Posted on 10/07/2002 9:47:54 AM PDT by snopercod
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.
I'm an unemployed high tech worker, and I'd take one of those jobs for less than they make and be thrilled with it, and in a year I'd be thier boss because I actually show up to work, not for work.
I didn't read that "operation were made next to impossible" [sic]. I did, however, read that the owners alledge that a work slowdown took place last month. This is a common labor negotiating tactic similar to the "blue flue" that occurs everytime the LAPD or LA County Sheriff's Departments contracts expire and they are forced to work without a contract.
100K a year dock workers may not command much sympathy from me, but billion dollar multinational conglomerates get even less.
While yet to see 200 vessels, we've counted 20 and more, waiting just a few miles offshore. Never in 34 years has anything remotely like this happened. I bet never in the history of the port.
The combined Los Angeles/Long Beach harbors are the largest commercial port in the US. Two separate entities, next to each other.
I sure hope that a ship doesn't hit one of about eight offshore oil platforms.
The longshoremen live well, on $100 k per annum. They want to keep technology out of the work. Most of the jobs at stake are clerical.
All of the vessels standing offshore are an environmental and national security risk. An al Qaeda operative could theoretically go out among the waiting vessels, and do the suicide bomb-boat terror-act. Then blame it on the US, for not "protecting" the foreign vessel and crew.
I wonder if some crew members are discussing a strip ashore? Immigration issue, too.
One thing for sure: It is a once in a lifetime sight. The ships are huge. So many in one place.
That goes without saying. But in this case, too many people know that these unskilled workers have rejected salaries and benefits that the rest of us can only dream about. Even union people will not support these overpaid scum.
Are you implying that I could go...say...Long Beach and be hired to drive a fork lift for...well, hell...I'd do it for $100,000 per year?
I have seen these union thugs at work, and my car would be bashed and battered as I drove through their picket lines in an attempt to get to work. I would probably be shot.
Usually, the crooked cops stand by and watch, too.
I am not making this up. I have personally observed it in Laughlin, NV, in 1980 when Southern California Edison was on strike. I saw the guns, I saw the headlights being broken with 2x4s, and I saw the Sheriff's Deputies standing around and watching, but doing nothing.
Is this your idea of a free market, newbie?
And what do you think would happen if the Company started bringing in replacements for these "slowed down" workers? If the employer does not have the power to terminate an employee if he wants to then the whole concept of "free trade" is skewed. Good for Bush if he does this. He gets some badly needed points in my book.
Hell, I'll even bring my own forklift.
Don't get me started. These days in post-industrial America, the high-school dropouts are the smart ones.
My father works at Ford. Last year, he made over $100,000. I don't have a problem with that. I don't envy anyone their salaries. If someone is willing to pay him $100,00 for the following, then I say more power to my father:
He reads his morning paper on the job.
He works out on the job.
He is only allowed to manufacturer so many parts then he is done. If he is done by 10:00, then the rest of the day is his.
He gets in a 2 hour nap.
He has full benefits.
I don't blame the union members; they seemed to have worked themselves a pretty good deal. I blame the employer for allowing this kind of thing to go on.
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