Bret;

Oh yes - a "minor point". Starting salary is $80,000 and the foreman (union) is around $166,000). These are of course starting salaries.

By the way we had a dock strike that lasted 134 days (1972-73) Richard Nixon was President. No Taft Hartley Act that time.

The reason for the strike then was San Francisco (ILWU) did not want to have containerized cargo. You see, one of the benefits of being in the ILWU at that time was you took what you wanted from any shipment.

Friends of mine that owned restaurants in San Francisco for decades knew how to order wine from Europe. If you needed six bottles of wine you ordered 12. When the cargo ship got to New Orleans, two bottles were removed, two more at Los Angeles and finally two more were removed at San Francisco by the ILWU members. So you got your six bottles of wine. San Francisco lost and Oakland became the shipping port for the Bay Area. So containerized cargo became the name of the game. If you order 12 bottles of wine you get 12. Who would have thought such a thing is possible?

Tom



>Thomas could you enlighten us all on what the average starting salary is for a ILWU worker on the dock? I think the figures would be an eye opener.
>
>
>>What is going on with the west coast port/dock problem?
>>
>>The Problem:
>>At present ILWU (International Longshore Warehouse Union) uses a “clerk’, to mark each container with a piece of chalk. Management wants to use a bar code and agreed that no clerks would be laid off. The position of clerk would not be filled once a clerk retired. Other work would be found for clerks. That was agreed to months ago.
>>
>>So that should end all the problems right? Not so fast! The ILWU wants to have an ILWU member do all scheduling of containers for off and on loading. At present non-union and members of other unions accomplish this task. Get rid of non-union and other union members to make way for the ILWU. The 10,000 members of the ILWU have spoken! Do not forget some countries have completely automated this type of work and there is no need for “dock workers”.
>>
>>Imagine 10,000 workers having such impact upon our economy? When we lost 10,000 programmers on my block it hurt investors and the people that lost his/her jobs. So we lost 160,000 programmers in my area. Why not “loose” 10,000 dock workers and automate now?
>>
>>At the Oakland dock it looks like chaos city. There are over 200 ships offshore waiting to be off loaded – the same number at the peak of the “present problem”, when management locked out the workers for ”slowing down their work”. I guess management thinks that doing nothing is better than doing something.
>>
>>The union blames management and management blames the union for the problems. I think they are both right. Union Pacific Raliroad has stated they will soon be unable to deliver any shipments to the west coast because the yards are almost full. There are many railroad shipments waiting to be off loaded to ships and just sitting there.
>>
>>Many companies have been affected by the “dock problem” and the end is nowhere in sight. We get daily updates to let us know how things are doing. If we do not get our parts from Japan, we have to shut down the production line and then you have 5500 people at our factory without work.
>>
>>Congress has the solution. They want to extend the Taft Hartly Act through the end of January, as “congress will recess during Christmas”. Merry Christmas.