Portland sledgehammer blues: no one looks good

02/10/2023

If you ever wanted proof of the law of diminishing returns, the bankruptcy and placing into Chapter 11 of the ILWU is a standout example.

What began as a dispute over two (yep, you read that right, just two) jobs at Portland’s Terminal 6 container facility led to: firstly, the terminal being shut; then losing its entire customer base; then losing its operator; and then, in a delicious act of some hubristic hens coming home to roost, the very people who began the brouhaha have gone bust.

It was all entirely predictable – really, we were literally predicting something like this would happen over a decade ago. The idea that you would shut down an entire container terminal over two jobs seemed bonkers right from the off, as the collateral damage to the wider port community – including hundreds of its own members, who subsequently saw their jobs at Terminal 6 simply vanish – seemed more like an act of ruinous self-harm than a serious attempt to resolve an employment issue.

A word about those two jobs, which involved plugging-in and unplugging reefer containers stored in Terminal 6’s yard. For the best part of 30 years, they had been undertaken by members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The ILWU had long argued that those jobs should be performed by ILWU members – not an unreasonable point to the extent that the union was supported by the employer body, the Pacific Maritime Association, of which ICTSI was a member.

But the way ILWU officials decided to force the situation was like taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, missing the nut altogether and smashing the table instead.

It really ought to serve as a case study in how labour, management and statutory authorities need to work better together to resolve these sorts of issues. No one has emerged from this with any distinction – even if ICTSI receives damages from the ILWU, it’s still been a loss-making endeavour for the terminal operator; the port of Portland has seen its container traffic vanish and its importance to the local community decline; and the ILWU now has a reputation for destroying its members’ job prospects.