By Molly Parker
mparker@scbiznews.com
Published Dec. 23, 2008

Lawmakers, union officials, port executives and Maersk representatives gathered for a several-hour meeting Monday afternoon in Charleston.

It was a sign that the shipping line’s decision to leave the Port of Charleston by 2011 might not be so final.

Previous stories on the Maersk pullout:
Maersk threatens to leave port
Maersk pulling out of port of Charleston
Maersk decision to leave rattles state
Port of Charleston's biggest customer

S.C. State Ports Authority CEO Bernard Groseclose said afterward that he was “very hopeful” the parties could reach an accord that would keep Maersk in Charleston.

“If you ask Maersk, they will say they made their decision and they announced it last week,” Groseclose said. “But they said, offered scenarios — while it wouldn’t be easy to change their course, they would evaluate those.”

Still, Groseclose was careful not to oversell the discussion. Maersk has already made plans to move one service — the South Atlantic Express — to nearby ports starting in January. That service represents about a quarter of its business here.

The group did not get into the details of negotiations, Groseclose said, but rather talked about Maersk’s willingness to reconsider. No future meeting date was set, but Groseclose said he would be talking with the interested parties via telephone at least once more before Christmas.

Maersk’s announcement last week that it would pull out of Charleston by Dec. 31, 2010, the day its contract expires, was a stinging blow to the maritime community and related businesses across the state. Maersk is the world’s largest shipping line and Charleston’s biggest customer, representing about 20% of the port’s container business.

In making its exit announcement on Dec. 18, the Danish company blamed the International Longshoremen’s Association for forcing its hand. The union recently voted against a request by the company to move to the port’s common-user yard, where SPA employees run the gates.

Maersk said the move would help it cut costs, but doing so would be a departure from the international contract between the world’s major shipping lines and the ILA. It would also eliminate a few dozen union jobs at a time when working hours are already significantly down.

ILA Local 1422 president Ken Riley was among the attendees at Monday’s meeting. Groseclose did not say whether the union would reconsider its earlier vote to deny Maersk’s request.

“Everybody in the room expressed an interest in keeping Maersk here, and everybody was interested in looking at what can be done to keep them here,” Groseclose said.

Maersk is currently operating as a licensed user at the port. That means Maersk has its own dedicated terminal space and hires a stevedoring company to manage gate labor that is supplied by the ILA. It would give up that space if it moved to the common-user yard.  

At the Port of Charleston, most of the labor is unionized, but about 370 SPA employees who don’t belong to a union handle half of the terminal gate operations and all container lifting equipment. Union workers do everything else, regardless of what gates the shipping lines use. Given that, the union stands to lose a lot more workers than the few dozen clerks and checkers that currently manage Maersk’s gate should the company pull out.

For Groseclose’s part, the chief executive said he plans to work as hard as possible to reach an accord. Businesses across the Southeast rely on Maersk to import and export their goods.

“It would put not only the local waterfront community but business across this state at a disadvantage to not have that access to the global market,” he said.

Reach Molly Parker at 843-849-3144