I got this blurb from my son-in-law. I don't know where he got it.
All I know about longshoremen is that they're the ones who do the damage to your household goods when you move to Alaska and back.
I had the misfortune of working at the Port of Oakland for a shipping company for about a year and a half during the late ‘90s. Working on the “docks” opened my eyes to a world that is very foreign to the average Silicon Valley / high tech professional. I’d imagine that prison is very similar to life on the docks, because most of the longshoremen have been there at least once for various offences.
I’d show up to work at 7:00 am every morning and watch from my office as the longshoremen arrived for work. Many took a minute to finish a beer or two in the front seat of their Lexus or Plymouth (depending on how many ex-wives they had) before the whistle blew. Work was supposed to start at 8 and it was my job to make sure that we could start as close to 8 as possible.
The longshoremen would listlessly stroll out to their cranes and trucks and wait for someone to tell them what to do. The longshoremen are very good sitters, they can happily sit all day, just waiting. There were stacks of dirty magazines in every truck, every crane and every booth (and were not talking Playboy) to keep them busy while they sat.
The docks ran like a clock (when there wasn’t a “slow down”). You could always tell when it was near break time because everything would stop moving, and the longshoremen would drop everything and head to the break shacks and to their cars (probably to have a couple more beers). In the break shacks, there were on-going poker games where the pots reached hundreds of dollars each hand. Others would just stay in their trucks to catch up on the porn mags left during the previous shift. At the end of the day, the longshoremen would start packing up around 4:30 so they would be in their cars at 5:00.
The Longshoremen have little or no accountability for their actions. You could fire a guy on a Friday and he’d be back to work on Monday because the Union would send him back. If you fired someone at 8 am, he was entitled 4 hours of pay just for showing up. If you fired someone at noon, he’d still get a full days pay because of the union contract. One guy was caught masturbating in a forklift (with no doors) and was fired, only to return the next day. I saw longshoremen "accidentally" destroy container loads worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and continue work as if nothing had happened, no attempt to notify the management to perhaps save something.
There was a transfer station manned by longshoremen to move cargo from trucks to containers. Safeway, Nike, GAP, etc. would bring cargo to be transferred to containers. Along the way, the longshoremen would take something here and there. I have heard that as much as 5% of the cargo that passed through the transfer station went “missing”. We had a shipment of Starter jackets once and the next week, every longshoreman had his own. When we would get shipments of beef, they’d all plan barbeques.
Speaking of which, the current “Beef” between the ILWU and the companies on the West Coast is about the “Lock Out”. The companies have locked the ILWU out of the docks because the ILWU was engaged in a “slow down” during contract negotiations. The union engages in slow downs whenever they want something. Or, in this case, whenever they don't want something--they don't want new bar-code scanners to better keep track of inventory, given their pilfering.
For most people, a slow down does not mean much, but I have seen a slow down and the costs to the companies trying to run businesses on the docks can be devastating. Basically, the companies are better off locking the longshoremen out because slow downs are extremely counter-productive. Equipment mysteriously breaks, and the longshoremen do everything they can to not do any work. Car keys go missing, breaks are extended, pages go missing, containers are loaded onto the ships incorrectly (sometimes the wrong ships) and all of this costs the companies money.
The press would make you believe that the companies are at fault in the current dispute on the docks, but I have a different story. The shipping companies are doing everything they can to survive in a very competitive, low profit industry. Cutting costs is the only way most of these companies will stay in business and the union is, by far, their biggest expense. The AVERAGE longshoreman made over $95K per year in 1998 for a 40 hour work week (assuming they even work the full week). I could go on and on with details, but the bottom line is that there are hundreds of longshoremen who basically do nothing everyday and their jobs should be eliminated. Also, there are hundreds of longshoremen's jobs that could be improved through automation and their jobs should also be eliminated.
I feel as if the union has the upper hand in the current problem, because they are great actors. They are just "trying to do their jobs" and the companies are locking them out. Companies have billions of dollars in cargo waiting on ships that must be unloaded and cargo on the docks that need to be shipped out. But, letting the longshoremen go back to work during a slow down is more damaging to our economy than a lock out.
Signed,
a pissed off ex-superintendent watching as the ILWU does what it can to destroy an already weak economy. |
