With Portland Port strike averted, labor focus shifts to grain

With Portland Port strike averted, labor focus shifts to grain

Portland Business Journal by Erik Siemers , Business Journal staff writer
Date: Monday, November 26, 2012, 2:15pm PSThttp://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2012/11/26/with-port-strike-ave...

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Port of Portland

The Columbia Grain terminal at the Port of Portland is one of six grain shipping operations party to ongoing labor negotiations with longshore workers. 

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Erik Siemers

Business Journal staff writer-Portland Business Journal

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The Port of Portland may have averted a strike at its marine terminals this weekend, but the labor unrest involving union longshore labor is far from over.

Up next is the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's ongoing labor talks with six Pacific Northwest grain terminals, which faces a looming deadline late on Wednesday.

The Pacific Northwest Grain Handlers began bargaining in August with ILWU locals 8 in Portland; 4 in Vancouver, Wash.; 23 in Tacoma, Wash; and 19 in Seattle. Their existing labor pact expired at the end of September, and the parties mutually agreed to continue operations until a new deal is reached.

Last Monday, the grain shippers presented what it’s calling it’s “last, best and final offer to the union,” said spokesman Pat McCormick. That offer expires at midnight Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the ILWU couldn’t be reached Monday, but the union issued a rebuke last week lamenting how "profitable multinational grain merchants" continue to require what it calls "deep concessions" from workers.

“The ILWU has bargained in good faith and offered several proposals designed to meet the employers’ needs,” Leal Sundetof the ILWU Coast Longshore Division said in the union's statement. “We want to keep the grain moving as we have done nonstop since the 1930’s. It’s unfortunate that the multinational corporations that are profiting at our ports have failed to accept the workers’ reasonable proposals to reach a fair agreement.”

The ILWU's membership hasn't proposed a strike vote, though it remains possible that the impasse could result in a lockout of workers by terminal management.

McCormick on Monday said the grain shippers "have not speculated about what happens in the absence of an agreement."

Of the six grain terminals that are party to the negotiations, four are along the Columbia River near Portland: Columbia Grain, TEMCO and Louis Dreyfus terminals in Portland, and the United Grain Corp. terminal in Vancouver, Wash. The other two are in Seattle and Tacoma.

There are three other grain terminals along the Columbia — two in Kalama, Wash., and another in Longview, Wash. — that operate under separate labor agreements.

Though grain — especially wheat — is Oregon's second-largest export commodity, a shutdown of a majority of the region's grain terminals would have an effect far beyond the Pacific Northwest.

According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Pacific Northwest terminals so far this year have handled 30 percent of all U.S. grain exports — a figure that includes wheat, corn, and soybeans — and just under half of all the nation's wheat exports.