PMA’s lockout begins to crack

Oct. 5, 2002

Fissures are starting to appear in PMA’s lockout as pressure continues to mount for the employers to end their blockade of West Coast ports. A growing number of unions, businesses, elected officials and international interests are calling on the PMA to stop its irresponsible actions and reopen the ports to commerce.

            The ILWU has been calling on the PMA to end its more than week-long lockout since it began and has been working any and all cargo it can. Throughout the lockout union members worked cruise passenger ships, loading and unloading vacationers’ luggage and ship stores for their trips in Seattle , San Francisco , Los Angeles and San Diego . After several days of discussions, the union also got PMA to allow it to work ships carrying military materiel.

            Through their long-term relationship with the local non-PMA company TOTE, ILWU Local 23 in Tacoma , Wash. kept up sending essential goods to Alaska , which gets some 70 percent of its supplies by sea. By Thursday PMA granted an exemption to allow one of its member companies, CSX, which runs the same Tacoma to Alaska route, to send its ships north.

            Late Friday night PMA finally gave into the ILWU’s repeated requests to move essential goods to Hawaii , which is even more dependent on seaborne imported cargo.

            “The military cargo and the vital shipments to Alaska and Hawaii should never have been the collateral damage of PMA’s senseless assault on the national economy,” said ILWU International President James Spinosa. “These are cargoes the ILWU has always worked, even when we were out on strike. We applaud the fact that PMA has finally relented and let these ships go. We are now asking them to do the same for the ships bound for the Pacific island American territory of Guam , which faces the same shortages as Hawaii .”
            Spinosa noted that the ILWU has been working all these ships without any contract extension or any other pre-conditions.       

The union is also calling on PMA to allow its members to move the perishable produce now left sitting on the docks or on ships idle in the ports as well as the grain American farmers desperately need to get out to export.

            But so far PMA’S CEO Joe Miniace has refused that request. Last January the PMA took out a $200 million line of credit from banks for the express purpose of being able to last through an extended lockout. Earlier this year Robin Lanier, head of the West Coast Waterfront Coalition PMA set up to lobby on its behalf, told her members to prepare to hold out for a two-week lockout.

            “This has been PMA’s plan all along,” Spinosa said. “They don’t seem to care who else suffers since they are covered. But by simply unlocking the gates and letting us back to our jobs, PMA can end the bleeding of the economy.”

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