Port workers told to do heavy duty jobs as necessary.

Facing an ongoing backlog of ships, the union representing longshoremen at the ports of Los Angeles and Lone Beach has agreed to direct its members to stop passing up jobs unloading container ships in favor of better-paying clerical work.

The reluctance of some union members to accept duty on cranes and other heavy equipment when they could be making better wages in other assignments was seen as a factor in those delays.

Officials of the international Longshore and Warehouse Union agreed to tell its members to accept the assignments after the Pacific Maritime Association, the steamship lines" bargaining arm, told the union that qualified longshoremen who rejected heavy equipment operations would be disqualified from future consideration for permanent clerk or foreman positions.

"The union has agreed to that because we understand the situation needs to be taken care of," said Steve Stallone, a spokesman for the ILWU. "People who am training for those jobs should be taking those jobs. (But) the real solution is more people with more training, and we've been saying it for years."

Stallone said the ILWU began pressuring the PMA in February to hire 5,000 new casuals and register 1,000 existing casuals into the union to speed off-loading.

In August, the PMA hired 3,000 casuals and added 1,000 casuals to the union's ranks. When it appeared that the added manpower would not eliminate the labor shortage, the PMA committed to bringing on 2,000 more casuals.

"We wanted to move very quickly," said Steve Sugerman, a PMA consultant. "But unfortunately, it took a while to negotiate with the union and reach an agreement on the process of hiring

The additions have had little immediate impact, however, since they took largely unskilled positions and were not qualified to operate the heavy machinery. At the same time, when those jobs came available they were rejected by an unspecified number crane operators and other heavy equipment operators who had opportunities to take positions as clerks or foremen.

For all parties, the issue conics down to money. The PMA has resisted adding expensive new union positions, and some workers were angling for better-paying jobs.

Last year, the average longshore worker earned $115.591, while clerks made $136,340 and foremen $194,843, according to PMA records.

Registered longshoremen make a base rate of $28.68 per hour, get a generous pension plan and have a no-co-pay health plan that costs an average of $42,000 per year per worker. Casuals start out making $20.66 per hour and get no benefits.

"You can do the math and see why it is to their advantage not to promote people to registered status until you come to a situation that we're in now, when you need people." said Stallone. "Then it's like cutting off your nose to spite your face."

As a result of those issues, coupled with a busy holiday shipping season and labor issues or truck and rail operators, containers that would normally be unloaded from ships and placed directly on truck chassis for quick departure are often stacked in container yards. That has added to delays as the boxes then have to be unstacked to be shipped.

The backup appears to have peaked on Oct. 10 when the ports had 94 ships in or just off the locks, the highest level since more than 120 either docked or stacked up offshore after the 2002 lockout. By Oct. 21, the number of vessels at the docks or anchored just off the port had dropped to 85, including 55 container ships.