With a tentative agreement finally in hand, employers and the leadership of some 22,000 longshore workers began organizing ratification procedures on Thursday, June 15, that will finalize a 6-year pact for wages, benefits and other work issues at shipping ports along the West Coast.
Both sides must ratify the agreement, a process that can take as long as two or three months.
Details have not been formally released, but the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the negotiations,” reported on Thursday that West Coast dockworkers won a 32% pay increase through 2028 and will get a one-time “hero bonus” for working through the pandemic under the tentative contract agreement.
COVID-19 took the lives of several longshore workers and posed additional stress on the workforce which kept cargo moving and handled a months-long surge of imports that often kept workers on the job for six days a week.
The Wall Street Journal article also reported that dockworkers will receive a raise of $4.62 an hour in the first year of the contract — the equivalent of a 10% wage increase — plus an additional $2 an hour in each subsequent year. The wage increases are retroactive to July 1, 2022, when the last contract expired.
The union had been pushing to double current pay, according to the WSJ article.
The basic hourly pay, according to the Pacific Maritime Association’s 2022 annual report, was $46.23. With bonuses and overtime, the PMA said, the average full-time dockworker last year earned more than $200,000.
The process going forward is more complicated on the union side, as delegates will meet in a caucus initially for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union before the proposal is forwarded to the rank and file.
A contract caucus, Adams said in the statement, “convenes delegates from our 29 locals up and down the West Coast. These delegates will carefully review the tentative agreement and make a recommendation to the rank and file who will…
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