As the clock ticks down to February 6, the date when longshoremen and foremen at Port Metro Vancouver and the Port of Prince Rupert can legally strike, containers of goods are being diverted to rival American ports.
“Just before Christmas, we had companies starting to come to us saying, ‘You need to understand, we’re putting [diversion] plans in place,’” Port Metro Vancouver’s president and CEO Robin Silvester said. “And those plans are now being implemented because we’re in a cooling-off period and companies are not going to take the risk.”
The 21-day “cooling-off period” started January 17. It follows the exit of conciliation officer Bill Lewis from port labour talks – the most recent stage in more than 12 months of bargaining between the BC Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA) and five locals of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Canada plus ILWU local 514, which represents ship and dock foremen at B.C. ports.
For retailers such as Canadian Tire, Silvester said, there’s a significant financial risk should advertised goods end up behind a strike line, rather than on store shelves.
“They won’t take that risk – who in business would? – and they move [containers] through Seattle and Tacoma and Los Angeles instead,” Silvester said. “It costs them more to do that, but less than the costs that they incur if they fail to have their goods on the stores’ shelves.”
He added that the port’s supply chain contributes 130,000 jobs and $10 billion in GDP annually to Canada’s economy. Those figures do not include the economic value of imports and exports.
“Everyone in the Lower Mainland knows someone whose job is the result of the port,” he said.
Silvester pointed out that retailers need only the threat of a strike to convince them to reroute their cargos. In early 2009, he said, labour uncertainty resulted in the port dropping approximately four percentage points of its marketshare on North America’s west coast for a couple of months.
But Silvester added that even worse than the immediate cargo diversion is how the latest labour threat further batters the port’s reputation abroad.
“The fact that we’re in a cooling-off period is another hammer blow to our reputation,” he said. “Because the perception is out there: Vancouver has labour problems. And here we are unfortunately going down that path again.”
As the cooling-off period counts down, the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) is considering whether the BCMEA and the union have been making every reasonable effort to reach new collective agreements.
If the CIRB determines that those efforts haven’t been made, federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt has directed the CIRB to “either impose a new collective agreement on the parties or impose a binding method of resolving outstanding terms of collective agreements.”
Raitt’s office noted that she will not comment on the situation or her intentions while the matter is before the CIRB.
BCMEA president and CEO Andy Smith said his organization is petitioning the federal government for a new bargaining structure that would include terms of reference about such concerns as the rights of employers and the union and the need to serve a broader economy and establish a competitive global business in the Asia-Pacific Gateway (see “Wharf operators seek bargaining changes to secure labour stability” – issue 1082; July 20-26, 2010).
He said that structure would codify what the federal government has already made clear through previous intervention into port labour relations: that it won’t tolerate protracted work stoppages at the port.
He said the current structure isn’t working because neither party has a true ability to expedite bargaining or break through intransience with a strike or lockout. And while Smith added that the BCMEA supports Ottawa’s position that a lengthy work stoppage at the port is too harmful to the Canadian economy to tolerate, the organization wants an alternative dispute resolution mechanism.
“You can’t just snip off the pointy end of the bargaining relationship and expect the rest of it to remain unchanged,” he said.
With the changes that the BCMEA is requesting, Smith said the port’s employers could offer the necessary labour guarantees to attract additional clientele and capitalize more fully on the potential of the entire Pacific gateway.
“What we say is, get this labour uncertainty monkey off our back and we will deliver into the hands of British Columbians literally thousands of jobs.”
Union representatives did not return requests for comment by press deadline; however, Smith confirmed that no stike votes have been taken.
He added that the BCMEA has no plans to hold a lockout vote.
“We’re not very interested in locking anybody out.” •