CEA Among 120 Groups Backing Bill To Thwart Repeat of West Coast Ports Slowdown

U.S. economy.” Companies “are still reporting on the impacts to their business from the year long ordeal,” the groups said in a letter to Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Ohio, sponsor of S-1519, the Protecting Orderly and Responsible Transit of Shipments (PORTS) Act. Once the West Coast ports labor impasse was resolved in late February with an interim contract agreement, a “big group” of industry associations and companies “started the process of banging heads together” on a “longer-term fix” to assure the crisis never happens again, said Sage Chandler, CEA vice president-international trade, in a recent interview (see 1504070001). Though the groups in their letter to Gardner expressed “support” for the collective bargaining process, “we do not believe the negotiating process should threaten the interest of the national economy,” they said. Gardner’s bill would amend the National Labor Relations Act to give state governors “a mechanism under federal law to mitigate the destructive impact of port labor disputes on the economy in their state and nationally,” they said. It also would “explicitly include slowdowns as a trigger for Taft-Hartley emergency powers,” not just work stoppages or outright strikes, they said. “We believe this approach correctly reforms the Taft-Hartley process to promote government action in response to the great harm these disputes cause our national economy. Most importantly, the bill clearly defines and expands situations in which Taft-Hartley can be invoked, preventing legal ambiguity from causing inaction.”