Tom Perez heads to San Francisco to meet with shipping companies and dock workers to help settle dispute that has led to a partial shutdown of ports

A partial shutdown of 29 ports along the US west coast looks stretched into a third day as the federal labor secretary was due to arrive in San Francisco to try to broker a settlement ending months of disruptions on the cargo-clogged docks.



The White House, under pressure to weigh in on a labor dispute that is costing industry hundreds of millions of dollars in lost exports, said on Monday that labor secretary Tom Perez would meet the two sides on Tuesday.

Neither the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents 20,000 dockworkers, nor the shipping companies’ bargaining agent, the Pacific Maritime Association, have spoken about the negotiations since agreeing a news blackout on Friday requested by a federal mediator. No face-to-face talks between the parties are believed to have occurred since then.

The PMA previously said the talks, which have dragged on for nine months, hit a new snag over a union demand for changes in the system of binding arbitration of contract disputes. The union has insisted the two sides are near an accord.

“We hope secretary Perez can really get the parties to work out whatever their final issues are and get a deal,” said National Retail Federation executive Jonathan Gold on Fox Business News.

Inbound cargo vessels continued to stack up at anchor, with 34 freighters idled on Monday morning waiting for a berth outside the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s two busiest cargo hubs.

Loading and unloading of cargo vessels at all 29 west coast ports has been halted since Friday night and was not set to resume until Tuesday morning. Vessel operations were likewise suspended last weekend, and again on Thursday.

But shippers said work at the ports continued in the dockyards, rail yards and terminal gates as they seek to reduce the backlog of cargo sitting on the waterfronts.

The affected ports handle nearly half of all US maritime trade and more than 70% of imports from Asia. A domino effect has been felt across much of the economy, extending to agriculture, manufacturing, retail and transportation.



California farmers have been especially hard hit, with port disruptions posing a barrier to perishable goods headed to overseas markets and export losses estimated to be running at hundreds of millions of dollars a week.

Asian exporters faced rising shipping rates and some have been forced to reroute their goods by air freight. The Japanese car maker Honda said on Sunday it would slow production for a week at plants in Ohio, Indiana and the Canadian province of Ontario because of port-related delays in parts shipments to those factories.

The shippers have said they were curtailing port operations because they were no longer willing to pay union workers premium overnight, holiday and weekend wages during work slowdowns the companies have accused the union of orchestrating.

The union has blamed changes in shipping practices instituted by the carriers themselves for causing worsening backlogs and say that suspending vessel operations has only made matters worse.