By Molly Parker
mparker@scbiznews.com
Published July 31, 2009
The S.C. State Ports Authority is eliminating 17 dockworkers from its rolls and requiring that all employees take a two-day furlough.
In total, the plan is expected to save the ports authority $1 million. The authority will save $750,000 from the staff reduction and $250,000 from the mandatory unpaid time off, interim CEO John Hassell said.
“We’re like any other organization that functions in the business world. We have to carefully monitor circumstances and react accordingly,” Hassell said.
The staff reduction takes the employee headcount from 541 to 524. No one from the authority’s administrative staff has been laid off, though all employees, including management, must take two days of unpaid vacation before July 2010. Some administrative and operating positions have been eliminated through attrition.
This savings was not included in the fiscal 2010 budget that the SPA board approved in June.
“To be perfectly honest, I was not ready to take this action six to eight weeks ago,” Hassell said. “I think all of us wanted to satisfy that we had explored every other alternative to this action.”
The layoffs come after a “very deliberative process and numerous other steps to reduce expenses,” the SPA said in a statement. Those include not filling vacant positions, deferring capital expenses, freezing wages and salaries, and asking employees for suggestions on ways to save money, the authority said.
The affected employees work at the SPA’s marine terminals, in jobs such as gate operations, container handling and maintenance. The positions will be eliminated as of Saturday.
Four of the impacted employees have been offered openings in other departments, Hassell said. Three of the four employees have accepted the new positions; the other one has until Monday to decide.
The SPA said it plans to offer outplacement services, workshops and other consultation to help the impacted employees find work elsewhere. The authority called the layoffs a “direct result of market conditions in the international shipping industry. From January to May, the number of shipping containers moving through U.S. ports dropped 20% from the same five months last year.
The SPA is anticipating a 6% decline in container traffic for fiscal 2010, on top of the nearly 20% drop the SPA expects to report for fiscal 2009.
The staff reduction comes less than a year after the SPA awarded a half million dollars in employee bonuses as a reward for hitting earnings goals. Of that amount, about $280,000 worth of bonuses went to the executive team and the rest to rank-and-file employees.
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The SPA was roundly criticized for awarding the bonuses last fall. The rewards were doled out based on results in the previous fiscal year, but the payday timing coincided with the capital market implosion that tanked world trade.
The SPA is re-engineering its bonus plan to tie it more closely to container traffic instead of profits. But Hassell said the bonuses would not have been able to save the current positions that are being eliminated and were owed to employees under a board-approved plan.
“The 17 employees, assuming they were on board and qualified, all benefited from the bonuses paid out in September,” Hassell said.
Reach Molly Parker at 843-849-3144.
