‘Tighter’ Port, Yes, but How?

There’s no argument that security for the nation’s busiest port must be strengthened. The only question is how.

Daunting enough are the logistics of protecting a 7,600-acre property that employs a small city of up to 25,000 workers and moves $101 billion worth of cargo each year between 3,000 ships and countless thousands of trucks and rail cars. A waterfront security task force appointed by Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn must also base its decisions on how to spend limited funds most effectively--and without treading on civil rights and liberties.

First, every port employee, truck driver, caterer and contractor should be issued an identification card, which would be scanned at entry points and again at sensitive areas that handle hazardous cargo. But the task force’s consideration of criminal background checks for dockworkers is less clearly needed. The idea has drawn objections from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which sees such checks as a witch hunt that could cost dockworkers their jobs for offenses committed long ago. The union, led for 40 years until the mid-1970s by radical labor organizer Harry Bridges, carries a lingering political aversion to such checks.

More practically, it’s not worth the effort for the task force to fight this battle. The checks wouldn’t provide the best protection for the buck anyway.

These are coveted jobs that pay from $60,000 to $150,000 a year, and getting one is difficult. The first step is to become a “casual,” or part-time, worker, and thousands apply for a few hundred openings. Entrance to full-time work and union wages is based on seniority and takes five to 10 years, sometimes longer. The odds of a terrorist--even a “sleeper” sent to live quietly for years before receiving orders to act--getting all the way through are slim.

Background checks could be applied to casual workers when they entered the system, but even there the task force would have to weigh costs against benefits. Casual workers can wait up to 10 days between shifts and have little knowledge beforehand of what or where their next job will be. Key jobs such as checking containers fall to full-time union workers.

A better argument can be made for background checks on big-rig drivers, lower-paying jobs with high turnover. Minimum standards, including background checks, should be put in place for security workers, who are hired by shipping firms, not the port, much as airlines hire and oversee airport security workers. These are steps that would protect not only the port and its cargo but its workers.