NY-NJ Terminals Shut for Second Day by ILA Strike

Container traffic in the Port of New York and New Jersey remained at a standstill Wednesday morning as local dockworkers continued to observe picket lines by longshoremen from Philadelphia in defiance of a restraining order issued by a federal court in Newark Tuesday afternoon.

U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise ordered local members of the International Longshoremen’s Association to observe a ruling by an arbitrator on Monday and return to work. Attorneys for the New York Shipping Association were serving notice of the return to work order to ILA locals in the port on Wednesday morning even as ILA workers observed the picket lines by members of the Philadelphia ILA.

The NYSA said its attorneys would be returning to U.S. District Court Wednesday morning to seek enforcement of the court’s order.

The Philadelphia longshoremen were picketing the terminals to protest the pending move by Del Monte Fresh Produce of 75 ship calls a year from an ILA terminal in Camden, N.J. to a non-ILA facility in Gloucester, N.J. that is owned by the Holt family.

The Philadelphia ILA claimed the move by Del Monte will cost the union 200 jobs. Jim Paylor, a vice president of the national ILA who is president of ILA Local 1566 in Philadelphia, told The Journal of Commerce earlier this month that the ILA planned to attack Del Monte’s move “on all fronts.”

The pickets by Philadelphia ILA members shut down work at all six container terminals in New York Harbor starting Tuesday morning at 8:00 a.m. including the New York Container Terminal on Staten Island, APM Terminals and Maher Terminal in Port Elizabeth, N.J., the Port Newark Container Terminal, Global Marine Terminal in Bayonne, N.J., and the Red Hook Container Terminal in Brooklyn. The only terminal that remained open was the passenger cruise terminal.

“This is not a wildcat strike,” said Jim Devine, president and CEO of New York Container Terminal. “Because of phone calls to the pier by members of the ILA, the pier was shut down as an orchestrated effort, now in defiance both of an arbitrator’s ruling and a federal court judge.”

Devine said he had been in the federal district court in Newark on Tuesday afternoon. “We were able to demonstrate that this was not a random act of sympathy with people in Philly, so this is not a wildcat strike. It was organized by the national ILA.”