Posted on 10/15/2021 4:33:11 PM PDT by grundle
LONG BEACH, California — Crane operators who belong to a powerful union and earn up to $250,000 a year transferring containers from ships to trucks are worsening the supply chain crisis that threatens Christmas by goofing off on the job, frustrated truckers told the Washington Examiner.
The finger-pointing at the busy Los Angeles County ports comes as scores of container ships are anchored off the California coast, waiting in some cases for weeks to unload their freight. The Biden administration has scrambled to get shipping executives, port officials, and labor to tackle the problem. While the reasons for the burgeoning backlog are complex, truck drivers say not everyone seems to be working together.
“In 15 years of doing this job, I’ve never seen them work slower,” said Antonio, who has spent hours waiting at Los Angeles County ports for cargo to be loaded. “The crane operators take their time, like three to four hours to get just one container. You can’t say anything to them, or they will just go [help] someone else.”
The Washington Examiner spoke to six truck drivers near the Long Beach/Terminal Island entry route, and each described crane operators as lazy, prone to long lunches, and quick to retaliate against complaints. The allegations were backed up by a labor consultant who has worked on the waterfront for 40 years. None of the truckers interviewed for this story wanted to provide a last name because they fear reprisals at the ports.
The crane operators are part of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which also represents longshoremen. Veteran operators who have a set schedule make approximately $250,000 a year, while others who receive daily work assignments make $200,000, said labor consultant Jim Tessier, who represents longshoremen in disputes against the union.
“What you are talking about is perfectly described behavior,” Tessier said of the crane operators. “This is all a reflection of the management they have down there, the inmates run the asylum. The managers are all afraid to say anything because the operators are so powerful they get management fired if they don’t like them.”
Most truckers are independent contractors who are paid per container delivery and make a fraction of a crane operator's salary. They only arrive at the docks after receiving notification that the cargo is ready for pickup. Waiting hours for shipping containers to be loaded onto their trucks is frustrating, and those who have complained were swiftly dealt with, they say.
“They’ll go get the police and kick you out and tell you to leave,” said trucker Chris. “Then, you get banned from coming back in there.”
Or sometimes, the crane operator will mete out punishment by skipping the trucker and working on someone else, exacerbating the wait.
While three-hour waits are common, some truckers have been at the port for days.
“They will wait there all day and then come back the next day,” Chris said. “I know someone who kept coming back, and eventually, [the terminal] will charge you a storage fee if you don’t get the container out of there.”
Truckers unlucky enough to be waiting around lunchtime will watch as the entire crane crew stops work, instead of staggering their hours.
“They leave for two hours, and you are stuck with no one there,” trucker Brian said.
The ILWU did not respond to two requests for comment.
As of Wednesday, 59 ships were at a berth unloading cargo at one of the three Los Angeles ports. Another 88 are anchored off the coast stretching along Orange County and around Catalina Island, according to the Marine Exchange, which coordinates the ship traffic. The wait time to come into port can be weeks, including one ship that has been in a holding pattern miles offshore since Sept. 9.
The backlog, stretching 20 miles along the coast, has forced many large retailers to circumvent the bottleneck and charter their own ships so products can be on shelves before the Christmas shopping season. Reuters reported that incoming cargo is up 30%, which is also part of the problem.
A secondary issue leading to the crunch is a lack of available chassis at the ports to place the cargo containers onto before they're hauled away by the truckers. While the truckers say they are making the same number of trips as previous years, for some reason, chassis are in short supply for those who don't own one, and they wait for returns to come in.
In an effort to clear the logjam, President Joe Biden negotiated a 24-hour port operation . One of Long Beach’s terminals has already been working around the clock. The Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach account for roughly 40% of all U.S. imports.
But the round-the-clock schedule probably won’t matter much because the crane operators work slower at night, said a trucker identified as Oscar.
“Compared to all the other years, they are definitely [working] slower now. I wait at least three hours every single day,” he said. Oscar makes two trips to the ports a day to pick up shipping containers full of electronics, which are dropped off in the greater Los Angeles area — a 10-hour process.
Oscar said each terminal has two massive cranes to load cargo and he’s never seen both of them operating at once. A survey of two dozen cranes in Long Beach by the Washington Examiner found at least half of them nonoperational.
However, one terminal in Long Beach has started using automated cranes, and truckers rejoice when they are summoned to pick up cargo there. It is efficient and quick.
“They have to hire extra men to work the cranes and don’t want to do it,” Tessier said. “There are a lot of things [terminal operators] could do but don’t do because it costs extra money. Shows how concerned they are about their customers.”
Here’s a thought...STOP importing so much junk from overseas.
They need trucks to put the containers on. The “Greens” have reduced the truck fleet by half.
Really?
Or even better, stop buying junk from overseas.
Okay, so the issue isn’t how much they earn. We should not mimic the rhetoric of the Left, like, EVER.
If unions are trying to shut down things or not is something to be addressed.
That said, is it the State and EPA restricting which trucks are new enough to service the ports or is it the unions?
It would be nice if our so-called businessmen had at least been little “n” nationalists and understood and applied Adam Smith economics.
Well, parts of this are true, parts aren’t accurate.
It boils down to this:
There are only a very few people who will and can operate these cranes. It’s not like a crane game in the arcade. Obviously, this union wants to exclude as many people as possible, but, on the other hand, there’s a lot of folks who’d LOVE to operate these cranes, but don’t have the ability. You make a mistake and you will definitely kill multiple people.
This is just one of those things where it was mis-managed at the beginning in multiple ways. There’s no solution on the horizon. Hiring and training folks to do this over the next 18 months will deliver a solution when it’s far too late.
I think I have read somewhere that the Longshoreman union actually did some of this horse’s ass behavior during WWII when desperately needed cargo was needed to be transported.
Nawwwwwwww!
I can only speak of the Port of Philadelphia, which is somewhat of an anomaly.
The majority of what arrives here is things that can't be created here. Tropical fruits, exotic lumber, high amounts of lamb and beef, pet food from animals we don't have here, honey, etc.
It'd be interesting to know what arrives on the west coast, direct from the Chi-Coms. I'm guessing floor-loaded containers of plastic hair combs, Re-conditioned car tires, counterfeit Hello Kitty chachkis, knock-off burner phones, etc. Those things we could do without!
Common practice at union docks: They have a quota and once that’s met they slack off. If you’re the truck waiting to load/unload at the end of the tots, your SOL. Next shift may get you. Just hope your at the front end of a shift, they do hustle until they meet their numbers.
Are there not ports in Texas and Florida that can handle these ships?
Lest anyone think this is implausible, they need only to look at the behavior of labor unions in WWII, when their OWN BLOOD was fighting.
As an adult when I became aware of this aspect of WWII, I didn’t want to believe it, was genuinely shocked, and simply couldn’t wrap my head around it.
How could they do what they did with their own brothers, fathers, and sons fighting overseas, depending on the equipment and material they were supposed to supply.
And it wasn’t just the strikes that astonished me, though those alone were reprehensible.
Charles Lindbergh had an interesting anecdote relating to labor unions. When we went to war, the Roosevelt Administration blackballed him because of his isolationist attitudes, led by people like Harold Ickes Sr. (Yes, the father of the Harold Ickes Jr. POS) and he couldn’t get a job anywhere.
Eventually, Henry Ford hired him in April of 1942 as a fixer. They were having problems with the Willow Run factory building B-24s, the quality was shoddy and production levels were low. Hap Arnold told Lindbergh before he went: that “combat squadrons greatly preferred the B-17 bomber to the B-24 because ‘when we send the 17’s out on a mission, most of them return. But when we send the 24’s out, most of them don’t.’
So Lindbergh went out there to study and advise, and found that many critical techniques that were at the heart of real and efficient mass production weren’t being used. But worse, in observing the union workers there, he saw as he approached that they appeared to be busy and engaged, but as he walked away, if he turned and looked back...they were loafing. When he looked further and observing closely, he found that behavior endemic.
Because there are no union demands, only sabotage.
I met a guy that was a crane operator at a specialized construction site. The union rules said any time the crane was up it was to be manned.
However, he got bored stiff after a week being up there with nothing to do - they were waiting for a repair part from Germany. “Yeah - they said it might be another 4 weeks! I would have gone stir crazy!”
Only a small percentage of trucks meet California ports meet California’s latest environmental regulations, which is a bigger factor.
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