Finally something is happening. After a long stretch of negotiations between two West Coast shipping groups turned south late in 2014, worrying retailers and shippers across the country, some progress has at long last been announced.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) announced that it has reached a tentative agreement with its employers group following discussions that began before the last contract between the two groups expired last spring, The News Tribune explained. If the latest consensus between the union and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) is a sign of anything, then a new contract should be in place fairly soon. Terminal operators and shipping lines have been operating without a contract in place since July 1.
"The hope is that talks will now progress more quickly and that a coast-wide contract can be reached," Steve Getzug, spokesman for the managers' group, told the publication.
The issue resolved is reportedly related to how chassis are handled at the terminals. For some time, shipping lines owned their own fleets of the trailers, but recently, that changed. The lines began selling the chassis to leasing companies that prefer lower-paid workers to handle maintenance of the trailers, which union members claim is partially to blame for the historic congestion seen at West Coast ports in recent months.
"A tentative agreement was reached on the chassis topic, and we are hopeful that this will allow us to move toward conclusion of a full agreement in the near term," Wade Gates, another spokesman for the PMA wrote.
Previous progress in the ILWU-PMA discussions
The agreement follows the decision by both groups to bring a federal mediator into negotiations to assist with bringing them to a close, according to California Apparel News. Scot Beckenbaugh, deputy director of the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, entered the discussions following a Jan. 5 announcement from the agency explaining that it had been called into the two groups' talks.
In September, the PMA and ILWU announced that they had reached a tentative agreement on health care, the last time significant progress was made in the discussions, according to The News Tribune. Union members now have a health plan that could reportedly fit under the "Cadillac plan" umbrella, which would initiate extra tax payments. Despite the agreement, congestion quickly began building at West Coast terminals during the fall of 2014. The delays eventually began putting retailers' shipments at risk, an unfortunate turn that kick-started industry-wide calls to bring in federal mediation.