Fears of another port strike subsided last week following the final ratification and approval of a contract between members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63’s Office Clerical Unit and employers at the nation’s largest port complex.
Last November 27, the clerical workers at both the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles began a strike which was honored by all 10,000 ILWU members, crippling port operations and leaving 10 out of 14 container terminals completely shut down for eight days while some 20 ships left to dock at other ports.
The strike ended when the original agreement was announced by the OCU and the Harbor Employers Association on December 4 after the two groups endured days of late-night negotiations with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and, in the end, a federal mediator. At the time, ILWU officials said that they were confident that members would vote in favor of what would have been the unit’s first contract since June 30, 2010. Earlier this month, however, the union failed to ratify the tentative agreement presented at the time and refused to speak to the press about why
“OCU bargaining units voted and agreed to ratify the terms of tentative agreements reached with the Harbor Employers Association member companies December 4,” union negotiator John Fageaux and his management counterpart, Stephen Berry, said in a joint statement last week.
The contract, slated to run through June 30 of 2016, involves layoff protection, a $1/hour raise, and providing the union the ability to audit employers’ computer systems to ensure clerical tasks are not off-shored.
According to Fageaux, many of the workers disputed previous contracts since they felt the scope of their jobs were being altered; this has supposedly been solved in the confirmed pact.
“Our scope of work and how it relates to the outsourcing of jobs, or the limiting of the outsourcing of jobs, was of paramount importance to the union,” Fageaux said, adding that they got “everything we needed to get.”
Read more: