West Coast dockworkers reach tentative labor agreement after extended talks

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The union representing 22,000 dockworkers along the West Coast and the ocean carriers and terminal operators that employ them reached a tentative labor agreement Wednesday after more than a year of talks, sporadically interrupted by disruptions at the ports.

A tentative agreement on a new six-year contract covering workers at all 29 West Coast ports was announced late Wednesday by the International Longshore and Warehousing Union and the Pacific Maritime Association.

According to a joint statement, U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su assisted with reaching the deal. The two sides said that they won’t be releasing details on the agreement at this time, which is subject to ratification by both their members.

“We are pleased to have reached an agreement that recognizes the heroic efforts and personal sacrifices of the ILWU workforce in keeping our ports operating,” PMA President James McKenna and ILWU President Willie Adams said. “We are also pleased to turn our full attention back to the operation of the West Coast Ports.”

The negotiations that started last May had retailers on edge over the possibility that the biggest U.S. container ports handling imports from Asia could see new disruptions and delays just as they had recovered from a massive supply-chain logjam caused by the unprecedented flood of goods arriving during the pandemic.

Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two biggest ports, were sounding the alarm earlier this year as the protracted labor disputes were prompting retailers and other big importers to avoid the West Coast and, in so far as possible, move their shipments to ports on the Gulf Coast and East Coast.

After some encouraging news in February from the union and the terminal operators that an agreement was getting close and an April update of a tentative deal on “key issues,” the mood changed rapidly. In the last few months, the employers’ organization started accusing the union’s local chapters of withholding crews to offload container carriers and effectively shutting down the terminals temporarily.

Although neither side has made public statements on the details of the contract talks, the longshore workers, who are among the highest paid blue-collar workers in the world and can make close to $200,000 a year, were reportedly seeking a bigger cut of the massive profits that the ocean carriers were collecting during the pandemic.

President Joe Biden last year, during a speech in the Port of LA, took aim at the foreign-owned ocean carriers that dominate the trade routes between Asia and the U.S., saying they had raised their prices by as much as 1,000%. At the same time, they have raked in $190 billion in profits, a seven-fold increase in one year, Biden said, calling on Congress to pass litigation to crack down on these companies and lower shipping costs.

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