LOS ANGELES -- Waterfront employers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union put more than 1,000 new longshoremen to work last week at the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach, but dozens of vessels remain backed up at the nation's largest container complex.

The ILWU on Thursday is presenting to the Pacific Maritime Association a proposal to immediately promote 2,000 part-time longshoremen, known as casuals, to registered status. Also, the plan calls for adding 11,000 new casuals to the rolls within eight weeks, said David Arian, president of ILWU Local 13 in Southern California.

The ILWU Thursday held a national press teleconference to address what it terms the port infrastructure crisis on the West Coast. The problems surfaced last year when Union Pacific Railroad's operations suffered from a crew shortage. The railroad has hired thousands of new workers over the past year, but delays of one to two days on its network have continued over the past year.

Also, western rail operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe in June began to suffer capacity problems. It later put all intermodal customers in LA-Long Beach on an allocation system, causing containers to back up on the docks.

According to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, terminal operators were shorted 22 14-man gangs, or work crews, on the Wednesday night shift and were 46 gangs short on the Thursday morning shift. When employers cannot obtain all of the gangs they need, vessels are delayed in port for an extra day or two.

The question of how many casuals to hire and how rapidly they can be trained continues to be a point of disagreement between the ILWU and PMA. James McKenna, president of the PMA, said employers and the union have already agreed to take on 2,000 casuals. Arian said employers insist on testing and training only 60 casuals each week to prepare them for work. Under that process, it would take two years to prepare all 2,000 casuals for dock work, Arian said.

McKenna said traditionally employers and the ILWU have trained 60 casuals per week, but the PMA is prepared to expedite the process. As far as hiring 11,000 new casuals, McKenna said employers may agree to establish a roll of about 11,000 potential casuals, but such a large number could not be immediately trained for work, nor would they all be needed on the docks at this time.

Arian accused employers of delaying the promotion of casual longshoremen to registered status as the labor shortage intensified over the past month. Casuals are paid lower wages and do not receive benefits, saving employers $10-14 an hour, Arian said.

McKenna said employers are ready to promote a certain number of casuals to registered status, but once again, the number that employers feel is needed is less than what the union wants.

While today's labor shortage and infrastructure limitations are severe, they will grow even worse in the years ahead as projections call for more than a doubling of cargo volume in LA-Long Beach by 2020, said Blair Garcia, vice president of strategic planning at TranSystems Corp. in Norfolk, Va.

Garcia said West Coast ports must take a systemic approach to the infrastructure crisis, with ocean carriers, terminal operators and railroads communicating with each other electronically to streamline the transportation supply chain and reduce container dwell time on the docks from an average of seven or eight days at present to less than two days.

By Bill Mongelluzzo