Cargo at Ports Being Unloaded Without Incident

Four days after the reopening of West Coast ports, cargo continued to be unloaded without disruption Sunday, though hindered in part by equipment shortages and minor terminal mix-ups.

This week, federal mediator Peter Hurtgen will try to get contract negotiations between dockworkers and their employers back on track, and talks between the two parties could resume as early as next week, sources said.

Although the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents shipping lines, said Sunday that the unloading of ships was well behind schedule and would take a month or two to complete, union officials said containers were being unloaded as quickly as worker availability allowed.

The docks remained congested after the 10-day lockout, which ended Wednesday night on orders from a federal judge acting on a request from the Bush administration. The lockout went into effect after the carriers accused dockworkers of a work slowdown.

The two parties had been negotiating a new contract for the 10,500 West Coast port workers since May.

About 200 ships remain to be unloaded at the 29 ports along the West Coast, and more are arriving each day. As of Saturday, 117 vessels were in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach waiting to be unloaded, said Fausto Capobianco, a spokesman for the Marine Exchange.

“The port is busy as usual, but we don’t see as many trucks running back and forth on the weekend,” he said.

The flow of goods out of the ports has been slowed by shortages of truck container trailers and rail cars to take containers away.

“Union Pacific is only accepting 180 containers a day for the whole port” of Oakland, said Steve Stallone, a spokesman for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. “A single ship has hundreds of containers.”

Terminal operators have had difficulty coming up with enough chassis for trucks to move containers out. Many chassis are still in the possession of retailers that brought goods in.

Moreover, paperwork mix-ups by clerks have left some containers misplaced, for a few hours or even a few days.

Stallone said he also had heard of truckers being charged extra storage fees for the time the containers they are picking up spent at terminals during the lockout.

A PMA spokesman, however, attributed many of the delays to union workers’ starting shifts late or not showing up for assignments, a point Stallone could not dispute, he said, because he did not have immediate access to dispatch information.

“We are just not at a point of being able to resume normal operations. We have unloaded 25% less than we expected to be unloaded at this point,” said Steve Sugerman, a PMA spokesman.

Union officials have asked Gov. Davis and the governors of Oregon and Washington to dispatch state safety regulators to the docks to verify that longshore workers are working safely, as they have said, and not slowly.