Excerpt
SUMMARY: A labor dispute between shipowners and longshoreman on the West Coast has been going on for months now. This weekend, the President dispatched labor secretary Thomas Perez to California to try to resolve it. For more, economist Christopher Thornberg joins Alison Stewart from Los Angeles.
ALISON STEWART (NewsHour): In Canada today, 3,000 members of the Teamsters went on strike.
They are in a dispute with the Canadian Pacific Railway over wages and benefits. Analysts say a prolonged strike would affect the flow of oil, lumber, auto parts and other products into the United States.
Another labor dispute between ship owners and longshoremen has been going on for months now on the West Coast of this country. And, this weekend, the President dispatched Labor Secretary Thomas Perez to California to try to resolve it.
For more about this, we are joined now from Los Angeles by Christopher Thornberg. He is an economist and a founding partner of Beacon Economics.
So, Christopher, tell me, what is at the center of this dispute, and why has it gone on for something like nine months?
CHRISTOPHER THORNBERG, Founding Partner, Beacon Economics, LLC: Well, we have to remember that, you know, there is a long history of tension between the longshoremen and the various owners of the shipping companies that move products in and out of those ports.
This time around, the contract was up for renewal. Those negotiations had been carrying on.
I know the workers at the port have been working under the old expired contract for a number of months.
Contract negotiations haven’t been going very fast.
And, as a result of that, there’s been kind of this, if you will, guerrilla action going on between both parties.
It’s somewhat of a work slowdown by one side of the equation, and, of course, these kind of weekend-long lockouts on the other side of it. And, overall, the tensions are just getting hotter and hotter.
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