It is happening up and down the West Coast. Clerks jobs are being eliminated and Walking Bosses are doing their work.
The robots are not going to eliminate clerks jobs, they already did that themselves.
Greed and laziness is the cause of this problem, not mechanization.
Clerks allowed the hatch clerks jobs to be filled by casuals for so long that some employers offered to buy them out by paying the other clerks 25% to cover the work, and the Clerks went for it.
In Seattle and LA, SSA has started to require the Walking Bosses to do checking work, and they are agreeing to do it.
What kind of Union men allow the employer to eliminate jobs, then allow management to do the work?
Yes, Walking Bosses are management, and both the Clerks and Longshoremen are allowing them to do clerks work.
Not only are the Walking Bosses allowing their members to do clerks work, they are processing complaints against casual Walking Bosses for clerking errors, and finding them guilty even when they had nothing to do with the missing container.
The NLRB does not recognize the Walking Bosses as a Union, but the PMA and the ILWU do, and they are both using the Bosses to screw with longshoremen working off the Supplemental Bosses Board, now that hours worked count toward getting registered as a Boss.
Greed and laziness killed the Hatch Clerks jobs and the Clerks and Longshoremen sat and did nothing.
This is an example of a self inflicted injury to one, which is an injury to all.
Way to go Local 98 and Local 94, keep up the good work and maybe PMA will give you another big bonus in the contract extension talks.
