Keep This Engine Running

It’s safe to say that most area residents pass their days without thinking much about the Port of Los Angeles and its operations. Here are a few numbers, however, that demonstrate its incredible significance to the city, the region and the nation.

The first is $226.4 billion. That figure (larger than the combined gross domestic products of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait in one recent year) represents the value of the imports and exports that moved through Los Angeles’ port from 1994 through 1996. Among U.S. ports, only Long Beach produced a higher figure.

Another amount, $1.3 billion, represents the annual tax revenues received by Southern California governments from port operations. And the port is estimated to generate 1 million jobs nationwide for people like truckers and rail workers. That’s why even a brief delay in its operations generates national and international business concern.

A shutdown occurred this week, prompted by the strike of an elite city government work force: the slightly more than one dozen pilots who have the job of steering huge cargo vessels safely into dock.

The port’s enormous fiscal footprint is why any shutdown must be quickly resolved or, better yet, avoided outright. The city was right to seek the court injunction that sent sympathy-striking dockworkers back to work, allowing cargo ships to be unloaded. On Thursday, the Harbor Department sent letters ordering the striking pilots back to work. Now both the pilots and the city have to sit down and negotiate in good faith. The city’s path is clear: eventually privatize the harbor pilots, taking them off the city payroll. According to auditors, such a move would save the city money.

The pilots should welcome privatization as a potential way of earning salaries commensurate with their more highly paid counterparts in other cities. The city should handle this in a way that minimizes threats to job security, while the pilots have to be willing to take some risks.

Much larger considerations dictate that agreement should come quickly. The $1-billion Alameda Corridor project to speed goods out of the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports and the federal dollars that will fund a major portion of it are just one sign of this port’s importance to the national economy. And the Port of Los Angeles can’t be allowed to lose business to hungry West Coast competitors. The Southern California economy is simply too dependent on it to let that occur.