For some longshoremen, pay is steady, job isn't
Once a bustling hub for log exports, Port Angeles has seen only a trickle of shipping traffic in recent years. Dockworkers are summoned to Port Angeles Harbor perhaps once a month to load barges with felled hemlocks and Douglas firs.
But the peninsula remains home to 46 registered longshore workers, all of whom are guaranteed a salary of at least $55,000 a year. The workers of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 27 earn their money by traveling to jobs at other Northwest ports — or by simply being on call.
"I'm like a bullpen catcher on a Major League Baseball team," said Jay Kalla, longshoreman and assistant dispatcher for Local 27. "I'm under contract, and I'm ready to go to work ... put me in, coach, I'm ready to go."
Under a 30-year-old agreement between the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), dockworkers are guaranteed a full week's salary even if there isn't work at their home port. The idea was to have a steady, skilled work force at all West Coast ports at a time when cargo traffic was more evenly distributed among them.
As demand declined for Northwest logs and forest products, and cargo shipping became concentrated in urban ports such as Los Angeles, Tacoma and Seattle, longshore work dwindled at smaller ports like Port Angeles. Last year, Port Angeles handled 165,000 tons of goods, nearly a 60 percent drop from 401,000 tons in 1996.
Despite fewer jobs on the Port Angeles docks, Local 27's longshoremen are still paid full-time wages under the guaranteed-pay agreement. Last year, according to PMA statistics, the local's dockworkers received more than $1.5 million for being on call, leading the West Coast in on-call pay.
The guaranteed-pay plan also covers dockworkers based in Port Gamble, Kitsap County, and Newport, Ore., where there is no work for longshoremen anymore. Each town has an ILWU local with 10 registered workers who earn full-time salaries by remaining on call to work at other Northwest ports.
"It's a basic minimum salary so we can be on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day at their beck and call," said Duane Johnson, secretary and dispatcher for ILWU Local 51 of Port Gamble, where cargo shipments stopped in 1996, soon after the Pope & Talbot sawmill closed.
For guaranteed pay, longshore workers must be on call at all times and generally cannot refuse assignments. When called to work, they are most commonly dispatched to Seattle or Tacoma, with earnings counting against their guaranteed minimum salary.
If a longshoreman works 30 hours a week at other ports, the hours are counted as part of the guaranteed pay. If he averages more than 38 hours a week over a four-week period, he gets more.
"It's a lot of time on the road," said Johnson, who said he drives about 35,000 miles a year. "Some weeks are slack and you only get a day or two, other weeks are busy and you get five or six shifts."
While some small-port longshoremen generally work only when called to a job, others try to boost their income by seeking work at busier ports, hoping to land enough shifts to exceed the 38 hours a week they are paid for.
It is an unpredictable schedule that can be grueling. Tom Bond, a Local 27 longshoreman since 1966, said a typical day on the job lately might entail getting up at 3 a.m. in Port Angeles, driving three hours to Seattle, putting in a full shift at the docks and returning home around 8 p.m.
Bond, who is married with two grown children, said it's common for him to spend three nights a week away from home, staying in Puget Sound area motels for better access to jobs here.
"Everybody knows me up and down the I-5 corridor," Bond said.
Clem Head, a 36-year Local 27 veteran who just retired, said that in recent years he would travel some 1,000 miles a week for longshore jobs, living out of his van. Once, after working on the docks in Bellingham, he was sent to a job the next day in Coos Bay, Ore., more than nine hours away.
However, during a slow week — and lately there have been more slow weeks than ever — longshoremen based at small ports can receive a full week's wages just for calling every day to check in.
All dockworkers from Local 27 are holdovers from better days at the Port of Port Angeles. The youngest member is 43. A framed aerial photograph in the union's hiring hall shows four cargo ships tied to the docks in the mid-1980s, all being loaded with logs.
"We used to get Seattle and Tacoma guys coming here because we had plenty of work and we couldn't do it all," said George Schoenfeldt, the Local's secretary-treasurer and dispatcher. "Now, we're going over there."
Port Angeles has been hit by lagging demand for the peninsula's raw-log exports, particularly from Asian markets. And with most cargo now being moved in containers, ships have bypassed Port Angeles, which is equipped to load and unload loose bulk cargo carried in the hull of a ship.
It's not all glum news on the peninsula waterfront: Yesterday, Westport Shipyard announced that it had selected Port Angeles for a new yacht-building operation that will bring 200 jobs. Port officials have tossed around the idea of adding a barge facility that could move commodities other than logs, and longshoremen hold out hope that with the ebb and flow of international trade, Port Angeles can find a niche as an export hub once again.
"We're never going to be a containerized port," Bond said. "Today, it doesn't look good. But 10 years from now, we might be exporting forest products again."
In the meantime, Port Angeles' longshoremen are sustained by guaranteed pay, as long as they make themselves available for work by calling in. Tom Jacobsen, Local 27's president, likens guaranteed pay to the salary a professional athlete continues to receive after sustaining an injury.
Consider Ken Griffey Jr., the former Mariners center fielder who has had an injury-prone run with his current team, the Cincinnati Reds. Like Griffey, Jacobsen said, small-port longshoremen aren't able to work as much these days because of circumstances beyond their control.
"They don't cut his pay because he didn't play," Jacobsen said. "Right now, he's having a little trouble. It's the same with us."
Jake Batsell: 206-464-2718 or jbatsell@seattletimes.com.