ILWU – PMA ‘big table’ contract talks to resume

Chief negotiators for West Coast longshoremen and employers are expected to begin talking again.    Chief negotiators for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association are expected to resume contract negotiations Tuesday for the first time since Nov. 20, said Wade Gates, a spokesman for the PMA.
   He said the so-called “big table talks” between ILWU President Bob McEllrath and PMA President Jim McKenna are scheduled to resume after a break during which the union and employer group had limited discussion among subcommittees discussing various issues.
   The ILWU and the PMA painted the break in talks in very different lights.
   The PMA accused the ILWU of taking “slowdown tactics to the bargaining table,” by not continuing talks right up until Thanksgiving, while the ILWU said the subcommittee talks were constructive.
   Last Tuesday, ILWU spokesman Craig Merrilees said, “Both parties met yesterday in subcommittee, and had very productive and positive discussions. Both agreed to spend today working independently on various issues as allocated by the subcommittee parties for big table consideration.”
   Gates said that there were a half dozen discussion during the break and that some were via telephone conference calls.
   Meanwhile, there are continuing delays in berthing ships at some ports because of congestion at container ports. The Marine Exchange of Southern California said that at 7 a.m. on Monday, there were 12 vessels at anchor including six container vessels.
   Last week a Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of e21, the economics portal of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank, wrote an article that proposed bringing port labor under the Railway Labor Act.
   “Currently, ports are governed by the National Labor Relations Act, while airlines and railroads are required to abide by the 1934 Railroad Labor Act. The disruptions at the ports that are being used as a tactic of negotiation are allowed under the NLRA, but would not be permitted under the RLA,” she wrote.
   “Congress could pass a bill moving ports to the RLA, just as it moved airlines to the RLA in the 1930s. With ports increasingly important to the U.S. economy, it is time to give ports the same protections as railroads and airlines.”
   Merrilees said “I don’t think anyone is paying any attention” to Furchtgott-Roth’s proposal, calling her an “extreme right-wing political ideologue.”
   Furchtgott-Roth is a former chief economist in the U.S. Department of Labor and served in the administrations of President George W. Bush, President George H.W. Bush, and President Reagan.