In a last ditch effort to avert a strike that would cripple U.S. commerce, the International Longshoremen’s Association and management will meet one more time before the expiration of their contract extension at midnight Saturday.
Both sides agreed to come back to the table at the request of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the federal agency charged with mediating private sector labor disputes.
No date or place for the meeting was announced although the last round of talks was held at the Marriott Hotel at the airport in Newark, N.J.
Those talks broke off last week.
Although a number of issues remain unresolved, the major sticking point involves container royalties, annual payments to dockworkers based on the weight of container traffic coming through their port.
The ILA represents nearly 15,000 workers at ports from Boston to Houston. If an agreement is not reached, they will walk off the job this weekend, shutting down the movement of container cargo at all major ports on the Eastern and Gulf coasts, including Savannah.
A shutdown would wreak havoc on manufacturers, retailers, farmers and others who depend on the ports to move their supplies and products. They include large American retailers such as Walmart, Target and Home Depot that rank among the country’s top importers as well top exporters such as Weyerhaeuser, DuPont and Cargill.
Not only would any disruption have serious consequences for the nation’s still-recovering economy, it would also jeopardize the financial well-being of the ILA’s 14,500 members, who would lose nearly $5 million in wages and benefits for each day they’re out of work — a total of $150 million in lost compensation in just a month.
According to the U.S. Maritime Alliance, at the Savannah and Brunswick ports alone, a shutdown of union operations would result in an estimated $2.3 million a week in lost wages and benefits for ILA members.
Any shutdown also would hurt the nation’s more than half a million other workers who depend directly on port operations for their livelihood, the Alliance said.
In New York and New Jersey, for example, a shutdown would result in $100 million in lost revenue a month for railroads, truckers and other port-related transportation industries that handle the more than 250,000 containers that move through that port each month.
A one-month shutdown of the BMW assembly plant in South Carolina and the Mercedes Benz plant in Alabama could result in the temporary furlough of 6,900 workers at the two plants and potentially affect more than 34,000 workers across the country. It would also result in the loss of $52 million in federal, state and local tax revenues over a month.
While the overall impact of any East and Gulf Coast shutdown is yet to be determined, the 10-day lockout at West Coast ports in 2002 cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1 billion a day and resulted in a loss of cargo volume from which the West Coast ports have still not recovered a decade later.
More recently, an eight-day strike at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in November reportedly caused a 2 percent drop in the volume of containers compared with the same month in 2011.
Similarly, a work stoppage at ports on the East and Gulf Coast would cause shippers to divert cargo to Canada, Mexico and the West Coast.