U.S. Must Loosen Two Sides’ Tight Grip on Ports

So who has grounds to be outraged over what’s happening at West Coast ports -- labor or management? It turns out, neither. The party getting the rawest deal, as the two sides squabble, is the American public.

With this in mind, federal officials are starting to move forward with regulations and possibly new legislation designed to prevent future crippling disputes, even as Washington copes with the present impasse.

Although the ports are operating again, after President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to end a 10-day port closure, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the shipping lines and terminal operators of the Pacific Maritime Assn. remain bitterly divided in their battle over control of jobs and the movement of cargo at the ports.

But that notion of control is ridiculous.

What both sides refuse to recognize is that they have no right to “control” the giant public facilities that are the great ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as well as other docks stretching from San Diego to Seattle.

Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been invested in L.A. and Long Beach to deepen their channels and make them suitable for the massive container ships that now carry the world’s goods.

The ports and related facilities, such as the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor built at public expense, have made Southern California a hub of the global economy. Parts for cars and computers, food and clothing pass through these ports to factories and stores across the United States.

As the volume of trade has grown -- to more than $220 billion through Southern California last year -- port disputes have evolved from local labor-management clashes into grave threats to the national economy.

That is precisely why Washington, looking beyond the White House’s action last week, now is contemplating additional steps to forestall future disasters.

Although some of these measures are sure to face stiff union opposition, they’re a needed insurance policy for an economy that simply can’t afford to be brought to a halt by labor strife.

Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, for one, is being urged by a group of rail, truck and shipping companies to consider a form of the Railway Labor Act of the 1920s, which imposes compulsory arbitration on labor disputes that endanger the national economy.

That request, from the 30-member National Marine Systems National Advisory Council, is being passed on to the Labor Department and National Labor Relations Board, which administer the Taft-Hartley Act and related laws.

Meanwhile, some tough questions recently were raised by Rep. Don Young (R.-Alaska) regarding the inordinate control of West Coast ports by the

ILWU and the PMA management group.

Although no legislation was proposed during the current session to try to loosen the shackles that the two sides have placed on the docks, the issue is sure to surface again in the new Congress, which will take office in January.

The heart of the problem is the inability of union and management to cooperate over changes in technology. Both the 10,500-member ILWU and the PMA, representing 76 shipping lines and related businesses, have acted in ways that, while useful in a street fight, are counterproductive to the interests of the communities dependent on the ports. The tensions are deeply rooted in history.

Union clerks interrupt data streaming over the Internet from across the world and then painstakingly re-enter it into computers at the ports. Conceding that this process is cumbersome and uneconomic, the union says it is willing to give up the practice and accept the loss by retirement of a certain number of clerk positions.

As compensation, however, the ILWU demands that it gain control over other positions, such as the “planners” who direct where cargo is placed in containers and where the containers are placed on ships. “Planner” was a union job when cargo consisted of separate boxes and packages at dockside.

“Placing cargoes was always a clerk’s job on the ports,” says Steve Stallone, chief spokesman for the ILWU. “It is our job and we want it back.”

But today, cargo arrives and departs in containers that are arranged by computer software systems, often operated in the offices of shipping lines. Not surprisingly, many of the major shipping lines -- most of them foreign-owned -- have closed their Los Angeles and Long Beach offices and moved those operations to Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Texas, to escape the jurisdiction of the ILWU.

To the shipping lines, “planners are management employees,” says Joseph Miniace, president of the PMA. “The union can try to organize them if it wants, but we cannot hand over their representation.”

The enmity between the two sides is palpable. Small wonder that five months of negotiations have produced no agreement.

Negotiations, with a federal mediator now in the middle, are set to resume shortly as the 80-day clock of the cooling-off period stipulated by Taft-Hartley ticks on. But how much progress can be made is far from clear.

In recent years, the ports have operated successfully despite the lack of trust between labor and management because the growing flows of trade and money have masked their hostility. Shipping lines made concessions in previous contract talks to keep the goods moving.

This year, confrontation replaced compromise as both sides sensed a need to make changes to accommodate technology and prepare for even greater volumes of trade. Yet failing a sudden burst of cooperation, the federal government inevitably will be forced to govern what happens at West Coast ports.

And for the public interest, that is surely best.

James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@ latimes.com.