Union Election Heightens Tension at Seaports.

With the election of James Spinosa earlier this month as president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the group has a powerful, unified front office for the first time in years. And shippers and local port officials aren't the least bit happy about it.

That's because Spinosa is seen by maritime business leaders as an intransigent negotiator who will do everything in his power to block technical modernization at the ports--a key issue as port traffic continues to explode.

With Spinosa ousting Brian McWilliams as head of the union, the ILWU is expected to have considerably more clout than it did on the past. Although the Bay Are-based McWilliams was the nominal voice of the union, he lacked the support of the rank and file, especially those working on the waterfronts of San Pedro and Long Beach -- by far the largest longshore workforce on the West Coast and Spinosa's power base. It was Spinoza, not McWilliams, who was the union's chief negotiator in contract talks with employers last year.

By not giving an inch on the contentious issue of port modernization, Spinosa (who declined to be interviewed for this story) all but secured his election as president of the union.

"He certainly has the reputation of being a tough negotiator, and he's hugely popular with the workers in the ports here," said Jay Winter, executive director of the Foreign Trade Association of Southern California. "But it is clearly a positive development for the industry that they know who they are dealing with and that the ILWU will speak with one voice."

That's essentially the same tune all shipping industry executives have been publicly singing since Spinosa's Aug. 4 election.

But privately, many senior-level maritime industry executives concede that Spinosa's unbending attitude during last year's contract negotiations is a bad omen. The demand for far-reaching modernization of L.A.-area seaports will be getting louder as the volume of cargo passing through them keeps growing.

"Our container volume is going to outstrip the available land sooner rather than later, and we will need more-efficient ways of handling this growth," said Joseph Miniace, president and chief executive of the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents West Coast ocean carriers and terminal operators in their dealings with the longshoremen. "The carriers are keenly aware that the current pace of growth demands more efficiency at the terminals, and they will keep their eyes on the long term rather than the short term."

That means, according to Miniace, that ocean carriers are taking a closer look at the East Coast ports, where labor relations are quite amicable nowadays, as an alternative route for their shipments from the Far East. Although Los Angeles and Long Beach still have an iron grip on Asia-U.S. container traffic, the volatile labor relations on the West Coast and high costs here have started to make an all-water route from Asia to the East Coast (via the Panama or Suez canals) a more appealing alternative.

"We're one of the highest-cost ports in the world," Miniace said. "At the same time, the East Coast ports have made it understood that they badly want our cargo, and the unions there are happy to work with the employers to bring in more business and jobs."

Carriers are becoming increasingly impatient with the lack of progress in implementing new technologies that would speed up the flow of cargo and bring costs down.

"The bottom line is that labor is the biggest single expense for the terminal operators, and they want to reduce the number of people they need to pay," said one industry insider, who asked not to be named. (Given the power and militancy of the ILWU, many people in the maritime industry are loathe to publicly discuss any labor issues whatsoever out of fear of being targeted by the union.)

Longshoremen are among the highest-paid blue-collar workers, with most registered union members making more than $100,000 a year. Hence, employers are extremely keen to minimize the number of longshoremen and are particularly chagrined at paying top dollar for a union member to perform a task that is either redundant or could easily be done electronically or mechanically.

"They have some of the most arcane work practices, and there is somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of unnecessary labor performed in the ports," complained one shipping-industry representative. "They don't use scanners, for example, and if they do, they still have a guy entering the same information by hand into a computer."

Among the items high on the industry's wish list are paperless gate operations at the terminals and an automated dispatching system. This is hardly in the same league as the fully automated terminals at the port of Rotterdam, for example, but the industry can expect fierce opposition from the ILWU over even modest improvements.

Last year, the union's Local 13 in Wilmington, for example, voted down the installation of a computerized dispatch system, which would have replaced the old blackboard in the dispatch hail, even though the ILWU had participated in the design of the new system.

Many workers are highly suspicious of any kind of modernization at the ports that could conceivably threaten their job security. And to many in the industry, Spinosa is unlikely to change those rank-and-file attitudes anytime soon.

At the same time, carriers seem determined not to make the same mistake they did during last year's contract negotiations, when they caved in to the ILWU and did not press for any meaningful concessions in terms of implementing new technologies.

"Some people are extremely upset about what happened last year," said one insider. There is a new sense of purpose among some of the carriers who are more willing to confront the union next time around."

There are no new talks until 2002, when the current contract expires, but the Pacific Maritime Association and the ILWU met earlier his summer in the Joint Coast Technology and rob Security Committee, which was created as art of the 1999 contract agreement. Neither arty would provide details of the substance or atmosphere of those discussions.

Still, some observers are optimistic that the employers and union will avoid a prolonged and bitter conflict over modernizing the ports while business is booming.

"There is ample opportunity to come to an agreement," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. "This is a very wealthy industry and it is a growth industry. So there is no economic scarcity that stands in the way of finding a compromise, but that doesn't mean that these negotiations won't be contentious."