront, and it’s being done by the Port (District),” said Robert W. Young, chairman of C. L. Hutchins & Co., a local shipping agent.

Young and Chavez are among several critics who blame the San Diego Unified Port District for the loss of shipping. Port officials, they say, are more interested in turning the waterfront into a plethora of tourist hotels, restaurants and attractions, collecting rent at the expense of shipping.

It is a charge that is made again and again by frustrated men and women who feel they are being paid lip service by port officials, who insist they are doing everything possible to attract shipping to San Diego.

The Port District’s revenue figures, for the fiscal year ending last June 30, are revealing. According to spokesman Dan Wilkens, the Port District’s total revenue was $71.4 million. Of that, $33.4 million came from leases, including hotels and restaurants, and $31.7 million came from operations at Lindbergh Field, which is administered by the port. The total take from shipping, including cruise ships, amounted to $6.1 million.

In the last six months, the status of shipping has become worse. Two ships that used to handle manganese and potash in San Diego have gone to ports in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Young and Chavez said they have stopped pressuring the port to bring in new cargo and are now concentrating on making sure that the few remaining ships that call on San Diego continue to come here.

“It’s mind-boggling. While we’re struggling to get new cargo, we still have to keep an eye on the port to make sure they don’t lose the few remaining ships we have. It’s like plugging holes in a sinking boat,” Young said.

“The port would be happy to see an end to all shipping in San Diego,” Chavez said. (Former Port Commissioner Louis) Wolfsheimer once said that people don’t want to see freighters in San Diego Bay. They want to see sailboats.”

Wolfsheimer, who stepped down from the Board of Port Commissioners in February, and Bill Stonehouse, director of trade development for the Port District, adamantly denied that port officials are indifferent to the decline in shipping. But Wolfsheimer acknowledged that he envisions San Diego Bay as a recreational harbor “full of sailboats.”

“After being on the commission for 10 years, I can tell you that shipping finds its way to San Diego. There’s damn little the port can do to force shipping to come here. The ships that are here found us. We didn’t find them,” Wolfsheimer said. “You can’t force vessels to come here, even if you berth them for nothing. They won’t come in unless they can bring cargo to San Diego and take cargo out.”

Therein lies the problem, Stonehouse said. The local economy does not produce any export cargo, he said.

“San Diego is not an industrial town, and it doesn’t produce exports. Export cargo means big factories to produce goods demanded overseas,” Stonehouse said. “Plus we don’t have the rail lines that Long Beach and Los Angeles have that are needed when you import and export cargo.”

“Cargo is not a very profitable business for this port,” Wolfsheimer added. “But it’s something we want to keep going. The port has always said that we might lose money on cargo but we want it. It’s a loser in cash generation, but a winner in wages for certain groups.”

The Port District did not drive away the potash and manganese ships, Stonehouse said. As for charges that port officials are not attempting to attract shipping, Stonehouse points to what he said are “negotiations” with fruit importers to unload Chilean fruit in San Diego.

However, industry officials tell a different story.

Rick Estes, an official with the David Oppenheimer Co. in Long Beach, said his import company got tired of dealing with Stonehouse and other port officials, who he said “are incapable of making a decision.” Oppenheimer is the largest importer of Chilean fruit on the West Coast, handling one-third of the crop.

“Nobody can make a decision. And, once a decision is made, quite often it gets changed,” Estes said. “You discuss general terms of a contract, and everybody agrees. Then they draw something up and you end up in negotiations again.”

Although Stonehouse said port officials are negotiating with Oppenheimer, Estes said, “It’s not even in my thought pattern to come to San Diego at this point in time.”

Three years ago, Oppenheimer imported Chilean fruit through San Diego for one growing season, from December to April, and the experience proved disastrous, said Estes. A problem arose when port officials insisted that his company use a port-owned cold storage facility that drove up costs, he added.

Unlike the Port of Long Beach, to where Oppenheimer moved its operations, San Diego insisted that the company use an on-site cold storage facility, with longshoremen to move the fruit from the pier to the facility. Using longshoremen to store the fruit increased costs significantly, Estes said.

At Long Beach, longshoremen only unload the fruit, which is then transported to off-site facilities by other workers, he added.

“If the port (in San Diego) had been able to resolve these issues, we would have been there in a heartbeat. Not now,” Estes said.

Three years ago, when Oppenheimer was attempting to negotiate a long-term contract with the Port District, company officials assured Stonehouse that they could bring in $1 million a year in longshoremen’s wages alone, said Estes. That prediction proved to be too conservative. According to Estes, Chilean fruit imports are now providing $3 million a year in longshoremen’s wages and the amount of fruit that is imported has quadrupled in three years.

Last year, Oppenheimer gave the Port District another chance, Estes said. The company imported kiwi fruit here, but he said the operation “was bungled so badly,” in part by longshoremen, that Oppenheimer officials vowed not to use the local facility again.

“The discharge rates were a problem. The longshoremen were not capable of handling refrigerated cargo at a reasonable discharge rate,” Estes said. “The ships don’t want to go back there.”

The problem was that longshoremen could not meet the rate that a local stevedoring company quoted Oppenheimer for the number of fruit pallets unloaded from the ship per hour. Normally, fruit pallets can be unloaded at the rate of about 50 per hour, but local longshoremen unloaded them at a rate of 15 or 20 per hour, Estes said.

“I’m not going to blame the longshoremen. The longshoremen down there don’t have the ship traffic needed to give them the experience to discharge ships effectively. And the port’s to blame for that,” Estes said.

Ed Weglarz, vice president and director of New Jersey-based Holt Cargo Systems, said his company pulled out of a deal to store fruit at the Port of San Diego when officials attempted to raise rents by 42% in the middle of a contract. In addition, port officials could not guarantee him berthing and storage facilities, Weglarz said.

“We got good labor response in San Diego . . . but the substantial rental increase left us no alternative but to pull out,” Weglarz said.

Despite the unpleasant experience, Weglarz said his company has remained on good terms with the Port District.

Tom Unzicker, spokesman for IMC Fertilizer, said his company was recently forced to begin shipping potash out of the Port of Long Beach, after using San Diego for many years.

“Our buyers tell us which port to run it through. Long Beach has been getting most of the business because of the quality of service and economics,” Unzicker said.

However, not everyone who has stopped doing business with the port has a horror story to tell. Peter Moore, an official with BHP-Utah Mineral International, an Australian company based in San Francisco, speaks highly of San Diego port officials.

The company exports manganese to the Far East and is in the process of moving its shipping operations to the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest port in the country.

“We decided it was economically more viable to move our operations to Los Angeles. But I have no complaints about the people we dealt with in San Diego. I have heard from others that San Diego is not pro-shipping, but they never treated us that way,” Moore said.

He declined to explain why BHP decided it was more economic to use the Port of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, longshoremen are encouraged by the Pasha Group’s plans to process 50,000 imported cars a year at the 24th Street Pier, beginning in January. Pasha officials estimate that the operation should generate $1 million to $1.4 million in revenue a year.

However, the agreement negotiated between the Port District and Pasha officials has been clouded by copper contamination around the pier. The Regional Water Quality Control Board has ordered the port to clean up pollution caused by the copper concentrate, which is expected to be expensive. Pasha said its contract with the port is contingent upon the cleanup being completed.

“We can’t sit around waiting until January for an auto ship,” Chavez said. “We need work. Besides, knowing the way the port operates, I’m not holding my breath. There’s no guarantee that the port will do the cleanup in a timely manner and keep the Pasha contract.”

Estes, the Oppenheimer company official, said he sympathizes with Chavez and the longshoremen.

“San Diego had 200,000 square feet of pier space available for us to unload fruit,” he said. “People said then that San Diego was the only place to unload fruit on the West Coast. But there was no law that said that had to happen, just like there’s no law that says these cars have to be unloaded at San Diego.”