Striking Port Pilots, Officials Resume Talks

Los Angeles city officials and the tiny union of striking port pilots returned to the bargaining table Wednesday afternoon after a 10-day hiatus, but the prospects for immediate settlement remained slight, as city executives maintained that the union local’s demands are impossible to meet.

Documents obtained by The Times show that before the break in talks last week, the union suggested a one-year contract with the city at a salary of $133,232--far below the $195,000 strikers cite as the industry average and the figure they originally requested--if the city would accept a complex plan to privatize the pilots’ jobs.

Among the protections demanded by the union:

* The new employer must hire the current employees at a salary of $154,000, plus benefits equivalent to the city government’s.

* The contractor must allow the pilots to continue operating as a union.

* The new operator should have exclusive rights to pilotage in the port.

* The union must have the right to binding arbitration of grievances during the privatization process.

City lawyers have spent more than a week analyzing this proposal against the city’s charter--as well as state and federal laws--to determine whether Los Angeles has the authority to make such promises on behalf of an unknown future employer. Officials say they still have not completed that process, and that Wednesday’s bargaining session was expected to focus on other issues.

“There’s a policy question about whether the city would want to make those commitments,” said Paul Cauley, deputy city administrative officer. “There’s also a legal question as to whether we can make those commitments.”

In addition, a study last year by the management consultants Arroyo Associates Inc. suggests that privatization could streamline the operation in large part by slashing staff. While pilot “moves”--as their supervised shifting of ships are called--declined 27% between 1992 and 1996, the study shows, staffing remained steady.

“A private vendor would totally revamp the shift schedule and focus on greater utilization and productivity of the port’s assigned staff,” the consultants wrote. “Clearly there are significant cost savings opportunities given the declining workload.”

Although they support the concept of privatization, interim Harbor Executive Director Larry Keller and Leland Wong, president of the Harbor Commission, said the pilots’ proposal makes little business sense and may violate the city’s competitive bid process. If the city cannot afford to boost pilots’ salaries, they asked, how can it compel a private company to do the same?

Officials also are concerned about the impact of privatization on other city employees at the harbor, such as dispatchers and deckhands, who work directly with the pilots but belong to different unions.

“What they’re asking for is that we guarantee them a contract. The City Charter prohibits any agency within the city family from doing that,” Wong said, though he could not cite the specific charter provision concerning this question. “If we do privatize, it will be hard for the port to guarantee that [salary]. It would be in the hands of a private vendor.”

What the pilots want, Keller said, is “a kind of privatization, but with all the benefits and all the safety nets of civil service employment.”

“Some of the things we’re being asked to write into [the contract] we may or may not have the ability to write in or enforce,” he said. “Rather than lead anybody down a garden path or have any misunderstanding in the future, we thought it’d be better to have the lawyers work through these questions now.”

City Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., who represents the harbor area, echoed others’ concerns that if the union’s demands were written into the city’s request for proposals from a private piloting company, it could amount to sole sourcing, in which only one company can meet the specifications for bidding. That is prohibited under city laws.

But Svorinich was unable to cite which of the provisions requested by the union would give one company an edge over others, or identify a company waiting to benefit from the union’s demands.

Los Angeles is the only major port in the country where pilots are on the government payroll. In many other harbors, such as San Francisco, the pilots act as entrepreneurial independent contractors, running the operation themselves and taking salaries dependent on the year’s profits.

But Los Angeles’ pilots say they have no desire to act as businessmen. Rather, they think the city should raise its pilotage fees to enable a private operator to pump up their salaries. Transferring to a private company, they say, would be more efficient and make the six-figure salaries more palatable since they would be outside the purview of City Hall politicians.

In neighboring Long Beach Harbor, a family-owned business has run the pilotage operation for 75 years. Jacobsen Pilot Service Inc. has 14 active pilots who each own 3% to 5% of the company. It is a nonunion shop.

“It’s worked great here because it builds a team effort,” said Tom Jacobsen, the company president. “The pilots are part of it. Everybody’s thinking businesslike. Everybody participates.”

But Jim Larkins, president of the Los Angeles pilots’ union, said he and his colleagues don’t want to be in business; they just want pay comparable to their counterparts in other ports.

Larkins and his attorney, Elizabeth Garfield, have suggested that the port like its fees to shipping companies to offset the higher salaries. The union offered a 1995 study tht showed the same ship paid $1,629 to dock in Los Angeles, compared to $8,893 in the Columbia River, $4,824 in New York, $4,226 in San Francisco and $ 3,768 in Puge Sound.

“I think it would be a very lucrative thing both fo the city of Los Angeles and the contractor,” Garfield said. “I think it would be a win-win situation.”

In addition to raising its fees, Garfield said the city should change the way it calculates the charges. Right now, Los Angeles charges only by a ship’s length, while other ports take the width and depth into consideration as well.

“L.A. needs to change its fees,” she said. “It’s not only that the fees are low in Los Angeles, but the way they’re calculated is antiquated.”

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Guarantees Sought by Port Pilots

The union representing a dozen striking pilots in the Port of Los Angeles is seeking a one-year contract at a salary of $133,232 while the city moves to privatize the pilotage operation. But the union wants the city to include a series of protections as it requests proposals from contractors, some of which officials say are impossible. Among the guarantees sought by the union from its future employer:

* The company would hire the current pilots and allow them to remain unionized.

* They would earn $154,000 per year, plus a benefits package comparable to that provided by city government.

* The company would be one with a history of working well with unions.

* Union members would receive a long-term, exclusive contract to handle all piloting in the port.

Source: Local 68 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union