Longshoremen’s Job Lottery Draws Long Line of Hopeful Women

About 400 would-be female dockworkers gathered Friday at the longshoremen’s union hall in Wilmington, a place where Lady Luck traditionally has not been much of a sister to women.

It’s a place where the brawniest men will tell you, in whispers, that your best chance at landing a job is to have a father or brother or uncle already working the docks.

To try and change all that, and satisfy the settlement terms of a decade-old sex discrimination lawsuit, a drawing was held for 350 $14-an-hour dockworker jobs Friday at the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union Hall, Local 13. The one-hour lottery, conducted by the ILWU and Pacific Maritime Assn., will assure that more women will be working part-time on the docks, as longshoremen or clerks, by September.

In all, 5,778 women submitted application cards for the jobs, and 700 names were called, enough to make sure 350 women will be hired. When that happens, 35% of the part-time dockworkers in the nation’s busiest harbor will be women. And they, like other part-timers, will be positioned to become full-time dockworkers, whose pay now averages $50,000 a year.

Although they did not have to be present for the drawing, several hundred women showed up.

“I’m a wannabe,” said Heather McDonald, 37, a onetime cabbie from Torrance who came wearing a Teamsters Union jacket. Now working as a welder at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, McDonald signed up for the drawing as a hedge against unemployment.

“I’m making the same money now. But with Bush cutting back on the defense budget, we’ve had cuts at the yards. And I want to stay employed,” she said.

McDonald, like most of the women at the drawing, did not get called.

But Tanya Heard and Pamela Clark beat the odds. The sisters from Gardena were among those called. Now, they’ll wait to be screened with physicals, strength and agility tests, and drug and alcohol testing.

“As long as you can write, they say you can pass,” said Heard, 27.

While the sisters first considered working on the docks only a few weeks ago, many women at the drawing have coveted the jobs for a long time.

“I’ve had my application in for a while,” said Dana Rolland, a 23-year-old hairdresser from Wilmington whose mother, May, has been a dockworker for eight years.

At 5-foot-3 and 100 pounds, Rolland hardly looks the part of a dockworker. But it is a job she not only wants but believes she deserves.

“I feel family should get the jobs first,” she said. “Everyone should have equal opportunities, but there should be some sort of seniority for family.”

That sentiment has prevailed for decades among many longshoremen and their families. But in 1982, the courts stepped in with a landmark decision opening the docks to more women.

During the drawing, catcalls greeted some names as they were called out--names that some thought were too familiar, too close to those of current dockworkers, to be a coincidence.

But Carrie Clements, assistant area manager for the maritime association, bristled after the drawing at the notion that anyone would raise suspicions.

“I don’t know what else we could do,” Clements said, noting the drawing was open to the public, conducted by an outside arbitrator and videotaped. “It’s about as fair as you can get,” she said.

Fairness aside, the drawing itself irked a few longshoremen, who saw it as nothing but a handout for women.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Roberto Diaz, a longshoreman the last 10 years. “Who’s got more rights, men or women?” Diaz asked. “For me, it’s men.”

Not all longshoremen were upset.

“It doesn’t bother me at all,” said Jesse Smith, a bearish 39-year-old who has worked on the docks for 21 years. “There are some women who are excellent workers.

“Of course, they don’t compare to me,” said Smith, 6-foot-3 and 326 pounds. “But a lot of men can’t compare with me either.”