Despite the hype and false promises, SSS is an attack on our union jobs
This article was published in the Winter 2010 issue of the Coast Longshore Division Newsletter.
NON-UNION CARGO: Short sea shipping barges on the Duwamish River (shown here) and the Columbia transport cargo loaded by non-union dockworkers.
Most longshore workers, particularly those of us registered in small ports, have heard the rhetoric associated with short sea shipping (SSS), sometimes referred to as marine highways.
The United States government and many small public port authorities are championing the concept of SSS. Why? The United States government wants to undermine our position in the cargo transportation industry. Ports want a piece of the free money that the current administration is irresponsibly throwing around. Wannabe freight moving entrepreneurs and underutilized ports are telling all of us up and down the West Coast that there are jobs in it for us and our communities.
The Coast Committee, supported by the Coast Longshore Division Caucus, opposes the United States government’s usage of scarce tax dollars to promote and subsidize SSS in the north/south movement of containers on the West Coast of the Americas. Such water trade movement, by its very nature, cannot compete economically with truck and rail (even if subsidized) and will only serve to further drive down our sector’s wages and our working conditions. It will establish the framework for non-union and non-ILWU predatory union challenges to the Coast Longshore Division’s jurisdiction.
Just what is short sea shipping? Simply put, it is the movement of containers between points along the North American coasts of the United States, Canada and Mexico (Hawaii excluded).
Today, this type of marine traffic is regulated, in part, by cabotage laws, the Jones Act, and the fact that it’s less efficient than truck and rail.
On the United States West Coast, SSS functions, unsubsidized, in four trade routes: between Seattle and Anchorage; between Tacoma and Anchorage; between Alaskan ports; and between the Columbia upriver ports and Portland.
Barge and rail travel side-by-side on the Columbia River.
In Seattle, not a single registered longshoreman handles the cargo associated with SSS. It is all handled on the Duwamish River, either by non-union workers or Inlandboatmen’s Union (IBU) represented longshoremen under a PCLCD substandard agreement. In Alaska, some ports are union, like the ILWU in Dutch Harbor, and the Teamsters longshore in Anchorage. But outside of those union ports, cargo is handled by other maritime unions or non-union crews associated with the towboat crew. In the upriver ports of the Columbia River, the containers are handled exclusively by non-union dockworkers. Operators in non-union upriver Columbia River ports are requesting government subsidies to build barges designed to bypass ILWU longshoremen in Portland and transport commodities directly to the non-union Duwamish, where the barge can be unloaded for the short truck transport to Seattle’s International Port.
Even the boats towing the barges have crews that are a mix of union and non-union, depending on company. Many towboat companies in the trade are double breasted.
Why is the SSS industry dominated by cheap labor? The answer is simple. With trucking deregulation and the efficiencies associated with its door-to-door service, no other transportation mode can compete unless wages and working conditions are markedly deflated. Even with government subsidy, wages and working conditions must be pushed below PCL&CA standards. No amount of government subsidy can counterbalance this reality.
In addition, short distance barge service for standardized commodities (containers) does not and cannot offer same day delivery. Large numbers of containers must be collected in a central location over days before being loaded to a barge. The container must be double- and triple-handled after leaving its source location. All this and more adds to the cost of handling. A shipper such as Wal-Mart will not pay more just for the environment or to limit congestion so your commute drive will be easier.
Government is trying to put just enough subsidies out there to bait a potential operator into squeezing the rest of the necessary cost reductions from labor and ports. Already, the Coast Committee is being approached with requests for manning and wage reductions that would be unique to SSS. Potential operators are seeking advantages from non-Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) member public port authorities to lease blocks of property for the purpose of establishing container yards (CY) with no ILWU Coast Longshore Division presence.
Other unions, including non-Longshore Divisions in our own ILWU family, are clamoring to fill the gap in the leased yards. The irony is that even they cannot agree to work cheaply enough to make the truck/barge economics work. In ports like Eureka and Coos Bay, where private docks are the norm, we don’t even have a historical relationship that we can rely on to protect our jurisdiction.
Other maritime unions, like the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association (MEBA), International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), Seafarers International Union (SIU) and our own IBU, see SSS as more work for them, despite the fact that in some cases the work may be that which is traditionally assigned to Coast Longshore Division longshoremen. MEBA represents dockworkers handling cargo to and from barges in Alaska as we speak. MEBA has even cut a substandard deal with Horizon on the East Coast for the trade. The AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trade Department (TTD) wants to support SSS, but the Coast Longshore Division is blocking any formal endorsement. Solidarity among these unions suddenly becomes important when the Jones Act is attacked or the cabotage laws are jeopardized, and these unions fail to see the connection between SSS and the fact that they’re under attack, and they ask the Coast Longshore Division for help.
Subsidy and promotion of SSS by the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico, is an effort, one of several fronts, to deregulate maritime transportation and drive organized labor consequentially from the Industry.
SSS is not a panacea for additional union jobs. It is just the opposite.
Scarce government tax dollars should be used for land-based infrastructure designed to efficiently move containers to and from established ports. We need dedicated freight corridors, bridges, rail enhancements and dredging that bring stability to the industry — not the funding, promotion, and blind acceptance of a concept that even with subsidy will fail, and drag organized labor down with it.
FACT BOX ON SSS:
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