Port Workers Ready to Roll, But Highways Pose Problems

Nearly 7,000 part-time longshore laborers at the Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles have been trained and are waiting in the wings to work during the peak season this summer and fall.

In addition, another wave of 1,000 casual workers will be added to the longshore roster in the next few months. That’s up from the 3,000 casual workers trained last fall to cope with the mounting cargo that stacked up on the docks.

Dave Arian, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 13, said he expects the remaining 9,000 workers on the list of eligible casual workers to be trained by the end of the year and be ready to cope with any cargo surge that results from U.S. apparel and textile quotas being eliminated on Jan. 1.

Last year, a labor shortage resulted in an enormous backlog of container ships floating off Los Angeles’ coast and waiting for berths at the largest port complex in the United States. At times, goods such as apparel and textiles were taking as long as one week to be loaded off ships, resulting in late deliveries to retailers during the crucial Holiday season.

Arian was one of several panelists speaking at a town hall meeting on port congestion that took place March 10 at California State University, Long Beach.

“One of the keys [to the congestion crisis] is a supply of sufficient skilled workers,” Arian said. “Training programs have to be accelerated, and we have to develop a higher level of skills on the waterfront in order to meet the needs.”

The meeting was timely. Figures published this month show there has been a huge surge in Chinese imports to the United States. According to the U.S. Office of Textiles and Apparel, imports of major apparel products doubled in January 2005, compared with January 2004. Jumps were major in such key categories as men’s trousers, lingerie, sleepwear, dresses and shirts.

And the numbers are only expected to grow. Most port experts at the conference said they worried that the next problem will not be labor but infrastructure. Can Southern California’s highways and railroads handle the trucks and trains transporting millions of cargo containers to local warehouses and beyond?

“The forecast is that we will see 10 to 14 percent growth this year [in cargo at the ports],” said Doug Tilden, president and chief executive of Marine Terminals Corp., an Oakland, Calif.–based company that operates three major container terminals at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

In 2004, the ports handled 13.2 million 20-foot containers. “This will bring another 1.4 million TEUs [20-foot equivalent units] on an already burdened infrastructure,” Tilden said. “I really think this is the year we need to focus on infrastructure.”

But infrastructure is one of the hardest things to resolve. Expanding and building roads takes federal and state funds, which are hard to come by these days. And the process spans years, not months.

Efficiency efforts

But the railroads are doing something. The two rail companies that transport cargo containers out of the ports are adding tracks to their Southern California routes.

The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. plans this year to add a third track through the Cajon Pass, located between Los Angeles and Barstow. The 4.9-mile-long track will act as a passing lane for trains going over the steep pass.

The Union Pacific Corp. is extending a second track on its Los Angeles to El Paso, Texas, route. Currently onethird of the route, or 740 miles, is double-tracked. By the end of 2007, two-thirds of it should be double-tracked. This line is one of Union Pacific’s primary intermodal routes going east from Los Angeles.

Also, the PierPass Inc. program to extend terminal gate hours is scheduled to start June 1. Everyone is banking that the program, which will keep gates open nights and weekends, will eventually redistribute some of the truck congestion at the ports and on the highways. “Pier- Pass will double gate capacity, but it will take some time before PierPass is felt,” Tilden noted.

More warehouses and distribution centers will have to open their doors at night, and more truckers will be needed to pick up cargo during off hours.

More work to do

While working to keep the terminal gates open longer hours, the port must also address the haphazard parking of containers after they come off ships.

Some shipping-line customers leave their containers on the docks for days or weeks instead of parking them in warehouses. Other customers put pressure on the ports to have their containers picked up first and be moved out the terminal gate. The result is a hopscotch pattern of containers that makes dockworkers’ jobs more difficult.

“We don’t need terminals to be storage areas,” said Tom Harrold, vice president and general manager of container shipping line P&O Nedlloyd Ltd. in Los Angeles. “As an ocean liner, we are probably the worst ones to offend that. We allow our customers to dictate that they want to use the terminal as a storage area. We need to move cargo out.”

Harrold noted that this is the time that most customers negotiate their shipping contracts for the year. “As a group, we need to take a look at the time cargo is sitting at the terminals and squeeze that down a bit,” he said.