Patience.
That’s the advice Philip Yandall offers to the more than 100,000 hopefuls who entered Monday’s lottery drawing for one of America’s best — and best compensated — blue-collar jobs.
The 60-year-old Long Beach grandfather was selected in the drawing a dozen years ago and is still waiting for the grand prize, a full-time union job working on the docks at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
“It has been a long time coming,” he said. “But it is a great job. That’s why so many of us are down there.”
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Dock workers move billions of dollars worth of cargo at the nation’s busiest port complex.
The jobs require little schooling. Once you’ve landed one of these positions, the job security is rock-solid. The union makes sure of that. And, above all, the jobs can pay more than $100,000 a year, plus top-of-the-line health coverage.
But the positions aren’t easy to come by.
Lottery winners like Yandall work freelance for years as “casuals” without health insurance to rack up enough seniority to have a shot at snagging a full-time, fully benefited, union-member gig.
Staffing these plum jobs are men and women who steer cranes that lift cargo boxes, load containers onto trains or perform dozens of other hands-on tasks needed to keep the ports humming.
The promise keeps Yandall coming back.
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The jobs are anachronisms in the logistics world. Robotic cargo-handling machines increasingly slash the need for manual labor in this world, without the cost of health, vision and dental insurance, sick days and vacation.
Why do some of these positions still exist?
Largely because of the clout of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents the dockworkers up and down the West Coast.
And joining their numbers is what every casual covets.
Waiting for work
On a recent predawn morning, rap music blares from a car as several men huddle together in the chill behind the gates of a Wilmington parking lot.
Hundreds of casuals line up here on any given day, waiting for the opportunity to snare a single-day role that regular union members can’t fill.
“Be careful what you wish for,” said Peter Olsen, a barrel-chested casual, walking away after failing to land a job for the day.
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Olsen said he can pick up one or two eight-hour shifts a week if he’s lucky. But sometimes, like around Chinese New Year, the work slows.
His salary can vary widely from month to month and from year to year.
The Pacific Maritime Association, representing shippers and terminal operators, submits daily orders to ILWU’s dispatch halls, calling for workers with various skill levels. Registered longshore and clerks are guaranteed a spot.
Whatever daily work remains is offered to casuals, who are called back in a rotating order.
Casuals start off at $25 an hour but their pay quickly increases with experience.
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Olsen, 39, logged more than 5,000 hours over more than a decade. For much of that time he held down two jobs to make ends meet. The financial stress broke up his marriage.
Not all casuals can cope with the uncertainty. Some drop out in search of steadier work.
Yandall watched three of his relatives quit.
“They didn’t stick it out,” he said. “They moved. They had to raise their family.”
Rare opportunity
The last time the PMA announced a wave of hiring, in 2015, the emotion was palpable.
“There were tears of joy and jubilation,” Yandall said.
“You feel the struggle with the family,” he said. “There are homeless there. There are people who have divorced because of finances. So when they go full-time, what can you do? We give them a hug.”
The PMA estimates that about 5,000 casuals work at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. About half of them make themselves available on any given week. They come from all over Southern California. They are computer programmers, construction workers, day laborers and substitute teachers.
The PMA said it needs more such workers, so that the ebb and flow of the shipping business doesn’t lag into worker shortages.
But at the Wilmington parking lot, some privately mutter, more casuals could mean less work for them.
Still, it won’t stop them from showing up. It’s not about today’s wages. It’s about long-range goals.
“A lot of people have this misconception you make it here and you are set for life,” said Elloisa Cuenca, a 39-year old mother. She was a nonprofit consultant before she started spending her mornings waiting in line for her number to be called. “But that’s not always the case.”
Cuenca, who has a young son, says she hasn’t put in the hours she has seen some of her colleagues invest. But she plans to double up this year.
Her dockworker friends help her out, taking care of her son here and there. It’s like one big family, she said.
“There are generations here,” Cuenca said. “Brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles.”
The lottery
On Monday, representatives from the union and the PMA expect to hold a preliminary draw near the waterfront. The last drawing was in the pre-recession year of 2004. George W. Bush was president and the West Coast economy was flourishing.
The process hasn’t changed much since then. Anyone can enter the drawing, but union members and officials are issued special cards they can submit that give them a boost.
More than 100,000 entries are split into two groups and placed in giant drums trucked in from Las Vegas. Once there is an equal number in each batch, the entries will be pulled one by one and placed in a numeric sequence.
The first 2,400 names will be screened to become casuals. The winners who qualify will immediately be put in line behind folks like Yandall. The rest will be called as needed.
“Everyone from the public is going to have their fingers crossed that they get into that barrel,” said Mondo Porras, vice president of ILWU Local 13, representing about 7,000 dock workers in the port complex.
At the end of the days-long process, winning names will be posted on the PMA’s website. “It’s a fair and equal process,” Morras said, “for everyone.”
Union power
The union job is unlike any other. There is no application to fill out online. There’s no weekly office schedule.
The lottery system, negotiated between the union and the PMA, gives union members and officials a leg up. Family or friends of dockworkers get preaddressed cards that all but ensure them a space in the lottery. So it’s not a coincidence the waterfront is filled with families with generations of dockworkers.
The familial dynamic breeds union loyalty, said Jake Wilson, an associate professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach who has studied longshore workers.
“American trade unions have declined over the last 25 years,” he said. “The ILWU has been an exception to the erosion of labor unions. They have militant workers and a coast-wide agreement.”
The union’s reputation? Since their earliest days when strikes in 1934 turned violent at San Francisco’s Embarcadero, they’ve been regarded as tough and combative. That reputation was rekindled during the labor disputes that sparked work interruptions at the port in 2012 and 2015.
Dockworkers draw power from their ability to slow the flow of billions of dollars in goods. Unlike other logistics workers, the ILWU has the leverage to prevent shippers from playing other West Coast ports against each other.
The results are evident, Wilson said, in the workers’ higher wages.
“These are one of the last good jobs for blue-collar workers in the United States. There are not many jobs like it.”
The competition: robots
How long will these jobs last? As automation advances, Wilson believes unions have tough fights ahead.
For years the union stood firm against mechanization. But a contract signed in 2008 opened the door to automated cargo-handling machines. U.S. ports have been slow to adopt automation in part because of the astronomical price to create and install the start-up technology.
But congestion, caused by increasingly larger ships stacked high with more cargo, is pushing terminal operators to invest in what some view as more efficient systems.
Self-driving cranes now stack containers at the TraPac Terminal in Los Angeles. In Long Beach, the $1.3 billion Middle Harbor terminal — expected to be the most automated port in North America when completed — opened its first wave last year.
At both terminals, giant cranes relentlessly swing mammoth containers onto the docks each time jumbo ships pull in to port — with little human intervention.
“Whenever you hear the word automation, it always has a price tag in eliminating a job,” said Porras, an ILWU representative. “The impact of this can have a ripple effect across the economy.”
But experts believe this doesn’t mean jobs are going away. It means they are evolving, they say.
John Martin, a maritime economist who advises the PMA, said as robots arrive, a human worker who once directed a crane where to drop a cargo box will instead handle sophisticated programing or maintain and upgrade the technology used to operate machines.
“We are going to have to move forward toward more automation in the ports,” he said. “Certainly there is always a fear when technology is introduced of a secondary job loss, but that’s not necessarily the case.”
But until then, the casuals will line up and wait to be called.
And they’ll wait for a shot, years away, at that dream job with the union.
“They tell you,” Olsen said, “your dreams are going to come true.”
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