The South Carolina State Ports Authority wants to make all public port operations “common user,” a phrase people outside the maritime community learned when Maersk Line threatened to pull its business from the Port of Charleston.
The SPA last year offered to move Maersk’s operations to what’s known as the common user gate, where SPA employees would handle work typically assigned to union labor. The International Longshoremen’s Association rejected that proposal.
Now, Newsome wants to switch all SPA port operations to the common-user model, saying that doing so could recapture some 20 percent capacity on the docks to handle additional containers.