Port shutdowns will result in more plant closings

LOS ANGELES -- A second week of a West Coast port shutdown will cause a noticeable increase in plant closings, job losses and financial market turmoil, say analysts and business leaders who are increasingly skeptical of a quick end to the labor dispute.\nAlready, storage facilities at beef, pork and poultry processing facilities across the country are full, crammed with produce that can't be exported.\nWith nowhere to move their product, plant operators will begin shutting down Monday and layoffs will follow, said Mary Kay Thatcher, public policy director of the American Farm Bureau Federation.\nIn less than two weeks, if the shutdown continues, manufacturing plants will be grinding to a halt all over the country, farmers will be up in arms, and Asian equity and currency markets could face a full blown crisis, said Steven Cohen, a University of California, Berkeley professor of regional planning.\n"It's like draining a swamp. You start seeing all kinds of ugly creatures," he said.\nTalks between the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping lines and terminal operators, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union entered a fourth day Sunday.\nNegotiators were meeting in separate rooms in a hotel in San Francisco's Chinatown, with a federal mediator shuttling between them.\n"I think this will be a very long day, and a significant day," said PMA spokesman Steve Sugerman.\nHe said the PMA would keep pushing for an extension of the old contract, which specifically forbid the kind of work slowdowns the PMA said prompted the shutdown Sept. 29. The union has refused, holding out for a new three-year contract that would give it control over any jobs that come with new technology.\nImplementing labor-saving technology like electronic tracking devices puts only a small number of jobs at risk in the short term, but future jobs are at stake, as well as control of the flow of information at the ports.\nThe PMA has always given the ILWU jurisdiction over new technology in the past, union negotiator Joseph Wenzl said Sunday.\n"The union feels we have offered a proposal that meets the employer in the middle," he said.\nBoth sides have agreed to resume shipping essential items to Alaska and Hawaii. They have also moved some cargo for the U.S. military, but there will be no more exceptions to the shutdown, Sugerman said.\nThe number of cargo vessels stranded at the docks or backing up at anchor points has risen to about 200 since the lockout, with dozens more still en route from Asia.\nAccording to American Farm Bureau Federation figures, between 20 percent and 30 percent of all U.S. agriculture products are exported, and a third of that goes to the Pacific rim -- mostly through the West Coast ports.\nA growing number of industry groups are calling for White House intervention, including use of the Taft-Hartley Act, which would force an 80-day cooling off period. President Bush hasn't said whether he would intervene.