Idle cranes at the ports of Los Angeles (foreground) and Long Beach on Monday. Photo by Sarah Bennett.
The announcement by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa late Tuesday night was succint and clear: “We’ve got a deal and people are going back to work.”
After several days of intense late-night negotiations that eventually required a federal mediator to be brought in, leaders of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit have agreed to a tentative agreement with the Harbor Employers Union that not only ends the eight-day strike that crippled much of the country’s largest port complex, but also wins new protections that will protect jobs from being outsourced.
“This victory was accomplished because of support from the entire ILWU family of 10,000 members in the harbor community,” said International Longshore and Warehouse Union International President Robert McEllrath.
The longshoremen who had been honoring the strike, will return to work Wednesday morning and begin tending to the 14 container ships that Marine Exchange Executive Director Dick McKenna told the Post Tuesday afternoon were anchored offshore. Since clerical workers walked off the job at the Port of Los Angeles last Tuesday, 20 ships have been diverted from the bottlenecked complex.
“Tonight is the end of a very long journey,” said Stephen Berry, chief negotiator for the Harbor Employers Association. “Both sides had principles that were very important to them.”
The two sides were deadlocked over the issue of whether the employers can outsource work functions of the clerical workers after positions become open or whether the shipping companies have to hire more clerical workers to replace union members who retire or leave for other jobs.
“[The strike] was a community effort that will benefit working families for many years to come,” said John Fageaux, president of ILWU Local 63’s OCU.
The agreement that union leaders agreed upon Tuesday night is expected to be ratified by the 800-member unit on Wednesday. ILWU officials are confident that members will vote in favor of what will be the unit’s first contract since June 30, 2010.