Originally printed in the Journal of Commerce – February 13, 2015

Opinion, by Michael Pellegrini

So the ILWU is solely responsible for the humongous mess our West Coast ports are in? It must be so because I read it in the Journal of Commerce. My first concern is that perhaps this blame is misplaced. To get at the truth, let’s look at the background.

First off, a normal workweek for longshoremen consists of 147 hours spread over three shifts in seven days. An eight-hour day shift, an eight-hour night shift, and a five-hour graveyard or “hoot owl” shift. If you take away the two night shifts each day, then you’ve lost 91 hours in a week, or about 62% of the available worktime. If you take away another two days from that, you drop the available work time to just 27% of normal.

Now as reported by the Journal of Commerce, the PMA’s supposed goals for not hiring night and now weekend shifts, they say,   is to reduce terminal congestion, and to reduce labor costs – to quit paying premium pay for what they consider to be workers with “diminished productivity.”

So what is the PMA really trying to accomplish by reducing available work? And is it likely that reducing available worktime to 27% of normal it will help ease terminal congestion or help customers get their goods delivered faster?

Well if you look beyond the repetitive, glib rhetoric and specious reasoning of the PMA, the true intent is obvious. The PMA has deliberately done away with nearly three-quarters of the available worktime solely to cut longshoremen’s paychecks. Their reasoning is the longshoremen will be much more pliable and easy to intimidate if maybe they can’t pay their mortgages or feed their children.

It’s that brutally simple. Their unstated but obvious purpose is to force the longshoremen to submit and back down. Period.   If that base motive wasn’t clear when the PMA stopped hiring the night shifts, it’s now abundantly clear since they locked-out the longshoremen for the weekend.

What this is, is hardball negotiations in the extreme. These foreign-owned shipping lines are perpetrating economic warfare against the United States of America. The only thing the PMA hasn’t done yet is to bring out thugs to bust heads, but perhaps that’s coming soon.   Things do seem to be escalating.

The irony is that if conversely, it was the longshoremen who had walked off the job and gone on strike refusing to work nights, much less if they staged a weekend strike, it’d be a completely different story.   In that instance, the whole country would be up in arms demanding their heads. They’d be calling for President Obama to fire them, à la Ronald Reagan and PATCO. They’d be called terrorists, holding the nation’s economy hostage.

That’s so very wrong. It’s extremely naive to assume the PMA’s lame excuses and tapestry of lies about reducing terminal congestion are even remotely valid.

Because the PMA excuses are indeed lame. If you want to move more cargo, and move it faster, you add shifts and you add workers. Not cut shifts. Is it any wonder the ports are on the brink of a complete standstill with what the PMA has done?

The vast majority of the blame for the gridlock we’re presently experiencing clearly lies with the PMA and their reckless attempt to punish the workers, trying to make them submit. Let’s give blame where blame is due.

This leads to my second concern: I take issue with the bias of the Journal of Commerce’s coverage of the negotiations. JOC has been facilitating the PMA’s propaganda agenda.

How so?

A good example is the way JOC seems to accept without question the PMA’s assertions that they’ve done away with nearly three-quarters of the work shifts to save money or to help clear terminal congestion. That simply defies reason.

Then in successive articles, the PMA statements – which are repeated over and over and over, ad nauseam – are all presented in an authoritative manner, while the ILWU statements are often presented in a more dismissive light.

And then to top it off, for the better part of the last month, JOC has had PMA graphics prominently displayed on its home page (Data), the latest graph having the headline: Pacific Maritime Association’s stats show drop in skilled labor.

So what’s the overall impression the reader is to come away with? Given the disparate, favored treatment, it’s obvious the PMA is the white knight. It would be extremely hard to walk away with an impression other than that.

That is not balanced reporting.

I value the Journal of Commerce for its news coverage of the industry. I even like reading opinion pieces that I don’t necessarily agree with; it’s enriching. But there has to be a clear line between the opinion and news. Because if the line blurs, it cheapens and degrades the publication. I hope JOC decides to take the high road.