Hauling Away 300 Jobs : Labor: Longshore workers are forced out of Wilmington rail yard over productivity issue. Their replacements say they’re doing a better job.

Strip away all the statistics on worker productivity, all the talk about an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, and what happened at Southern Pacific’s huge rail yard in Wilmington boils down to this:

Stephanie Fortune has a job and Robert (Rake) Wargo doesn’t; Linda Pitchford is earning a paycheck and Eddie Greenwood is facing bankruptcy.

“I’ve got $81 in my pocket and $141 in a checking account,” says Greenwood. “I’m struggling to put gas in my car, to buy milk for my kids.”

Pitchford, meanwhile, is cheery. “I’ve never worked for an employer that cared so much for its employees,” she says of the railroad. “Everybody wants to do a good job here.”

Two weeks ago, Pitchford went to work and Greenwood lost his job at Southern Pacific’s Intermodal Container Transfer Facility, a gritty yard in east Wilmington that for five years employed Greenwood and 300 other members of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, Local 13.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Greenwood and the others loaded and unloaded thousands of giant cargo containers for train shipments across the United States or delivery by truck to ships in the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, the nation’s busiest commercial harbor.

But to hear Southern Pacific officials tell it, the crane operators and cargo handlers and shipping clerks were not working hard enough. Not enough container lifts per man hour, is how Southern Pacific often describes it.

So on the morning of Feb. 11, as a cold rain pounded the 120-acre yard, Southern Pacific finally canceled its contract with the company that hired the longshoremen. And after ordering the workers home, the railroad bused in new employees lured from as far away as New Hampshire by the promise of steady work, good wages and even free meals at the yard because, Southern Pacific says, it feared for the safety of the new employees if they left the facility to eat.

In a different era, when America’s labor unions used muscle to achieve what negotiations did not, the events of Feb. 11 might have sparked a blood bath. Instead, while some ILWU workers and their replacements traded angry words or obscene gestures, there was no violence.

“The goon squad days are long gone,” says the ILWU’s Wargo. “Our people have one goal and that is to resolve this peacefully to get back our jobs.”

What happened at the container facility was months in the making. Still, it hit the longshoremen with all the surprise and pain of a sucker punch.

“I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet,” a stunned Eddie Mattera, 36, said recently as he and others filled out unemployment forms at the ILWU’s meeting hall in Wilmington.

“I did my job. I worked hard. And they had no right to do what they did,” he said.

Tom Curry has only worked for Southern Pacific for 15 months, but the senior assistant vice president has worked in and around rail yards for 30 years. And just as railroads are a passion, he soon makes clear, so are speed and efficiency.

“The Metroliner from New York to Philadelphia is the best,” he says. “It runs faster than a scalded dog . . . 145 miles an hour on the flats.”

Speed and efficiency. Those are defining factors for Curry as he talks about Southern Pacific’s container yard and the decision to take over the facility with new employees.

“What drove us to make the decision was the lack of service here,” Curry said. “We had many instances of trains departing anywhere from 12 to 36 hours late” with cargo, he said. “So our customers were adamant that we get the facility operating in a timely fashion.”

To do that, Curry and Southern Pacific officials insist, the railroad more than six months ago warned Pacific Rail Services--the company employing the longshoremen--that productivity must increase. And when it did not, they say, Southern Pacific had to let the contractor go.

In the weeks leading to that action, Southern Pacific says, it was willing to consider hiring some ILWU workers. But they and their union refused the offer, the railroad says, because it meant the workers would be represented by another union--the 110,000-member Transportation Communications Union, which has a nationwide agreement with Southern Pacific.

“We made a preferential offer of hiring . . . but they turned it down,” said Tom Matthews, the railroad’s vice president of labor relations, whose 30 years in the transportation industry includes several with strife-torn, and now defunct, Eastern Airlines.

But the ILWU disputes Southern Pacific’s claims, insisting its members were only offered scant promises of employment by a railroad more interested in profits than people.

“Tom Matthews is basically the Jeffrey Dahmer of the corporate world,” said ILWU’s Ray Familathe. “Give him a labor union and he’ll take it apart piece by piece, bone by bone.”

While the yard last year handled a record 550,000 containers, Southern Pacific officials say, the productivity of workers was at best sporadic, and at worst dismal. “The contract (called) for lifting 3,000 boxes in a 24-hour period, but the best that contractor ever did was 2,000 containers. And that only happened on five or six occasions,” said Curry.

“They just lost the work ethic. There was no recognition of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay,” he added.

So pervasive is that reputation of the longshoremen that Southern Pacific’s 200 new workers, after only days on the job, confidently described themselves as every bit as productive as the employees who ran the yard for years.

“I regret that they lost their jobs,” said Pitchford, 39, a loading clerk from Long Beach. “But they had a six-month reprieve to raise their productivity and they never did. I feel like they had every opportunity to perform and they didn’t.”

Added Fortune, a 43-year-old truck driver from Fontana: “It makes me sad that they are out of work. But on the other side, if they would have cared as much as we care about these jobs, they would still be here.”

But the ILWU, armed with its own statistics and letters of praise about productivity, says Southern Pacific’s claims are inaccurate. “The night before they kicked us out, we moved 3,500 containers. So how can they say we were lazy?” wondered Cathy Maynez-Moore, the union’s chief shop steward.

Moreover, ILWU officials contend the railroad has always had no one to blame but itself for whatever problems occurred at the yard.

“We’ve always been the scapegoat for Southern Pacific’s inefficiency,” said Wargo, a union official and one of the first workers hired at the yard when it opened in 1986.

Indeed, he and other ILWU members claim, Southern Pacific over the years refused to address the workers’ proposals to improve productivity. From better train schedules to providing more rail cars to reducing the periodic flood of containers at the yard, they said, Southern Pacific ignored plan after plan to make the yard more efficient.

Only weeks ago, American President Lines--the yard’s largest customer--told Southern Pacific that worker productivity was only one of many problems at the yard. That position, relayed in a Jan. 17 letter to Southern Pacific, also made clear that American President did not believe firing the longshoremen would significantly improve operations at the yard.

But Southern Pacific’s Curry disagrees with American President’s position. “They do not have the in-house rail expertise to analyze what’s really going on,” he said.

Amid that debate, what happened at the yard--and what continues to occur--is painful, sometimes ugly, both for the laid-off longshoremen and Southern Pacific’s new workers, who will receive almost the same wages--$12 to $16 an hour--and slightly better benefits than the yard’s former workers.

Every day, as a dozen or so ILWU members stand vigil outside the yard, busloads of new workers arrive at jobs the longshoremen once had. And as a score of security guards watch over the facility, the new workers tell of threats, the union members tell of merciless taunting.

“They call (the rail yard) and say things like, ‘You are going to die,’ ” claimed Pitchford.

Countered Mike Belnap, a former mechanic there: “They come by in buses, laughing at us and giving us the finger.”

While Southern Pacific predicts higher productivity at the yard, the ILWU insists it will not be long before the railroad’s gambit proves to be a mistake.

“They’ll never get the productivity they had . . . and the shippers and others are soon going to see this (Southern Pacific) action as a negative,” said ILWU President Dave Arian.

Meanwhile, he said, the union will continue its lobbying and demonstrations--a recent rally drew 3,000 dockworkers from as far away as Seattle and briefly disrupted shipping at several West Coast ports.

But rallies don’t erase the pain of unemployment. And even their union’s solidarity, it seems, cannot ease the angst the laid-off longshoremen express when they talk about the yard.

“We opened that facility . . . we are the ones who made it successful,” said the ILWU’s Familathe. “And it’s the most dehumanizing thing you could ever face when a corporate American giant, with just a stroke of the pen, can wipe out the future of so many people.”

People like Eddie Greenwood.

“I grew up in this area,” the 32-year-old Wilmington resident said. “I remember when that yard used to be Lions Drag Strip and I would go there as a kid.”

Now, he said, the dusty yard is nothing more than a place that used to provide a living for him and his family. A place, he said, where others now have jobs.

“I don’t know what kind of hearts they have, but they surely didn’t take into account that they were taking away work from others,” Greenwood said.

“It’s not easy to take when someone comes in and takes bread off my table. . . . It just doesn’t seem to be the American way for one person to come in and take another’s job.”