East Coast dock workers OK 6-year labor contract

Unionized freight handlers have reached a six-year agreement with management at Atlantic and Gulf coast ports. The Longshoremen’s membership includes 60,000 waterfront workers from Maine to Texas, in the Great Lakes region, on major domestic rivers and in Puerto Rico and eastern Canada. The employees load and unload cargo, handle freight in warehouses, drive trucks, keep track of cargo and do other jobs.   Both sides must now hammer out local agreements in every port to supplement the master contract.   Representatives declined to discuss local issues in detail.  “Some of them are serious and will take some work,” said Edward L. Brown Sr., the Norfolk-based international vice president and Atlantic Coast District vice president for the Longshoremen. “We still have a lot of work to do.”   

The port master contract and local agreements must be ratified by the Longshoremen’s membership. A vote is expected around June 1.   That’s four months before the most recent deal is set to expire. And the timing should all but eliminate a repeat of 2002’s costly West Coast lockout, when terminal operators and shipping companies barred dockworkers from the ports for 10 days after contract negotiations stalled.