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An Editor-to-Editor Podcast for JOC.com
Editors Dana L. Brundage and Bill Mongelluzzo discuss the Port of L.A.-Long Beach office clerical strike in this podcast. Mongelluzzo is covering the strike for The Journal of Commerce.
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Q: Bill, can you briefly explain the origin of the strike between the clerical workers and the port and the three main issues at hand?
A: In a word, the Office Clerical Unit of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63’s contract expired on June 30 and they went out on strike. But first, a little background so that our readers can understand the difference between the OCU and the dockworkers.
Although they are both under the IWLU umbrella, the office workers have a separate contract from the dockworkers. These are folks who process bookings, they do customer service work, everything from receptionist to secretary to customer service functions. So they don’t actually touch cargo.
What gives them leverage is their affiliation with the ILWU. And if they go out on strike, normally the dockworkers will attempt to honor the picket lines, which is what happened already since June 30 twice. But the arbitrator ruled in each instance that the OCU was not negotiating in good faith and so he instructed them not to honor the picket lines.
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As in virtually all sectors of business, technology has created efficiencies, a natural progression of virtually any business. So again we see unions being used to protect jobs by having the business remain inefficient, or by protecting numbers of people simply not needed.
Similar to the ILWU and their 24 mover per hour, artifically being inefficient to protect a few at the cost of millions. Or the shipyard workers making the shipbuilding industry in the US almost non-existant from a commercial perspective.
I don't mind the "protect jobs" position, but let the efficiencies from changed processes and systems happen and work out another way of protecting the few hundred people we are talking about and let the efficiencies be felt by the rest of the nnation.