ID System for Port Workers Considered

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn’s task force on waterfront security has opened talks on the most politically sensitive item on its anti-terrorist agenda: possible background checks of the 25,000 people who work each day at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The nation’s busiest harbor complex remains “wide open” to possible security breaches, said Los Angeles Port Police Chief Noel Cunningham, who hopes to have an identification system in place and sanctioned by federal authorities within six months.

“We need to know who we’re talking to at midnight on the docks,” he said. “Not having a worker identification system is like having an automobile without wheels.”

A problem facing the 18-member task force is whether to run background checks focusing on the immigration status and possible criminal records of dockworkers, truck drivers and steamship workers who labor next to volatile and toxic materials, cargo vessels and military equipment.

The powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union opposes such inquiries as violations of privacy that could lead to dismissals of people who have worked on the docks for decades with spotless employment records.

“If people have certain felonies on their record but also have got their lives together and are now productive members of society, should they be banned from the port?” asked Steve Stallone, spokesman for the union’s West Coast headquarters in San Francisco. “What about the person who had what President Bush called one of his ‘youthful indiscretions?’ Should that person lose their job because of security hysteria?”

In San Pedro, Luisa Gratz, president of Local 26, which represents dockworkers including union security officers, agreed.

“We don’t want to create a new government bureaucracy to arrest Americans, or bar them from work,” she said. “We don’t want to open the door to witch hunts.”

Similar concerns were expressed by organizations representing the hundreds of nonunion big-rig drivers who ply the three freeways leading in and out of the ports each day. The truckers, who include a significant number of undocumented immigrants, already have been singled out by Hahn, who said earlier this month that he wants “to know who the drivers are, what they are bringing into the port and where it came from.”

Warren Hoemann, vice president of the California Trucking Assn., said, “Any identification system will be completely ineffective unless the people who work the terminal gates are also checked.”

“After all,” he said, “the Great Wall of China was built to keep out the Mongol hordes. But Genghis Khan still conquered them by bribing the gatekeepers.”

Unions May Have Say in Implementation

Given the potential for resistance, Los Angeles Port Commissioner Nick Tonsich suggested the possibility of a compromise that would not interfere with the port’s economy, which generates $10 billion in annual wages.

“I think an identification system will be implemented,” Tonsich said. “But the level of background checks will be determined by several factors, including union negotiations.”

Options could include background checks extending no more than a decade into a person’s past. Or it might not examine a worker’s past at all and simply require a card showing a person’s photograph, fingerprints and identification number, port officials said.

It remains to be seen whether any system devised by the task force would be trumped in the future by a seaport security program that might be mandated by the federal government.

U.S. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) is sponsoring legislation that would provide security guidelines for local ports, including a requirement that each harbor develop its own clearance program for workers.

“This bill understands that not one size fits all,” said Hollings spokesman Andrew Davis. “Its main goals are to develop federal security guidelines, which are nonexistent right now, improve coordination between local entities and federal agencies, and provide resources for security equipment, including scanning equipment and perimeter fencing.”

“Right now,” he said, “98% of all the cargo entering the nation’s ports is not checked.”

Local task force members, including Cunningham, welcome the opportunity to create a Los Angeles-Long Beach system that, as he put it, “would be customized for our work force. I don’t want us having to risk hiring one of Osama bin Laden’s followers.”

Exactly who would operate the identification system remains unclear. Some task force members had hoped that the local U.S. Coast Guard would run the background checks and issue the identification cards.

But Coast Guard Cmdr. George Cummings said his agency will not participate in any system that lacks federal approval.

“I can’t envision any circumstances,” he said, “in which the Coast Guard in Los Angeles would issue cards before getting directions from headquarters in Washington.”

In the meantime, there is no indication that the ports are being targeted by terrorists.

Study Finds Ports Vulnerable

Still, risks abound. Petroleum refineries and storage facilities, container terminals, bridges and military equipment all present potential targets. A Port Police report completed last summer warned that Los Angeles Harbor was extremely vulnerable to attack from the water and along the Alameda Corridor, the 20-mile rail link between the ports and downtown Los Angeles.

“The threat to the Port of Los Angeles is magnified by the fact that it is a military mobilization facility for the West Coast of the United States,” the report said. “An act of terrorism or sabotage can certainly harm the national defense capability, in addition to those working at the port. The presence of military munitions and equipment could be a magnet for such acts.”

Since Sept. 11, federal officials have established a 500-yard security zone around all Navy ships and barred other vessels from coming within 100 yards of them. The U.S. Customs Service remains on “code red alert” status. Multi-agency teams led by the Coast Guard now board all incoming freighters and cruise lines, and patrol the waterfront around the clock.

Nonetheless, “at this point, there is no means of tracking who is at any port facility at a given time,” said Joseph Miniace, president and chief executive of the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents about 100 shipping lines, stevedore companies and operators of cargo terminals on the West Coast.

“A worker identification system is absolutely mandatory,” he said.