On July 20, 2012, Ronald D. White writes in the Los Angeles Times that Los Angeles and Long Beach, California ports are building new piers, wharves and rail yards to compete cargo business.
The most expensive and extensive upgrades in the history of both ports will cost nearly $6 billion. The improvements are getting underway as international trade rebuilds ever so slowly from the devastating global recession, but experts say the building binge is necessary to keep the roughly 40% share of Asian imports that the two ports handle.
“Complacency would be our biggest enemy,” said freight specialist Gill V. Hicks, director of Southern California operations for Cambridge Systematics Inc., a transportation consulting firm. “And infrastructure is an important aspect of maintaining that advantage. If that is not handled correctly, shippers will find other places for their cargo.”
About 640,000 people work in trade-related jobs in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Imperial counties, economist John Husing said. That’s up from a low of fewer than 600,000 during the recession, but still far short of the 709,000 trade jobs in pre-recession 2007.
“The competitive environment is about to get a lot tougher,” said Husing, of consulting firm Economics & Politics Inc. “When you move to increase capacity and efficiency you are in a position to say to your customers, ‘You really still want to be using us.’ Throughput is the name of the game, getting the cargo in and out, in a hurry.”
At the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, new cargo terminals will cut air pollution by half compared with the current facilities. More containers will be loaded directly onto trains; handling equipment will run on electricity instead of diesel. Ships will hook to the electric grids so that they can turn off their diesel engines while in port.
The only thing that isn’t clear is the amount of automation the new terminals will have, which probably will be a subject of intense longshore union contract talks.
This is yet another article on infrastructure improvements that fails to address the question of Who Owns It? Modern ports are necessarily productive capital intensive, and less dependent on labor worker input. As stated in the article the amount of automation that the new terminals will have “will be a subject of intense longshore union contract talks.”
The longshore union should transform to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for their individual worker-members as owners in the new income-producing capital formation assets. They should play the part that they have always aspired to––that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress.
Unfortunately, at the present time the longshore union and the labor movement in general is built on one-factor economics––the labor worker. The insufficiency of labor worker earnings to purchase increasingly capital-produced products and services gave rise to labor laws and labor unions designed to coerce higher and higher prices for the same or reduced labor input. With government assistance, unions have gradually converted productive enterprises in the private and public sectors into welfare institutions. The myth of the “rising productivity” of labor is used to conceal the increasing productiveness of capital and the decreasing productiveness of labor, and to disguise income redistribution by making it seem morally acceptable.
The City of Los Angeles and Long Beach should be implementing policies and programs that broaden private, individual ownership of infrastructure projects supported with taxpayer monies. No where in the article is it stated who owns what, except for a reference to another project, due to begin at the Los Angeles port this year, that will modernize the container terminal operated by longtime tenant Eagle Marine Services, a subsidiary of ocean carrier APL Ltd. Such operations generate rents, which would provide for an income stream to pay back the initial investment and once paid continue to generate income for the owners of the facilities.
It is unfortunate that the media and our elected representatives as well as union leaders are not addressing the critical issues of who owns and who should own and instead are focused on job creation and protection.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ports-projects-20120720,0,3659702.story
