Word: longshoremen
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...most easily seen anywhere needed imports arrive. Every Iranian port on the Persian Gulf, from Abadan to Bandar Abbas, has become not a gateway but a bottleneck. Dock facilities are totally inadequate to handle the volume of goods that have been ordered. Despite round-the-clock shifts for longshoremen and feverish construction of new piers, the average time for a ship to get a berth is an almost incredible 150 days...
Once the agreement was signed, President Ford lifted the two-month moratorium on new sales to the Soviets from this year's crop; he had imposed it at about the time longshoremen began refusing to load ships with wheat bound for Russia. The Soviets, who face a disastrous harvest, as much as 56 million tons below the planners' target of 215 million tons, are now free to buy from this year's record U.S. crop. The U.S.S.R. had signed contracts to buy 10 million tons before the embargo; it probably will buy about 7 million tons more...
Minimum Level. The moves are largely political and are aimed most immediately at mollifying big labor. AFL-CIO President George Meany had denounced the grain purchases as part of maintaining a "phony" détente with the Russians. Responding to Ford's announcement, longshoremen called off their boycott of Russian-bound wheat; they had refused to load it, then complied with injunctions ordering them back to work. Ford also gave assurance that negotiations over shipping rates paid by the Russians would go on, to ensure that at least one-third of the grain would be carried in U.S. vessels...
...sign of the increasing edginess in Washington is the rising controversy over the sale of American grain to the Soviet Union. The Ford Administration has publicly endorsed the sale but the AFL-CIO's president, George Meany, vowed that the International Longshoremen's Association would not load such grain unless Ford did more to "protect the American consumer and the American shipping industry." He declared that the Administration must come to him with such guarantees and "with Dr. Kissinger at the head of the parade." Growled Meany: "Foreign policy is too damned important to be left...
...American grain is unusual, to say the least. Up in Washington, Meany & Co. last week continued to denounce the grain deal, and to insist that the "boycott" of Soviet ships would continue. But meanwhile down at the Gulf Coast grain ports, loading was going on as usual. The longshoremen have in fact been kept working by court injunctions ever since their job action was announced two weeks ago, and they seem unperturbed. Said Luther Wiggins Jr., a union official in Houston: "If the judge says we load ships, we load ships...