German shipping line will be port’s largest customer when Hanjin stops coming to Portland in March.
BY JACOB PALMER | OB DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
You know things are grim for the Port of Portland when a company says it won’t leave immediately — making headline news.
That’s exactly what’s happening. Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping line, confirmed in an OregonLive.com report Monday that it was not planning on abandoning Portland.
The company did say it has been skipping some stops in Portland due to slowdowns at the port caused by labor strife that shows no signs of ending. Ports along the West Coast were closed for the fourth-straight day Monday.
From the OregonLive.com report:
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is nine months into working on an expired contract, and tensions between union members and the 29 West Coast port operating companies are reaching a fever pitch. The Pacific Maritime Association, the coalition of those port operators, locked the gates on dock workers for four days over the past week, saying it’s too expensive to run the ports when longshoremen are not moving cargo at a normal pace. The longshore workers say they are not slowing down loading and unloading. The union officials maintain that congestion, safety and other issues are the problem.
Shipping companies, truck and train operators, manufacturers and anyone else relying on reliable importing and exporting over the Pacific Ocean is increasingly worried about the negotiations dragging on longer. Many retailers have products sitting on boats past when they were supposed to put it on shelves, or in store rooms from last season that are no longer sellable.
Oregon’s senators penned a letter hoping to persuade President Barack Obama to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, which allows the president to end labor disputes that hurt the national economy.
From the letter:
“We are concerned that if a new collective bargaining agreement is not reached soon, thousands of Oregon jobs will be in jeopardy, and in the long term, demand for American made products and agricultural commodities could significantly diminish,” the letter said. “As you well know, the recent announcement that Hanjin Shipping Company will no longer call Portland after March 9 represents a loss of 78% of the shipping volume at Terminal 6 which has supported over 650 jobs and $33 million in annual wages.”
A report by the Albany Democrat-Herald interviewed a 30-year veteran of the ports who said the terminal operators are unfairly demonizing union workers.
“I think the [Pacific Maritime Association] is coloring the story to make it look like the longshoremen are bad guys,” [Victor] Hietala said. “They want to put guys out of work.”
Hietala said there are two key issues behind the current contract dispute: chassis maintenance that affects the workers’ safety, and automation that displaces union members. According to Hietala, chassis maintenance has traditionally been done by union mechanics. He says shipping companies that own the chassis units — basically the trailers on which cargo containers are placed for movement to rail yards — want to replace qualified union mechanics with lesser-skilled non-union workers, whose hourly wages are less than their union counterparts. Hietala said the union workers believe that shift opens them up to safety issues, since they don’t see the non-union mechanics as skilled. They also see the shift as a way to defer maintenance, leading to unsafe equipment.
