Room for Give in Port Dispute

Every harbor pilot’s job is extremely difficult and justifies ample compensation. That’s at the heart of the current labor dispute between a dozen pilots, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 68, and the city of Los Angeles. The pilots earn $113,712 annually and have sought raises to bring them to $195,000. That’s more in line, the pilots argue, with salaries at other major U.S. ports. They complain that the city’s offer falls considerably short of that.

Since summer, a majority of the pilots have been on strike, leaving the important task at the second-busiest port in the nation to a few nonstrikers and managers.

Pilots have one of the world’s most stressful peacetime jobs. Once some behemoth cargo ship is close to port, a pilot is ferried out to steer it into the harbor and to the dock. This skill requires years of study and training and the ability to visualize and avoid every potential underwater hazard. Think of it as knowing the deep-water channel at the Port of Los Angeles as well as you know your driveway.

But the difficulty of the pilots’ work, which justifies their high compensation, involves a matter of degree. Experts point out that other harbor channels are considered far more difficult to navigate: for example, the Houston Ship Channel, the Columbia River entrance, and Bergen Point off the New York/New Jersey coast. The problems in these cases include wave conditions, complex water currents, heavy weather and fog, complex intersections and physical obstacles, including sunken vessels.

The Los Angeles channel is relatively short, relatively straight, generally blessed with good weather and visibility and does not have problem currents or wave patterns. All these facts should have been on the table in the negotiations but apparently were not.

Moreover, some industry analysts say that a straight salary comparison with pilots elsewhere can be misleading. The Los Angeles pilots are city employees who have full benefits and retirement funds. Those are out-of-pocket expenses for private pilots at other ports, who also have to buy into an association and pay for pilot stations and their own boats.

All that suggests that L.A.’s pilots have some ground to give in the current wage dispute and they ought to acknowledge that. After all, the port is tremendously important to our region in terms of jobs and tax revenues. So the city’s offer might still be sweetened a bit, but the package is hardly so stingy as the pilots have made it out to be.