McOsker Probes APM’s Broken Promises in Hearing

APM’s broken promises at Pier 400 were the subject of a special meeting of LA City Council’s trade, travel, and tourism committee held in San Pedro at the request of Councilman Tim McOsker. The council member introduced a motion in August to investigate the matter of jobs being eliminated based on the promise of zero-emission all- electric cargo handlers which instead are hybrids.

“Job loss is terrible, but if it’s job loss based on a false promise, it’s worse,” McOsker told Random Lengths News in an Aug. 31 interview. “I am unequivocally opposed to automation that eliminates jobs, and I will never agree that we are forced to choose to protect the environment or the workforce, we must make urgent course corrections on climate change,
but not at the expense of good union jobs,” McOsker said in a statement after the meeting. “It’s clear to me that the underlying commitment made in 2019 to improve the environment and protect jobs is both unrealized and under threat.”

McOsker’s attention was drawn to the issue after LA Harbor Commission Vice President Diane Middleton spoke out at the commission’s Aug. 10 meeting, but the Sierra Club had begun making inquiries into the matter eight months earlier, in a Jan. 4 letter.

The hearing was intended to drill down into what happened — with testimony from Port of LA Executive Director Gene Seroka and APM’s Vice President/General Counsel Peter Jabbour — and resulted in two amendments to McOsker’s original motion designed to correct some of the consequences.

Concerning the process, McOsker asked Seroka, if it was true that “on these permits, you have to start the work within two years and once you start the work there’s no expiration of the permit?”

“That’s my understanding,” Seroka responded.

“Which is problematic,” McOsker noted, “Because someone could get the stuff that they want — automated equipment that runs on diesel — and then never in a hypothetical never, ever, ever get to the charging stations and never reach the goal … to stop burning diesel.”

Missing the point, Seroka assured McOsker that the port’s zero-emission deadline would be met while ignoring the issue of the flawed permit process.

As an example of what had actually transpired, McOsker noted two questions on APM’s 2019 application: one asking about the number of jobs on the site, and the other asking about the impact of the project on those jobs. The answer to both was “It varies. We don’t know.” This led him to say, “It seems incredible to believe one of the largest, most sophisticated logistics companies on Earth, whose prime, the bulk of their costs is employment, would not be able to answer either of those two questions. Defies credibility to the point of being not believable.”

While Jabbour did his best to allay such concerns and promote APM/Maersk’s reputation as a forward- thinking industry leader, he did not do as well under questioning. At one point, McOsker asked a simple question, “Did the conversion to hybrid electric engines require you to be automated?”

In response, he got a convoluted answer touting Maersk’s far-sightedness that ended with a hidden contradiction. “We wanted to set the future so that we could make sure that we could electrify well in advance of 2030 and we knew that there was going to be a road and a journey to get there.” In reality, buying hybrid technology now means buying new technology twice before 2030, rather than once.

Jabbour also didn’t answer the question. So McOsker asked again. “Did it require automation? Does it require automation? Can you have human-assisted electric equipment or hybrids with potato chip oil?”

“I’m sure you possibly can,” Jabbour finally acknowledged. “The choice we made is to move forward with this mode of operation.”

Despite job losses due to automation, APM claims its workforce hasn’t declined, which led McOsker to ask a very granular question, comparing its old and new ways of operating.

“Under your old operation,” McOsker said, “a crane — human being running the crane — in both instances, takes the can off and puts it on a chassis, that UTR driver — human being — drives it and there’s probably multiple, three to four UTRs … per crane drives it to the yard and a top handler — probably a couple of top handlers or at least a few top handlers per crane — then stacks it and then later when it leaves — another set of human beings — later when it leaves a yard crane — human being — moves it.” He then summed up, “So, we got human being, crane, human beings, multiple UTRs, human beings, multiple top handlers, human being, yard crane all working under the old model.”

In contrast, “New model is a crane — still I think a human being (although we’ll talk about that on Wednesday) still a human being takes it and drops it for an autostrad. Autostrad — no human being — moves it to the yard and stacks it — no human being — can get ready to leave, autostrad moves it — no human being.” Again McOsker
summed up: “So, just on those moves, just on the simplest of moves, taking it off, stacking it, and sending it out there’s multiple, let’s say you know half a dozen or a dozen human beings, and then under the new operations there’s one human being — crane operator — and yet the information that you’ve answered that I asked for, on total man hours — sorry sexist term — total headcount and person-hours per TEU the numbers don’t change all
that much.”

So he asked, “Where are the jobs that keep the numbers sort of uniform? Where are the jobs in the new operation?”

The period from 2019 to 2013 was “a very complex environment,” Jabbour said, in response, “but what the numbers do show you [are] the biggest driver of workforce impact are volumes … because not every job at Pier 400 is subject to automation has been eliminated … it is a very complex ecosystem. You do have clerks, you have mechanics … it’s much more complex than a simple one plus one.”

Once again, McOsker brought things down to earth. “But if UTR drivers are gone and if top handlers are gone and if yard crane operators are gone … and the numbers remain fairly constant, you would think, man, there must be a lot more mechanics. But there’s not,” he said. “The number of mechanics is pretty static too. … They’re up by, you know, 40. So I’m now wondering where are these jobs?”

In the end, there was no clear answer.

Another key issue was the false promise of electric charging stations, and the explanation here was even more garbled, as it got confused with the discussion of hybrid auto-straddlers.

“When you pulled the permit and said we are going to do this in 30 days beginning in 2019, we’re going to put in the chargers, you must have known then, I mean the company must have known then that you weren’t going to do that.”

Yet another meandering response ensued, involving the pandemic along with long-term investment practices, after which McOsker, again, came back down to earth. “Somebody made a choice to say on page two of the application ‘charging stations.’ q1 2019. No pandemic … no one had heard of COVID then,” McOsker emphasized. “So, somebody made a choice. And it certainly makes the application way more palatable to the world to say, ‘We’re going to be fully charged and plugging in and for that, we’re going to have automated equipment,’” which is precisely how it was presented to the public.

At the end of the meeting, McOsker asked for two amendments to his motion. “For my first amendment, I want to add I therefore move that the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles be directed to establish a baseline staffing plan for the APMT and a guarantee for hires from the maintenance and repair facility at or 400.” Second, he said, “I further move that the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles provide a report and regular updates to the Trade Travel and Tourism Committee on the timeline for the completion of the 2019 level one CDP 18-25 scope of work. Which parenthetically is the environmental stuff.”

Both amendments were unanimously approved. But a growing cloud of questions remain unanswered in the hearing’s wake.