IBU Challenged By Industry-wide Asset Swaps

The Jankovich Co. sale to TJC LLC was just one instance of consolidation among many that has happened in recent years — disruptions that are increasingly impacting wages and labor contracts.

This past May, members of the ILWU’s marine division — the Inlandboatmen’s Union, or IBU, and ILWU Locals 13, 63, 94, 63 OCU, the Pacific Coast Pensioners Association, Federated Auxiliary 8 and the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots, or MM&P, rallied outside Westoil Marine Service on Terminal Island over such issues.

The biggest news to happen in fuel transhipment news was the asset exchanges by two large national marine transportation corporations — Saltchuk Marine and Centerline Logistic and its impact on labor contracts. Both Saltchuk and Centerline come from old family owned companies. 

The asset exchange has upended scores of contracts worked by IBU, MM&P  and the Sailors Union of the Pacific maritime workers while weakening the Southwest Marine Pension Trust. 

The maritime unions charge that Saltchuk and Centerline have used the asset exchange as an opportunity to replace longstanding contracts with the IBU and the MM&P with a substandard agreement with company-friendly, Seafarers International Union that undermines the standards for fair wages and benefits previously set by the IBU and MM&P collective bargaining agreements. 

In December of this past year, Saltchuk Marine announced that it acquired eight ship assist tugs owned by Centerline Logistics and operated in the Pacific Northwest and California. Centerline Logistics, in turn, purchased six bunker barges operated in California from Foss Maritime, a subsidiary of Saltchuk. A bunker barge is like a floating petrol station. The bunker barge pumps fuel oil into the ship’s storage (bunker) tanks. 

The effect of this deal had an immediate impact on mariners from Los Angeles and Long Beach to San Francisco. In Los Angeles and Long Beach Foss Maritime terminated 21 employees who worked on its bunker barges. The collective bargaining agreement with MM&P, who represented the mariners, was voided as were contributions to the Southwest Marine Pension Trust. In San Francisco, roughly the same number of employees represented by the Sailors Union of the Pacific also lost their jobs when Foss Maritime stopped its operations.

Sly Hunter, regional representative for MM&P, was quoted in the ILWU newspaper, The Dispatcher, that on the day after Christmas, he received a call from Foss Maritime stating that it had sold its bunker barge business and that the contract which had two-and-a-half years left on it and employed 21 of their members was gone. The company was sold to Centerline Logistics, which then created a subsidiary, called Leo Marine. Centerline Logistics claimed that MM&P didn’t have jurisdiction. The transaction also impacted 55 IBU members working for the Centerline-owned Westoil/Millennium when Centerline’s Millennium-branded tug operation was sold to Saltchuk operation. Instead of folding the six bunker barges and the contracts it acquired from Foss into its existing marine fueling companies including Westoil, Centerline gave the contract and barges to its newly created subsidiary, Leo Marine Services, leaving many of the IBU mariners who manned both the Millennium tugs and the Westoil barges without work. All that remains now for the 55 workers at Westoil are contracts from two smaller customers.