Strike !

No not truckers but port truckers will be affected: The Eastern District ILA is set to strike at 12:01 am Sunday morning if a deal cannot be reached. This includes all ports from Houston to NYC and NJ.

According to my union brothers from another mother they are not asking for anything, instead it's the other side demanding contract concessions...... to wit, their royalty agreement. The ILA gets a royalty for every TEU moved thru the port and it works out to roughly 20 grand a year for a 20 year vet give or take and port mgmt wants it to stop. Union members feel this is tied directly to the Panama Canal expansion that will increase thu tonnage by about 20%. ( more TEU's = more $ for ILA members )

Of course it's more complicated than what I'm putting here but that's the jest of it.

I'm here to tell you mgmt won't get this trophy. Not even close. It's an icon to these folks and it's way across the line in the sand.

My buds are optimistic tho and think mgmt will buckle at the last minute and they have a large war chest if they don't and decide to dig in.

Time will tell ..........

 

UPDATE !! 30 day extension negotiated and accepted. But I don't know what for.....same issue will be there in 30 days......

 

Psst..."20 foot equivalent unit" where 1 x 40 is 2 TEU's and obviously a 20 is one.

A standard jargon used to measure productivity like " You need to move 35 TEU's and hour " ........ Or " There's 4000 TEU's on that ship"

( for the young people and those that really want to know )