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Labor disputes have dominated the North American maritime industry in recent months, and one with its roots at the Port of Charleston is sparking a union get-together this week.

The “Rally for Workers’ Rights” event scheduled for 11 a.m. July 12 at the Statehouse in Columbia is being sponsored by the Charleston-based International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422.

That labor union is battling with the State Ports Authority over whether its members or state employees will operate the big cranes at the Leatherman Terminal in North Charleston. Container shipping lines refuse to call on the site until the matter is settled, and that’s left the terminal mostly idle since its $1 billion first phase opened in March 2021.

The National Labor Relations Board initially ruled in favor of the ILA, but the SPA appealed the case to a federal appeals court. A hearing was held June 6 and a decision is pending.

This week’s rally is being held in the Capitol City as a show of strength against Gov. Henry McMaster, who has backed the SPA in its efforts to preserve the “hybrid workforce” of state and union employees working side-by-side at the port’s other container terminals. Under that arrangement, non-union SPA workers operate cranes while ILA members move cargo through the terminal yards.

The ILA maintains that a 2012 contract amendment with shipping lines calls for union workers to operate cranes at all new terminals on the East and Gulf coasts, and Leatherman is the first test of that stipulation.

McMaster “is trying to push workers back a century by breaking a signed master agreement between the ILA and the shipping lines,” Charles Brave, president of ILA 1422 and the state’s AFL-CIO, said in a written statement. “McMaster and his cabal of anti-worker, anti-labor bullies are trying to do this by forcing shippers to use the ... Leatherman Terminal, staffed by non-union employees. This action will drive the wages of dock workers down further towards oblivion and working conditions towards danger.”

A spokesman for McMaster said the governor “made his position clear” in a friend-of-the-court brief he filed in support of the SPA’s appeal.

“I will not allow unions and their unlawful boycotts to hold our state’s resources, jobs, or supply chain hostage as they seek to advance their own self interests,” McMaster said in a statement.

Barbara Melvin, the SPA’s chief executive officer, has said the agency “remains hopeful that we can work with the ILA to achieve a solution” that benefits both sides.

Wages were at the forefront of another maritime union fight this year, as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union negotiated a six-year deal with West Coast ports that guarantees a 32 percent salary increase over the life of the contract. The contract also calls for $70 million in bonuses for dockworkers who were already making an average of $200,000 a year.

Just as that dispute was resolved, another one flared up in Canada where dockworkers went on strike seeking 17 percent wage increases over two years.

“We were relieved that labor and management at West Coast ports reached a tentative agreement last month, but that doesn’t mean supply chain disruptions are over,” Jonathan Gold, a vice president with the National Retail Federation, said in a statement. “The port strike affecting Vancouver and Prince Rupert shouldn’t have a major impact here but could affect some U.S. retailers whose merchandise comes in through Canada and could have a potential ripple effect at other ports.”

It’s not clear whether the Leatherman dispute has affected goods moving through Charleston’s port, because the SPA has issued conflicting comments on the matter.

The maritime agency said in its court filings that inactivity at Leatherman is a threat to the nation’s supply chain. But the NLRB pointed out that the SPA has repeatedly bragged about its ability to move cargo smoothly, even with Leatherman operating far below capacity.

Almost all of the cargo that would have gone to Leatherman these past two years has been rerouted to the SPA’s other terminals, in North Charleston and Mount Pleasant.

With imports this year declining by double digits at Charleston’s port and elsewhere in the U.S., congestion has largely become a non-issue.

U.S. ports covered by the National Retail Federation’s Global Port Tracker handled 1.93 million 20-foot containers in May. That’s down 19.3 percent year over year. Ports haven’t reported June numbers, but the federation projects the month at 1.86 million containers, down 17.5 percent year over year.

That would bring the first half of 2023 to 10.6 million containers, down 22 percent from the first half of 2022.

While the easing of cargo shipments would seem to make Leatherman’s operating status less of an immediate concern, it remains a rallying point for the ILA.

“The employer class, along with their allies in government, have been trying to increase their profits on our backs by cutting our wages and our jobs,” Brave said, adding the state government’s goal of a union-free South Carolina “enriches the wealthy while the rest of us struggle to get by.”

Daily Covid-19 admissions in the Union County area

About the data

Data is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hospitalization data is a daily average of Covid-19 patients in hospital service areas that intersect with Union County, an area which may be larger than Union County itself.

The number of daily hospital admissions shows how many patients tested positive for Covid in hospitals and is one of the most reliably reported indicators of Covid’s impact on a community.

Nearby hospitals

Share of I.C.U. beds occupied

About this data Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Notes: The hospitals map shows the average I.C.U. occupancy at nearby hospitals in the most recent week with data reported. The data is self-reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by individual hospitals. It excludes counts from hospitals operated by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service. Numbers for hospitalized patients are based on inpatient beds and include I.C.U. beds. Hospitalized Covid-19 patients include both confirmed and suspected Covid-19 patients. The C.D.C. stopped reporting data on cases in May 2023.

How trends have changed in Union County

About this data Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Notes: Weekly county death data prior to Jan. 2021 was not reported by the C.D.C. and is sourced from reporting by The New York Times. Hospitalization data is a weekly average of Covid-19 patients in hospital service areas that intersect with Union County. Hospitalization numbers early in the pandemic are undercounts due to incomplete reporting by hospitals to the federal government. Test positivity data is based only on test results reported to the federal government and is a seven-day average.

Historical trends in Union County

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data in this chart has been archived and is no longer being updated. Weekly county case data prior to Jan. 2021 was not reported by the C.D.C. and is sourced from reporting by The New York Times. The C.D.C. stopped reporting data on cases in May 2023.

The dispute over whether union workers or state employees will operate the large ship-to-shore cranes at the Leatherman Terminal in North Charleston has moved from the political branches to the courts, which means the time for over-the-top rhetoric should have ended.

Of course that’s not how things work in our country with politically charged disputes, and this one is no different.

As The Post and Courier’s David Wren reports, leading up to a rally last week at the S.C. Statehouse — where the dispute will not be resolved — the president of the local chapter of the International Longshoremen’s Association charged that Gov. Henry McMaster was “trying to push workers back a century by breaking a signed master agreement between the ILA and the shipping lines” in order to “drive the wages of dock workers down further towards oblivion and working conditions towards danger.”

Not to be outdone, reports Skyler Laird, Mr. McMaster suggested that if unionized dockworkers prevail in the state’s appeal — the National Labor Relations Board, to no one’s surprise, sided with the union — that will hurt South Carolina’s economic growth.

“To allow the union to prevail on their effort at the port would be harmful for the port, a disaster for the state, would send a wrong message to the country and world about doing business in South Carolina and would set us back,” the governor told reporters.

Although we support South Carolina’s so-called right-to-work law, and like Mr. McMaster we disagree with the notion that a S.C. win would take jobs away from the union workers — it would merely stop the union from claiming new jobs that traditionally would have gone to state employees — we find the governor’s rhetoric particularly disturbing. Because unlike union representatives, he’s the governor, and his comments reflect on our state.

To be clear, companies do not locate in South Carolina based on decisions by the National Labor Relations Board or the federal courts. They locate here because of a large variety of factors, one of which obviously is our status as the least-unionized state in the nation. Even if the three-judge panel considering the appeal decides in favor of the union, that will not change.

It’s absurd to suggest that our state would suffer “a disaster” or be set back in any significant way even if union dockworkers are able to claim all of the jobs at the underused Leatherman terminal rather than continuing with the hybrid model employed at other S.C. ports and ports in Georgia and North Carolina.

Indeed, the closest thing to a disaster or setback in this whole dispute is the fact that the State Ports Authority has not been able to make significant use of the Leatherman terminal, after all the money S.C. taxpayers poured into the facility. The larger disaster would be for that impasse to continue to drag on.

We’re also disturbed by Mr. McMaster’s promise that the state will appeal the lower court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court if the union prevails.

If the judicial panel that heard oral arguments last month rules in favor of the union, it might well turn out that there’s a legitimate reason to appeal. But the fact that we lose a lawsuit is not by itself a legitimate reason to appeal.

Please read that last sentence again, and think about it in terms of every court decision you care about. And yes, we realize a lot of you are saying the idea of waiting to read a court decision before deciding whether to appeal is quaint. But it shouldn’t be, just as whether we think a decision is legitimate or not shouldn’t be made before we read it, or at least understand the legal basis.

That part about appeals is particularly true when the decision is being made by our government.

We don’t have a right to expect anything from the union, which is a private organization to which we and most of our readers do not belong. We do, however, have a right to expect a certain level of behavior from our government, whether we agree with its political goals, as we do in this case, or we don’t, as is the case at other times.

We should be able to expect that our government will not take up the time of our courts or force private entities to spend money fighting an appeal that’s based simply on the fact that we don’t like a lower-court decision. For that matter, government shouldn’t be wasting court time and opponents’ resources filing or fighting lawsuits that are based on what we want the law or the constitution to say rather than what they actually say.

Yes, that’s considered a quaint idea too. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

Click here for more opinion content from The Post and Courier.

The South Carolina Ports Authority says they’re pausing and shifting its planning process for a future neighborhood at Union Pier for a year.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The South Carolina Ports Authority says they’re pausing and shifting its planning process for a future neighborhood at Union Pier for a year.

SC Ports Authority President and CEO Barbara Melvin announced the change during a Friday morning press conference on the pier.

“To get to the best solution, there must be a willingness to listen and compromise,” Melvin said Friday. “That’s exactly what we have done here today with the plans for Union Pier. We listened to the community and what they want, and we are now responding.”

Melvin said the Ports Authority would defer future plans for the pier’s 70 acres to the City of Charleston. The decision follows a public input meeting where hundreds of locals weighed in on the Union Pier Project.

During the announcement, Melvin was flanked by city of Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg and local advocacy groups, such as the Preservation Society of Charleston, the Historic Charleston Foundation and the Coastal Conservation League.

“While there will always be differing perspectives on a project of this scale, we took note that the same themes kept emerging,” Melvin said. “We heard the calls to slow down the process and gather even more community input. We heard the need for this city, for this process, to be city-led with third-party experts weighing in on every aspect of the proposal.”

Officials said the city will now lead the process along with the community, and the Riley Center for Livable Communities from the College of Charleston acting as a third-party consultant.

Current plans for the 70-acre plot of land on the Charleston Harbor are to create a mixed-use district. The plan includes affordable housing, retail, commercial and office space.

READ MORE: Environmental groups continue to weigh in on Union Pier Plans

During a June 7 meeting, port officials said the latest plans were adjusted to reflect public feedback received over the last six months.

The presented plan included lower building heights, reduced square footage, the expansion of the Rice Mill Mall and 367 units of affordable housing.

Tecklenburg called Friday a day of celebration and a sigh of relief, stating the city needs to get the proposed neighborhood right.

The mayor said there are six tracks the city will focus on during the pause:

During a June 7 meeting, port officials said the latest plans were adjusted to reflect public feedback received over the last six months.

The presented plan included lower building heights, reduced square footage, the expansion of the Rice Mill Mall and 367 units of affordable housing.

“Today is, in a way, a day of celebration because we kind of breathed a little sigh of relief that we’re going to have a pause, a reset, so we can get this right,” Tecklenburg said.

The mayor said there are six tracks the city will focus on during the pause:

Advocacy organizations applauded the change in process from the ports.

“It needs to be a process that’s independent and third-party and driven by the community first,” Preservation Society of Charleston President and CEO Brian Turner said. “It needs to be proactive, and that’s exactly the puzzle piece that the port is helping us put into place today.”

Melvin said they still want to build a mixed-use neighborhood with parks and waterfront access but hopes the shift could bring a way forward everyone can agree on.

“We are so fortunate to live in a place where people care so much about their city,” Melvin said. “We, too, care deeply about what happens here. We believe that we will have a new plan that all can embrace.”

State Rep. Wendell Gilliard, D-Charleston County, penned a letter to Melvin earlier this week asking to restart the planning process on the redevelopment.

Gilliard said he believes “the best path forward is to pause, reset, and restart the process.” He submitted the letter citing concerns over the lack of communication and transparency while the plans for the land were being created.

“We call upon you to set aside the current plan and begin the process anew, this time including all the affected, interested, and appropriated community leaders and stakeholders,” Gilliard said.

Melvin said the port is listening to the community and considering feedback heard during the June 7 public meeting.

“This is an ongoing, collaborative process with both the city and the community. We have been listening to community members and stakeholders for the past year, and we are continuing to listen,” Melvin said in a statement. “As we consider the community feedback we received from last week’s Planning Commission meeting, we have deepened our conversations with city officials and stakeholders to further evolve the plan.”

Tecklenburg said he will be meeting with the local advocacy groups throughout the day to outline a path forward for the site.

“We have a world-class city where people travel from all over the globe to see this wonderfully fine-grained, historic, walkable city,” Historic Charleston Foundation Chief Advocacy Officer Cashion Drolet said. “We have every opportunity mess that up and one opportunity to get it right.”

Peter Shahid, a councilmember running for Charleston mayor this November, released the following statement on the announcement, which reads in part:

“I commend Barbara Melvin for slowing down the process of redeveloping the Union Pier site. This is a wise decision.”

Clay Middleton, another candidate for Charleston mayor, also released a statement regarding the announcement.

He said, in part, “Never underestimate the power of what a committed group of individuals can do. The citizens of Charleston have spoken. Because of the leadership and advocacy of neighbors and non-profit organizations, the development of the Union Pier site will truly provide the right plan we can be proud of now and a generation yet born will thank us for.”

Ports officials said they ideally would want a revised plan for the pier adopted around July 2024.

They also said they still own the Union Pier site, but it will be put out for bid in the future. However, they do not know who will eventually purchase the land.

Officials outline the future of the Union Pier redevelopment.

Copyright 2023 WCSC. All rights reserved.

The South Carolina Ports Authority has revealed their updated plans for a mixed-use neighborhood to be built on the Union Pier Terminal.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The South Carolina Ports Authority has revealed their updated plans for a mixed-use neighborhood to be built on the Union Pier Terminal.

President and CEO Barbara Melvin said the updated plans will include less density and around an acre of more greenspace, as well as creating a mall with the rice mill façade as a defining feature. They shared renderings of what the potential mall and updated site could look like, Wednesday.

Project Partner Lowe Vice President Jacob Lindsey said the heights of buildings in the neighborhood will range from three stories up to seven stories in the center of the site.

“What we’ll see is buildings that are more articulated than before, buildings that will blend with Charleston better than our previous proposal, and overall, it will create more public spaces for Charlestonians to use forever,” Lindsey said.

Although total costs haven’t been worked out yet, Melvin said private developers would provide money to the city to build and maintain the area’s infrastructure through a tax increment financing district and municipal improvement district.

Compared to the previous plan, Lindsey said the updated plan could cost a little more for public facilities.

Melvin said the updated drawings could be a potential way forward for everyone in the community.

“We believe this plan blends very well community input and what would be desirable for a developer to be a part of,” Melvin said. “There’s always a balance when you’re trying to present a project like this, and we feel like we have found a very good balance, but I stress again, we are still listening.”

However, the Preservation Society of Charleston said the new plans do not go far enough to satisfy their concerns.

“There’s really been no major change from this kind of continued trend, very concerning trend of big buildings marching down the peninsula,” President and CEO Brian Turner said. “This has raised a lot of concern in the community, and the revised plans really do nothing to alleviate our concerns.”

Turner also said the new mall retaining the rice mill façade is a welcome gesture from the state, but he wants the size and heights of the buildings reduced further.

“Those heights and those masses are exactly the same trend of buildings that we have permitted in places like the spine of the peninsula, on the high ground,” Turner said. “We’ve made conscious decisions as a community to move away from them once we get to the waterfront, and so what they’re proposing is a real deviation from our planning norms.”

Officials also said they’re coordinating with the City of Charleston as they work on their peninsula flood protection project with the Army Corps of Engineers to make sure the site works with their designs.

The Ports Authority will be presenting the updated plan to the Charleston Planning Commission at their Thursday night meeting at the Charleston Gailliard Center.

Melvin said they plan to file the updated paperwork for Union Pier on April 17.

“These plans can be improved with public input,” Melvin said. “We think that’s why it’s important for people to stay engaged throughout the rest of the city process because we look forward to what the community is saying.”

Chief Advocacy Officer Cashion Drolet at the Historical Charleston Foundation provided the following statement:

HCF is encouraged by the addition of the open green space surrounding the Bennett Rice Mill façade, as it provides an important view and connection to the water. This is a great start, and we would like to see additional allocation of green space throughout the developable portion of the site. We continue to have concerns over the height and density proposed, as well as compatibility with the exceptional design of our world-renowned historic city. It’s simply too tall and too dense. HCF will continue to advocate for architectural design principles and regulating guidelines to ensure that the future of Union Pier blends in the city’s existing aesthetic and protects the skyline views of steeples and spires.

Copyright 2023 WCSC. All rights reserved.