Just a few minor niggles to sort out
"Wot, me worry?" could perhaps become the motto for Western Seaboard ports. Despite warning signals getting bigger and louder, port authorities pretend that problems are insignificant.
The latest warning has come from Pacific Merchant Shipping Association President John McLaurin, who says that local and regional politics is becoming a threat.
Down in LA/Long Beach, the city councils are raiding the coffers to pay bills. Long Beach councilors want the port to pay for projects such as the city aquarium – their logic presumably being that the aquarium has loads of water and fish, so is a natural offshoot of the port – and rebuilding a seawall that protects a residential area.
LA is shoving unneeded workers onto the port payroll. Of the two strategies, LA's is more worrying. A little bit of background is needed here. LA port is a department of the city council and all major decisions have to be referred to the council, while Long Beach has much more leeway and is almost self-governing. (Which is why the benefits and conditions of the harbor pilots are different – the one is unionized and part of the city council while the other is a commercial concern that has to pay its own way.)
Up in Seattle, the Teamsters are apparently calling the tune over the election of port commissioners next year, which is bound up with the ongoing saga of unionizing port truckers throughout the country.
McLaurin reckons that LA is spending needless millions defending the employee-driver provision, while the core reason for the measure has been forgotten and the quest is for political power.
"Hear, hear" is the comment from many industry observers, who note that a potential new problem has arisen from the political protests over Israel's Zim shipping line. There is some unease at the ILWU in Oakland refusing to cross a picket line that was set up for political and not labor reasons. Memories of anti-apartheid demos against South Africa are being awakened, with apprehension that work stoppages along the seaboard will become more common.
But, no doubt all this is just scaremongering, the money and traffic will come sailing into the ports and everything will be hunky dory.