Alisha Rhodes dreams of providing a stable middle-class life for her family, and sees landing a job on Baltimore's shipping piers as her best option for getting there.
"I have three kids that I need to support with a better job," said the 26-year-old Belair-Edison resident and local leasing agent, who has been pursuing work at the port of Baltimore the last several months. "I'm making it now, but I'm barely making it."
Such aspirations aren't new in Baltimore, where men and women have survived on dock work for generations in middle-class neighborhoods like Locust Point and Canton. But Rhodes' path to the pier is far from certain.
She is one of 10 newly admitted members of the International Longshoremen's Association Local 333, the port's largest labor union, who recently filed a lawsuit against the Steamship Trade Association of Baltimore, which represents employers, alleging the group has blocked their attempts to work the docks. She's also among hundreds of new members at the local whose membership has been questioned internally within the union.
In the last year, landing a port job has become increasingly complicated, as shippers have butted heads with Local 333 leaders over a local contract that governs how jobs are filled. Turmoil within the ranks of the union has also spread confusion about new members entering the field. Last week, national ILA officials placed the local under trusteeship and launched an investigation into allegations that hundreds of new members have been brought into the union in recent months without proper approval from the local's existing membership.
Beyond leaving those aspiring longshoremen in limbo, the confusion has implications for existing members and for Baltimore's reputation as a reliable port of call, at a time when it is looking to ramp up business with the widening of the Panama Canal, said Anirban Basu, a local economist and founder of Sage Policy Group.
Though Baltimore has the 50-foot channel depth needed for the large ships scheduled to move through the canal, the port's labor situation isn't helping inspire confidence in shippers, Basu said. Instead, it adds to Baltimore's shortcomings for handling high volumes of international goods, including its lack of "double-stacking" capability for loading cargo containers two-high on outbound trains.
"What we have done by not addressing our lack of double-stacking capacity and by not fully addressing labor issues that should have been resolved decades ago," Basu said, "is to make it more likely than it otherwise would be that major shippers will bypass Baltimore in favor of other East Coast ports."
The port has remained a reliable employment anchor for decades — even as the city has struggled with high joblessness generally — and provides some 14,600 jobs and about $3 billion in personal wages and salaries, according to state estimates.
Jim White, CEO of the Maryland Port Administration, said despite the labor unrest, the port has managed to break productivity levels this year, with container cargo and automobile volume up over last year. "Things are working. It's the labor contract we need to get behind us," he said.
Ensuring that cargo on large ships at the port is unloaded and loaded quickly has long been the purview of unions like Local 333, but shippers also have a good amount of control in shaping the local workforce.
The STA is in charge of providing longshoremen with what is known as Power Industrial Truck or PIT training, for the operation of heavy machinery on the docks.
That training has become a focal point of the contract negotiations, which have languished since Local 333 members went on strike for three days in October 2013. Leaders of Local 333, including President Riker "Rocky" McKenzie, have argued PIT training is unnecessary for longshoremen who don't operate machinery, and that the requirement that all longshoremen receive it is being used by the STA to wrest control of the local labor force from the union.
Gwendolyn Williamson, a Local 333 member and former executive board member, said the STA is keeping the new members sidelined by denying them PIT training, and then canceling jobs under the claim that Local 333 can't meet its responsibility to provide labor.
Michael Collins, an STA attorney, says the existing local contract under which jobs are dispatched in Baltimore outlines the PIT requirement, and it has not used it to block new workers from entering the docks.
The contract includes a provision that the STA and Local 333 agree on new hires who are to receive PIT training. The STA says it has provided the training to 400 people in the last three years — though not to everyone Local 333 has put forward.
Rhodes and the other plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the STA are claiming $30,000 each for undue stress and lost potential wages and benefits.
"The [STA] is intentionally inflicting emotional distress on me by treating me less favorably than similarly situated employees," reads the tort claim in Baltimore County District Court, signed by McKenzie on behalf of the other plaintiffs.
Collins dismissed the lawsuit as frivolous.
Rhodes believes otherwise, saying she has been given no reason for being denied the training.
"We can't even go to try to get work from the dispatch center, so that hurts us," she said of the lack of certification.
"It's not fair the way they're treating some people," said Kevin Knight Jr., 20, an aspiring longshoremen from Dundalk. Knight has been paying dues to Local 333 since October, he said, but his membership has not been recognized by the STA to receive the training or begin working union jobs.
"I just want to become a unionized local longshoreman and be able to go to work and live my life," he said.
The fate of Rhodes, Knight and hundreds of others like them could come down to the findings of the national ILA investigation into Local 333's recently added members.
That investigation was launched after several existing members complained, saying there isn't enough work to support the new members. They also argued the new members were overwhelmingly African-American, disrupting a racial balance between white and black members that has been in place since the union was formed amid desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ronald Barkhorn was one of the members who helped bring the complaints to national ILA officials.
"Flooding the Local with unneeded members will cause dissension, anger and drastically reduce the wages of many lower seniority current members," Barkhorn wrote to ILA officials in a memo obtained by The Baltimore Sun.
McKenzie, the Local 333 president, has said union bylaws dictate that applicants must be allowed into the union barring good reason to deny them, and that Barkhorn and others complaining about racial dynamics were just "trying to divide the local on this issue."
White, of the port administration, said the labor issues have been confusing even for him. He's heard anywhere from 200 to 500 new Local 333 members are in question, and isn't sure what number is correct, he said.
Some workers have told him there is a need for some new hires, he said, but "nowhere near" the numbers that have arrived.
Still, White said he was encouraged by the news Local 333 had been placed under trusteeship, and predicted a local contract could be signed as early as next month.
"We're going to make some significant strides," he said.
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