Bush Intervenes in Port Lockout

WASHINGTON (AP) - Hours after talks broke down between West Coast port workers and shipping lines, President Bush took a first step toward ordering longshoremen back onto the job Monday. Bush formed a board of inquiry to determine the impact of a dispute draining up to $2 billion a day from the U.S. economy. The board will make a quick assessment of the economic damage and determine whether the two sides are negotiating in good faith. Its formation was required before the president can order an 80-day cooling-off period that would force longshoremen back to work. Bush has not decided whether to take that step, said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

Bush signed an executive order stating that "continuation of this lockout will imperil the national health and safety" and forming the panel, which must report back to Bush by Tuesday. Bush then would have to make his case in federal court, asking for a ruling to end the lockout for 80 days because the dispute is hurting the national interest. A senior administration official said Bush would likely immediately go to court after the board makes its report.

The board's members are former Sen. Bill Brock, R-Tenn., a former U.S. trade representative and labor secretary; Patrick Hardin, a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law and onetime National Labor Relations Board official; and Dennis Nolan, a professor at the University of South Carolina law school and vice president of the National Academy of Arbitrators.

"Clearly, the longer this goes on, the longer the parties are incapable of reaching an agreement between themselves, the more damage it's doing to America's economy and hurting people who are wholly unrelated to events on the West Coast because they work down the assembly line, they're down the production line or the shipment line, and that's not fair," Fleischer said.

According to Robert Parry, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the lockout is sapping $2 billion a day from the economy.

"The country has been patient. We have been patient," said Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. "But now ordinary Americans are being seriously harmed by this dispute."

The Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping companies and terminal operators, has locked out 10,500 members of the longshoremen's union, claiming the dockworkers engaged in a slowdown late last month.

The association ordered the lockout until the union agrees to extend a contract that expired July 1. The main issues are pensions and other benefits and whether jobs created by new technology will be unionized.

Labor talks broke off in San Francisco late Sunday night after the union rejected the latest contract proposal.

Steve Sugerman, a spokesman for the Pacific Maritime Association, said the shippers' offer "would have made their members the highest-paid blue-collar workers in America." The contract offer would have given union members an increase in pay, complete health care coverage with no premiums and no deductibles and a $1 billion increase to the union's pension plan.

The PMA offered to reopen the West Coast ports if the union agreed to a 90-day contract extension to finalize the new contract, Sugerman said.

A call to union president James Spinosa was not immediately returned early Monday.

Bush's decision came after days of debate within the White House. Some advisers have warned Bush that intervening in the shutdown could energize the Democratic Party's labor base weeks before the midterm elections, and that Taft-Hartley, the law that allows the president to order a cooling-off period, has a poor history of resolving labor disputes.

Others, however, say Bush can't ignore the economic implications of a prolonged shutdown, both for political and policy reasons. There also is no love lost between unions and Bush's most conservative advisers, some of whom note with disdain that some of the longshoreman earn more than $100,000 a year.

The lockout entered its second week Monday, with the number of cargo vessels stranded at West Coast docks or backing up at anchor points rising to 200. Dozens more were still en route from Asia.

Analysts and business leaders have warned the shutdown will cause a noticeable increase in plant closings, job losses and financial market turmoil.

Already, storage facilities at beef, pork and poultry processing facilities across the country are full — crammed with produce that can't be exported.

With nowhere to move their product, plant operators were expected to begin shutting down Monday, with layoffs soon to follow, said Mary Kay Thatcher, public policy director of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

In less than two weeks, if the shutdown continues, manufacturing plants will be grinding to a halt all over the country, farmers will be up in arms, and Asian equity and currency markets could face a full blown crisis, said Steven Cohen, a University of California, Berkeley professor of regional planning.

"It's like draining a swamp. You start seeing all kinds of ugly creatures," he said.

Unless you want to seriously advocate that it is in our economic interest to have a huge portion of society working at poverty level wages, the market response to low wages is collective bargaining. It avoids the need for any government interference, and everyone goes home happy.

You paint a rosy picture of unions and the wonders of collective bargaining to stop the greedy companies from profiting from little children...

But what forces are in play to keep the unions from spiralling out of control, demaning more and more, higher and higher wages, less hours per week, until eventually you're paying people 150K per year to work 20 hours a week driving a forklift? Why not 300K for 10 hours a week to push a broom?

The saddest part about this is that the shipping companies have been stupid enough to get themselves into this position, leaving them NO bargaining room whatsoever. When 10,500 union members have the power to shut down all shipping on the entire west coast, that's power baby... and yet we're supposed to believe that their union leaders are only going to wield this power for "the good"? Give me a major break.

To shutdown all west coast shipping because they have technophobia... who's the big meanie here? Some evil coal mining company making 12 year olds work in the mines, or some union members shutting down our country to benefit it's already wealthy membership?

Funny I found the same lists looking for support for my argument.

Did some poking around and here's a few lists of "most dangerous jobs" I found, while what shows up where on which list varies one thing I found to be rather consistent: dangerous jobs don't pay too good.

I would have to disagree with you about that. They DO pay good if your in a Union. If not I guess your just assed out.

1. Truck driver - Only pays well in a union.
2. Farm worker - Doesn't pay well. Pays better for union
3. Sales supervisor/proprietor - Primary cause of death is homicide. They are talking people that own small shops they get held up.
4. Construction worker - Only pays well in a union.
5. Police detective - Pays well. Always union.
6. Airplane pilot - Pays well. Always union.
7. Security guard - Only pays well in a union.
8. Taxicab driver - Only pays well in a union.
9. Timber cutter - Only pays well in a union.
10. Cashier - Only pays well in a union.
11. Fisherman - Usally pays well.
12. Metal worker - Only pays well in a union.
13. Roofer - Only pays well in a union.
14. Firefighter - Always union.

Gee. Notice all the most dangerous jobs in the country have strong Unions. I wonder why that is?

It seems that one of the only purposes of unions anymore is collective bargaining for wages/benefit increases. And I have to ask you... honestly, how do unions make that any better? I'm not in a union and I do pretty good, because if I don't like what one employer pays, I can try somewhere else. It's called competitive forces and it works for employees just as well as businesses.

In construction at least unions peform and employees pay for ALL of the job training.

I'm not sure fishermen get paid well, at least none of the ones I've seen. Notice though they only pay well when they have a union. Then you turn to less dangerous unionized jobs (like delivery men, teachers, postal workers, janitors, most hospitality related (that's hotels to us regular folks) jobs, here's where I grabbed a lot of that http://jobsearch.about.com/cs/unionjobs/ ) and they still get paid well. The common thread for getting paid well is having a union. And there a plenty of cush jobs with butch unions out there.

And let's not forget that almost every single aspect of the entertainment industry is unionized. Last time SAG and SWG threatened to strike all the networks suddenly fell in love with reality TV... talk a bout a powerful union, these clowns own Fox. And the players of every major sport are unionized. One look at what the MLBPA has done to "Americas Pasttime" shows they're pretty powerful (and my personal poser child for unions meddling where they don't belong... advertising budgets, they were negotiating to set the advertising budgets).

Whether or not the job can get you killed, the union will make sure you're paid an exhorbitant fee.

Non-issue to me. I've seen the paperwork and delt with the delays companies have to go through to get H1B workers, while they might get to pay them less I doubt there's any actual savings for at least two years. When we were going through all the H1B hell there just weren't any workers from America to fill the spots. And the H1B guys I worked with kicked ass. 3 of the 5 best programmer I've worked with were from India and here on visa. Things are different now that the tech bubble has burst and the number of positions in general has dropped, but now that the bubble has burst I'm still not seeing any prefence for H1Bs. I know that's a big stink issue on FR but I'm just not seeing it.

So what's free trade about having a bunch of greedy union thugs crippling the economy and putting thousands of innocent people out of work?

We don't have 'free' trade, greedy corporate executive thugs have destroyed more wealth and lost more jobs than these longshoremen and took hundreds, no, thousands of times more compensation than these 10,500 workers.

What's free market about the ripple effect of people who are already higher paid than most corporate executives?

What's the ripple effect of the wealth lost and wealth stolen by corrupt or just over compensated, incompetent corporate executives?

Problem is mathematics of scale. If the 10,500 longshoremen are over paid by a mean average of 25k/year (given what they make compared to positions requiring college degrees I think that's a pretty low estimate of how over paid these guys are) then you have wasted revenue of $262,500,000/year. Now compare them to the number of corporate execs they'd need to be seriously overpaid (like to the tune of at least $1 million/ year) to sap that much money out of the business. As for incompitency, I'd say any group costing an industry a quarter of a BILLION dollars a year would be the most obviously incompitent group in that business.

You almost got it right. The phony stock options played in. The real problem is we (I'm tech too, though I managed to land another job) were riding a wave. And we forgot the one rule every surfer knows: all waves crash eventually. One quick look at the dot-com waste land shows we made our own bed. Tons of businesses were being formed that had no prayer of revenue period, much less self sustaining revenue. We were all cracking wise about how amazon.com hadn't shown a profit yet and none of us were wondering what that meant about our company (as it turns out amazon pulled it off, they're actually in the black, how and why I still haven't figured out). The seeds to our destruction were in our overconfidence and the blind eye we turned to the reality of the business world. We declared this a new economy and said the old rules didn't apply, and we were full of crap.

The H1-B program was a stab in the back to American software engineering. It was designed to lower labor cost and forward the globalist agenda. In retrospect we should have formed unions, protected our jobs and maintained our position of value.

As has been stated earlier on this thread, why are forklift drivers making more than highly educated and skilled engineers?

I'd say any group costing an industry a quarter of a BILLION dollars a year would be the most obviously incompitent group in that business.

The CEO of Global Crossing cost the economy around 150 billion dollars and received compensation of three quarters of a billion dollars for the destruction he caused.

And he is just one of how many?

So that we could screw over our industry as badly as these longshoremen are screwing over theirs? Sorry, I didn't go into QA to be part of the problem. Lack of unionization is one of the things that drew me to the industry, and I'll never join a union. The longshoremen are overpaid. Making ourselves overpaid wouldn't have helped the situation. The H1Bs play little if any part of the problem. Crappy business plans that couldn't possibly work but got funded anyway were the problem. And businesses that didn't even HAVE business plans, and yet IPOd for $25/share. Pie in the sky thinking results in egg on your face. Pushing blame to the H1Bs is excuse mongering and just sets up the industry to make the same stupid mistakes next time around.

How many years did it take this guy to screw things up that bad? And where was the board of directors? These guys are costing us $2billion A DAY by shutting down the ports. And that number is expected to accelerate if the shutdown last more than a couple of weeks as various manufacturing industries SHUT DOWN because there's no where for their product to go. No matter how you slice it unions in general, and this union in particular SUCK ASS and a re killing this country. The sooner we wake up and put unions on the ashheap of history where they belong the better.

The Union says it's not about money. It's about their resisting new technology that would make our ports competitive with those in other countries. It's all about computers and systems that would impact them--poor guys! How many of you make from $80 to $150K per year? They do.

The Union was once known on the coast as controlled by the Commies. Now it's the RAT union leaders.

DON'T YOU READ? I'M AGAINST THAT POWER! IT'S WRONG! It's killing the sports you mention. It's killing America's economy right now. Collective bargaining is nothing buck seeking revenge for imagined mistreatment. The unions are dictating not just salaries and benefits packages, but how the business itself is run. That's not how things are supposed to work, and the businesses suffer because of it. Even Lexus, which is worker owned, doesn't give the average shmo on the floor the power unions have and seek. They don't need it and would probably screw things up if they had it. Labor unions should not be able to tell business owners not to introduce new money saving technology. When they do (which is what's happening right now) that's wrong and bad for business. And when it's a key business for the whole economy (which Global Crossing never was) it's bad for America.

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