Fears for Jobs Could Bring Shutdown of West Coast Ports

The New York Times ^ | June 19 | STEVEN GREENHOUSE

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

bttt!

[newgeezer]

Hey, longshoremen! Why don't you go a step further, and demand the destruction of all machinery currently used to unload ships. It will create thousands more jobs! Same logic, no?

Let's all cut our productivity in half, and create the greatest job market this country's ever seen. </sarcasm>

[VOA]

Workers who unload ships commonly earn more than $90,000 a year.

Absolutely true; saw in The Los Angeles Times a few years ago a story about
a crane operator was making over $100I and was looking for more.
Oh, and nepotism was a big part of the brew.
Bet these guys are secretly praying for the Republicans to kill the death tax...

What was I thinking? If you're virtually guaranteed that one (or more) of your offspring
will inherit a >$100K job AND you don't have to worry about paying their college tuition
who's worried about a death tax?

(And no flames about this being the carping of some elitist; my dad was a union worker
in an oil refinery and I did farm work as part of my collegiate "experience".)

[cksharks]

"UNIONS" Govt sanctioned organized crime!

[B4Ranch]

I wonder how many hundreds of millions of tons products that this crane operator handles in a year. To me this is like paying military pay for our pilots to fly aircraft worth 20 or 30 million dollars when civilian pilots make ten times the pay for half the hours. $100,000 grand is a small price for the experience these guys have.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I did farm work as part of my collegiate "experience

As I did also!

It was a great learning experience but I ate a lot of dirt!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Got a problem on this article also. Can't update topics or keywords.

Put the periods on the left so I wouldn't overlay the topics and keywords but that does not seem to be the problem!

Preview and what is actually posted are not the same.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Management dislikes rules like the one that requires clerks in the longshoremen's union to type in information about all arriving merchandise when that information was already typed in when ships left Asia.

Sounds like the railroad was at one time!

[varon]

Workers who unload ships commonly earn more than $90,000 a year.

Not too shabby for Manual Labor. I wander just how many schools grant a BML degree or are they AML ;-)

[Myrddin]

During the 1989 IBEW/CWA strike, PacBell replaced a bunch of step-by-step switches with 5ESS in the El Centro area. At the end of the strike, half the strikers didn't have jobs. In the same time frame, the computer center staff management had to figure out how to get all the work done that wasn't being done by the striking workers. Necessity being the mother of invention, the managers replaced manually loaded 9 track tapes with robotic tape drives on the IBM floor and 8mm tapes on the floor with the COSMOS UNIX boxes. The 22 non-management positions were eliminated. The improved tape drive technology could be handled by 1 first level management employee per shift. The same persons that had been the supervisors. Going on strike isn't always a swift idea. PacBell drew the strike out long enough to make sure that the payroll savings exceeded any improvement in pay that might have to be ceded in the negotions.

The longshoremen may learn a similar lesson by walking out. The management will pick one of the ports as a "pilot" site to test the new equipment. The efficiencies gained will finance the upgrades at the other port sites. Going on strike will simply accelerate the implementation. The union would be better off trying to figure out how to integrate the existing employees with the new technology and help the ones destined to be displaced with the task of finding new jobs.

[Myrddin]

negotions == negotiations

[Postbro1]

New technology or not these guys days are numbered. As with most jobs that don't reguire an education in California, they will soon be replaced by illegal immigrants. Those that do manage to hang on to their jobs will suddenly be happy to make $15/hr.

[11th Earl of Mar]

$90,000 per year to unload ships. That means I should have made $60,000 per year to unload boxcars when in college.

When you start adding up $90,000 per year times every guy standing around the dock, it makes upgrading the technology much more likely.

[Ben Hecks]

The unions threw a similar tantrum when the shipping industry changed from break-bulk to containerization. Fewer stevedores were required and there was a big cost savings due to the huge reduction in pilferage.

[elbucko]

The Longshoreman and Stevedores Union, as it was once known, was also a hotbed of communist organizers. Harry Bridges, the President of the union for years was an admitted member of the Communist Party USA. Harry ranevery four years for president of the US as a commie. Harry died about 5 years ago and there is a memorial to him in LA or SF.

As an aside, there are rumors about that Harry was actually a spy FOR the US. Nothing like hiding in plain sight. RIP Harry.

[VOA]

$100,000 grand is a small price for the experience these guys have.

I don't disagree that this might be the case.

I'm just crest-fallen to learn that such high-compensation jobs were
available to high school graduates.
I wasted a lot of time on education when I should have chased something like this job.

[B4Ranch]

The West Coast longshoremen's union is just like any other one. It takes seniority to get these jobs 'great' jobs. Just getting into these unions can be difficult.

Don't look back, loof forward.

[redhead]

Does this include Communist China's COSCO operation? Inqiring minds want to know...