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发表于 2008-6-25 12:13
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来自： 日本
The Long and Short of Longshoring
Dennis Brueckner remembers hearing about the fatal accident, although he was not on the docks that day. A crew chief was directing a group of men unloading logs from a ship. Brueckner knew the man. His son was Brueckner's friend, and the chief had worked with Buckner's father for years.
The man had "directed the crane driver to pick up a log and move it," said Brueckner, now president of local 54 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). "The crane shut off and the log came over and slammed into him. He died of his injuries."
Brueckner, like his friend and both their fathers, is a longshoreman. He has been since 1978 and is a third generation dockworker. Like his father and his father's father before him, Brueckner wakes up every day at 5:00 a.m., goes down to the docks in Stockton, CA, and waits for the ships to come in.
Longshoring is an old profession. The hours are long, the work is hard and by its very nature, the job is dangerous.
By 2002, the volume of trade moving through the United States' 102 seaports had nearly doubled since 1995, according to a report issued by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
The report said that U.S. Customs processed more than 214,000 vessels and 5.7 million sea containers in 2001 alone.
When these ships arrive, longshoremen are assigned to a ship and quickly begin to unload or load the cargo. They work on the ships, docks, platforms, barges, and various other surfaces. They operate heavy equipment, such as lifts, cranes and industrial truck, and work with extremely heavy cargo, under intense deadlines.
The work is inconsistent. When the ship leaves port, work is done and longshoremen will not know if there is more work until they show up at the docks the next day.
When workers begin, Brueckner said, they are casual workers. Casual spots are temporary, hard to come by, and usually without healthcare benefits. Once a worker registers as a longshoreman (they are required to complete 4000 hours of work experience to qualify), work becomes more consistent and benefits increase.
Both casuals and registered longshoremen depend on the ships for their work. Brueckner, the vice-chair of his union's safety committee, remembers how hard it was when he first started out as a ‘casual' and a lull in the economy meant less work to go around.
"It was terrible, I had to go find another job for awhile and hope and pray that the work would pick up again so I could go back and not lose all the time I put in," said Brueckner, a father of three.
In California, longshoremen are organized under the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association (PM), a joint venture between the union and ship owners. Ship owners pay into the PMA, which distributes the funds and work to the longshoremen. Seniority ensures hours.
Getting hours is not only important for the salary, but it is the only way for longshoremen to protect their benefits.
"You have your medical benefits. If you don't get a certain amount of hours a day, [you lose them]," Brueckner said "To get my basic benefits, I need to work 800 hours."
Today, longshoremen earn between $20.66 an hour, as a casual, and $27 an hour as an experienced operator. Brueckner said he generally works an eight-hour shift, however, on a terminal job, they can work up to nine hours. If they are going to finish a ship, they sometimes work 10 hours.
When Brueckner first started, the industry was in the midst of changing from a manual labor-oriented industry to a faster paced, more mechanized industry.
He remembers throwing 100-pound sacks of rice, shoveling cement, rolling 60-gallon barrels, and rolling 500-pound bales of cotton. Now he mostly drives tractors for containers, and operates container cranes, ship cranes, bulk loaders, pay loaders, bulldozers, and track mobiles. With the larger equipment and faster pace, new safety concerns arose.
"[Employers] tend to tell you to go 10-15 miles per hour [in the trucks.] People tend to speed within the terminal, which is very dangerous," Brueckner said.
Brueckner has been injured on the job.
"I was operating [a machine that] unloads bulk cement," Brueckner said. "I was working down in a tunnel, where there was a conveyor belt, washing it down with the hose. I stumbled and hurt my back. That was the first time I had taken off for an injury."
Brueckner said he, like other longshoremen, usually tries to work despite injuries.
"You are looking at losing your house and losing everything you own. You are stressed over your financial status. You are wondering how many house payments you can make into the future. You still have to buy your kids school books," Brueckner said.
He is lucky, though. He has avoided some of the worse accidents, and in his 26 years as a longshoreman, he has witnessed or heard of his fair share of them.
"In Sacramento, they had a guy who was tying up the ship and they tightened up the line. The line broke and it literally took the guy's head off," Brueckner said.
He also witnessed accidents where steel beams shifted in the cargo holds, trapping some of his co-workers' legs.
In 1993, the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), identified longshoring as having one of the highest rates of lost workdays due to accidents.
In a 1994 study, OSHA found that the majority of accidents in the field are associated with "cargo lifting gear, vehicular cargo transferal, manual cargo handling, hazardous atmospheres and materials, and hazards posed by the more modern and sophisticated cargo handling methods."
The accidents keep happening though, and on both coasts.
In Boston, in 1993, Willard Stewart was working as a maritime engineer dredging the bottom of Boston Harbor as part of the city's "Big Dig" construction project
"He was on the scowe, feeding wire from where he was on the scowe through a hatch down into the engine room. The scowe bumped into the dredge and he fell headfirst into the bottom of the scowe," said Thomas Bond, an attorney with the Kaplan/Bond Group, who is representing the engineer in Stewart v. Dutra Construction Co. The case is before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if the dredge he got hurt on should be considered a "vessel in navigation" for the purposes of allowing him to be treated as a "seaman" and entitled to coverage under the federal Jones Act.
"You are hurt a lot because you are on unstable surfaces often. You are on a dock, and you are working with heavy equipment all around you," Bond said.
"[Longshoremen] are loading and unloading cargo which is dangerous enough when you are on land, but [then] you add to it the sea, the wind, the waves, the tides, things that are floating and rocking all the time and the water making slippery surfaces," Bond said.
In addition, the production mindset of the job helps to create a hazardous environment, Brueckner said.
"The major thing when you talk about danger on the waterfront is that you have to look at the massive size of the machinery, then you put that up against the mindset on the waterfront: production. You have to get that ship out as quickly as you can," Brueckner said. "It is even more pressing on workers now to be more productive because now you are dealing with the global economy."
When longshoremen get hurt, under the Longshoremen's and Harbor Worker's Compensation Act, they are entitled to compensation of usually 2/3rds of what they earned on average the year before. Workers also get their medical bills paid and, possibly, a one-time payment for the injury.
"You get money, you get money quickly, but you don't get reimbursed for your pain and suffering," Bond said.
"In addition to getting worker's compensation, which can be quite lucrative, a longshoreman who is injured by the negligence of the vessel can bring a lawsuit. These cases are extremely difficult to prove and win," Bond said.
For Brueckner, however, serious injuries still mean loss of work.
"If you are at the age where you can retire and you go out on disability, you can go out on a partial retirement and you can get a partial settlement," Brueckner said. "Hopefully you can make it on that. But if you are young … you are losing a great job to do what? It is really scary nowadays if you are very young. If you are off two years on an injury, you are not going to get retirement and you could lose your medical."
For some, however, the most distressing part of these injuries is that there is no clear rule of law or standard detailing which laws govern compensation in all injury cases.
If a person is injured while working on a movable waterborne platform, and does work that would normally be done on land, as in the Stewart case, it is unclear if they qualify as a longshoreman or as a seaman falling under the Jones Act.
"Any injury on or around the water falls into one of [several] categories: Either you are a Jones Act seaman [or] you are a longshoreman or a maritime worker," Bond said.
"If you are a seaman, you don't get worker's compensation. All you get is a jury trial, and a jury determines how much money to give you. You have to show that the company you work for is negligent. You can make a lot more money than you would by recovering as a longshoreman," Bond said.
"In order to be a seaman, you have to be a member of a crew of a vessel in navigation. You look at what a person does, you look at whether the person has some sort of a work related connection to a vessel, and if that structure is a vessel," Bond said. |
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