Ports could be shut Friday Management brandishes its lockout threat due to alleged union slowdowns at one West Coast terminal.
September 19, 2002: 8:34 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Management is threatening to lock out unionized dock workers at the two major West Coast ports by Friday, unless the union ends a slowdown by Thursday night.
Joe Miniace, chief executive of the employers' association, said the group would order an indefinite lockout if the union failed to provide workers for the 6 p.m., PT (9 p.m., ET) Thursday night shift, Reuters reported. He added a lockout would affect some 5,000 workers.
The Pacific Maritime Association, which represents terminal operators and major shipping lines calling on the West Coast, said the PMA would lock out all union workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Those two ports handle 56 percent of all cargo and nearly 70 percent of the high-value containers of freight passing through West Coast ports.
"The union will probably not fill the jobs," Miniace told a conference call, according to Reuters. "In essence they are saying 'take us down on a defensive shutdown'."
The threat brings to a head a labor dispute that has simmered all summer and heated up in the last couple of days as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union did not send sufficient workers to a Long Beach, Calif., facility owned by Stevedoring Services of America, the nation's largest port terminal operator.
The union denied that it was engaged in a slowdown, and said that the lack of workers was due to heavy work loads now moving through ports due to the peak season.
"Basically, there just aren't enough people," ILWU spokesman Steve Stallone told the Associated Press. "They are blowing a small, local dispute into a coastal issue."
Management has dismissed those claims.
The PMA threat of a lockout has been a longstanding one, with management saying it would not tolerate slowdowns, which it said are the equivalent of "strikes with pay."
A work stoppage would also have the potential to choke off trade between the United States and Asia. It is estimated that a shutdown of all 29 ports would cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1 billion a day. But many observers expect that the Bush administration would step in and order the two sides back to work if a strike or lockout was declared.
The lockout could take effect with the early shift Friday, which starts between 6:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. PT (9:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. ET).
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