Mark Keserich plans to market the port’s labour reliability to Asian shipping lines in a play to build back jobs lost during the recession
Mission: To lead the Vancouver longshore local, keeping members happy and building up port jobs lost in the recession
Assets: Four decades on the waterfront, 18 years in the union executive and high popularity
Yield: Elected president with an overwhelming majority and currently leading Local 500 in the modernization of a historic dipatch system
Jenny Wagler
When a 16-year-old Mark Keserich started working on the Vancouver waterfront in 1972, nobody checked to see if he was actually 18; they just put him to work.
Keserich, now president of the Vancouver local of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a force behind a new eight-year collective agreement geared at growing business at Port Metro Vancouver (PMV), still vividly remembers his early days on the job.
“Whatever the worst job was, I was doing that,” he said with a grin, describing how he’d unload ships’ heavy cargos of flour, coffee and frozen fish.
“Japanese trawlers would come in once in awhile and you knew you were going to get stuck on that one: 40 below, down below packing all that stuff out.”
But even “at the bottom of the pile,” Keserich was quickly hooked on the job’s flexible schedule and “amazing” $5.25 an hour wage.
Unlike some of the guys he was working with, Keserich finished high school. Still working longshore, he completed a bachelor of arts in psychology at the University of British Columbia. But – to his longshoreman father’s chagrin – the degree didn’t change his desire to keep working on the waterfront.
“It’s a pretty fantastic job,” Keserich said. “If you talk to longshoremen, they’re going to tell you: this is the best job in the world.”
Maintaining that job quality is a key part of Keserich’s role as president of ILWU Local 500 – as is maintaining jobs, pure and simple, since the recession wiped out 1,000,000 hours of waterfront work.
“A lot of people left the industry,” he said. “We’re hoping to recover some of that.”
A desire to create more waterfront work, Keserich said, was a key reason the union membership accepted an eight-year collective agreement in May after 16 months of bargaining. He said the unusually long term of the agreement should help fix the port’s international reputation as a place of labour uncertainty and better position to compete for West Coast-bound cargo.
“We don’t like to say it openly, but we know that Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Long Beach – all those terminals go after all that cargo,” he said. “That cargo just can sail away.”
With Keserich at the helm, Local 500 is also the only one of five ILWU longshore locals looking to modernize its decades-old dispatch system. Currently, workers have the flexibility to decide any given morning whether they wish to work or not, leaving employers little time to scramble up any missing labour and skillsets before day shift starts at 8 a.m. And those labour gaps, Keserich said, can lead to ship delays.
“That’s the worst thing,” he said. “It’s very costly for a ship to sit there because they could miss their next calling.”
Under the new system, being phased in as of July 1, workers will declare the night before whether they’ll be available to work the following day, allowing the union time to drum up any missing skillsets by morning.
Keserich said that while there’s some concern in the union membership about forfeiting some job flexibility, there are also clear gains in job certainty for workers who don’t want to waste time, gas and, soon, tolls to drive in, only to risk not getting matched with a job.
“If it’s a pre-dispatch, we capture those people the night before and we can say to them, ‘You’ve got a job for tomorrow.’”
Keserich brings to his leadership role nearly three decades on the waterfront and nearly two decades of executive roles at the union, including a year as vice-president of the local and four years as chair of the local’s labour relations committee.
Keserich is also a skilled crane and gantry operator and instructor with more than 4,000 days in a crane or gantry. As an instructor, he’s travelled to China and Japan to see new cranes on freshly commissioned ships and write up procedures for Vancouver crane operators to use at the ships’ arrival.
While Keserich is on hiatus from his crane work in his current position, he recounted how just last month he filled in for an emergency shift alongside Local 500 vice-president and fellow crane operator Mike Rondpre.
“A piece of equipment collapsed at Neptune [Bulk]Terminals and it was getting close to midnight and they had nobody available; all the crane operators were gone,” Keserich said. “ So we went to the terminal and we pulled out all these parts that had fallen into the hatch and we had to use four cranes to jockey it off the ship.”
Rondpre, Keserich’s longtime waterfront colleague, described Keserich as a popular force on the waterfront.
“He’s well-loved by everybody,” Rondpre said, noting that Keserich won approximately 95% of the votes cast in the election for president. “I don’t know of anybody that could unseat him [as president] if he didn’t want to be.”
But Keserich estimates his power cautiously.
“As president I have some latitude to move things this way and that way but ultimately I have to answer to the membership,” he said. “The membership is really the highest ruling body.”
Key issues ahead for the year, Keserich said, include managing tensions created by a change in Canadian legislation that has halted the union’s ability to mandate retirement at 65. As a result, he said, retirement-aged longshoremen are clinging to their jobs, delaying waterfront workers with “casual” status in their goal of making union membership.
“People stepped aside for them [older workers] to get those jobs and now they’re saying, ‘Oh no no, it’s different for me,’” he said.
Developing a provincewide recruitment policy, he said, is another priority this year.
“Whenever we have a recruitment, we have thousands of applicants that put in,” he said. “You need a fair way to get through them all and process them all and give everybody a fair shot.”
Also this year, Keserich said he’s been invited to go to Asia to talk up the port’s labour reliability. “We want to get out and tell those in the Asian rim countries that we’re open for business and come to Vancouver.”
He added that from what he’s seen, shipping line owners are particularly keen to hear the labour reliability message coming straight from a labour voice.
“They don’t get to hear labour very often,” he said. “And maybe they need to hear it from us to believe it.”