By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES Fri Feb 13, 2015 10:44pm EST
Containers and ships sit idle at the Port of Long Beach, California in
this aerial file photo taken February 6, 2015.
Credit: Reuters/Bob Riha, Jr.
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- Mediator
urges 48-hour news blackout in West coast port talks
- Farmers
hit hard by labor strife at West Coast ports
(Reuters) - Clogged ports along the U.S. West Coast were closed to cargo
freighters for the third time in a week on Friday night, and shippers vowed to
keep a partial shutdown in effect through Monday barring a settlement in labor
talks with the dockworkers' union.
The latest halt in loading and unloading of container ships at the 29
ports came as contract talks between union negotiators and management's
bargaining agent, the Pacific Maritime Association, appeared to reach a
critical juncture.
The federal mediator who has sought for weeks to broker a deal called on
Friday for a 48-hour news blackout after meeting with both parties together,
and then separately, union and management representatives told Reuters.
The two sides said they would abide by the mediator's request. The
development followed a bargaining session on Thursday, the parties' first
face-to-face meeting in nearly a week, that failed to produce an accord.
The PMA has said the talks, which have dragged on for nine months, hit a
new snag over a demand by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for
changes in the system of binding arbitration of contract disputes.
The 20,000 dockworkers represented by the union have been without a
contract since July.
In the meantime, inbound cargo vessels continued to stack up at anchor,
with 27 freighters left idle on Friday morning waiting for a berth outside the
ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation's two busiest cargo hubs.
The numbers are likely to grow by the end of the weekend as additional vessels
arrive from Asia with no place to park at the docks.
The West Coast ports were not left entirely dormant. The companies said
work will continue in the dockyards, rail yards and terminal gates as they seek
to clear some of the cargo containers already stacked up on the waterfronts.
EXPORT-IMPORT CRUNCH
The affected ports handle nearly half of all U.S. maritime trade and
more than 70 percent of imports from Asia. Disruptions at those harbors have
rippled through the U.S. commercial supply chain, slowing deliveries of a wide
range of goods, from agricultural produce to housewares and apparel.
Farmers have been especially hard hit, with port disruptions posing a
major barrier to perishable goods headed to overseas markets and export losses
estimated to be running at hundreds of millions of dollars a day.
The shippers first suspended vessel operations at the ports for two days
last weekend, and suspended operations again on Thursday, a union holiday. Port
operations resumed in full for one eight-hour shift on Friday before the
loading and unloading container ships was halted again.
Citing months of chronic congestion in freight traffic, the shipping
companies said they were unwilling to pay union workers higher holiday and
weekend wages while productivity declines and cargo backups reach the point of
near gridlock.
The companies accuse the union of orchestrating work slowdowns since
October to gain leverage in negotiations, while the union has faulted changes
in shipping practices instituted by the carriers themselves for causing
worsening backlogs.
Union officials also say the shippers are engaging in brinkmanship,
using the partial shutdown to exaggerate the magnitude of the crisis as a
pressure tactic.
The last time longshore contract talks led to a full shutdown of the
West Coast ports was in 2002, when the companies imposed a lockout that was
lifted 10 days later under a court order sought by President George W. Bush,
invoking the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
The shipping industry has estimated the 2002 lockout caused $15.6
billion in economic losses. When it ended, some 200 freighters were waiting at
anchor up and down the coast.
The retail and manufacturing industries have projected that a full,
extended shutdown of the ports now could cost the U.S.economy some
$2 billion a day.
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