LOS ANGELES — The dispute that has snarled West Coast shipping revolves around a rarity in American business — a small but mighty union.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union represents 20,000 dockworkers, a fraction of the organized ranks of teachers, truck drivers or health care workers. But the port workers — who still queue up at hiring halls daily for work and spend years earning full membership — stand guard over a crucial chokepoint in the global economy.
For decades, these “lords of the docks” have been paid like blue-collar royalty. Their current contract pays $26 to $41 an hour, with free health care for members. Some earn six figures with overtime. Even as a growing chorus of business groups clamor for a resolution to their months-long contract talks with the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping companies, the union sees little need to back down.
“They have unique skills that aren’t easily replaced,” said Goetz Wolff, who teaches about labor and economics at the University of California, Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs. “They’re not going to roll over and play dead.”
They went back to work Tuesday, after a holiday weekend port shutdown that left dozens of ships parked off the Southern California coast. They also returned to the negotiating table, where U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez is now trying to broker a deal.
The talks have dragged on since May, but tensions have ramped up in recent days, with the shippers group closing the ports over the weekend and each side accusing the other of slowing operations. Both parties say they want to avoid repeating the 10-day lockout of 2002, which then-President George W. Bush stepped in to end. They have reportedly agreed on many major elements of a new contract but remain at odds over finer points, including the job of a particular arbitrator who handles disputes on the Los Angeles and Long Beach docks.
The same forces that have pulverized private sector unions in other industries — overseas manufacturing, lower transportation costs, global markets — have strengthened the hand of the ILWU, said economists who study global trade.
So did two decisions by ILWU’s founder and longtime president, Harry Bridges.
The first was negotiating a single contract covering every port from San Diego to Bellingham. That prevents shippers from playing one West Coast port against another, as sometimes happens on the East Coast, said Peter Olney, a former organizing director at ILWU.
The other was a 1960 agreement that embraced the arrival of containerization, essentially agreeing to shed thousands of jobs to manually haul crates and bags from ships’ holds in order to save thousands in the higher-tech — and higher-paid — work of operating forklifts and giant cranes.
As container traffic boomed in the decades since, that tough choice paid off, Wolff said.
“It was a brilliant quid pro quo,” he said.
Today’s workers come up steeped in tales of that sort of militancy, Olney said, and they see how well it pays off in their wages and company-paid health insurance.
“In the port towns, everyone has a friend, a brother, a cousin, a niece who works in this industry and benefits from the power of the union,” he said.
