Cracks began to appear late Saturday in a devastating US$1 billion-a-day industry-imposed lockout of US West Coast docks as ships laden with urgently needed supplies steamed out of port for Hawaii.
Vessels began leaving some of the 29 ports paralyzed by the shutdown, sparked by a bitter contract row between the shipping industry and dock workers, for the import-dependent Pacific US state Saturday, union officials said.
The first cargo to leave idled ports for the islands since the lockout by shippers began a week ago sailed after the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping lines, agreed to another key exception to the lockout.
PHOTO: AP
"After constantly asking the PMA to let us load and resume shipments of goods to Hawaii, they finally agreed to our request overnight [Friday]," said Steve Stallone of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
The progress came a day after the PMA, which represents around 80 shipping firms, also gave the green light for the resumption of shipments to the US' other non-contiguous state, Alaska.
The governors of both states had appealed to both sides in the conflict, which is costing America about a US$1 billion a day while also damaging export-driven Asian economies, to make key exceptions to the shutdown.
Ninety percent of goods sold in Hawaii, including 65 percent of its food, is imported, mostly from the lower 48. That dependence prompted residents and retailers to furiously stockpile consumables ahead of the lockout.
The first shipments should arrive in Hawaii in about a week.
The latest concession came during a round of marathon talks between the PMA and the union that began Thursday in San Francisco and looked set to continue through the weekend in a bid to break the crippling gridlock.
"You can certainly see signs that the PMA's resolve to keep us away from our posts at any cost is slipping," the union's Stallone said. "We want to get back to work and hope that a deal can be struck soon."
Shippers locked longshoremen out last Sunday, accusing them of staging a go-slow strike over the deadlock in labour negotiations and said they would not pay workers not to work.
Longshoremen have been without a contract since July 1 over PMA demands that up to 300 workers' jobs be replaced by electronic tracking systems and other technology an shippers insist that the workers extend their old contract before they are allowed to get back to work.
Officials were tightlipped over concrete progress in the San Francisco talks, but indicated that there were signs of progress.
"We're pretty encouraged by the talks," said the ILWU's Jeremy Prillwitz of the negotiations being held under the auspices of a federal government mediator
Some 160 freight ships, meanwhile, were anchored off the west coast hoping to land their multimillion-dollar cargos, while billions of dollars of stranded goods languished in ships, trucks and in port warehouses.
The 29 West Coast ports annually handle more than US$300 billion worth of goods, or about 7 percent of the US gross national product, including about US$1 billion worth of goods from Asia a day.
The shutdown is causing havoc to a range of US industries and has prompted business leaders to urge an immediate solution, while others have demanded that President George W. Bush intervene to end it.
But as the closure entered its seventh day, the White House continued to resist efforts to declare an 80-day "cooling-off" period to get cargo moving again as key nattional elections loomed.
The economic fallout hit the auto industry when a joint Toyota-General Motors plant in California was forced shut down production early Thursday after it ran out of parts.
The halt in agricultural shipping has also left millions of dollars of fruits and vegetables rotting in trucks and ports or in suppliers' warehouses, raising the risk of the local market being flooded by excess produce.
Asia's exporting economies such as China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand are also being hard hit by the closure, with some economists warning an extended closure could throw them back into recession.
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