Heavy-Duty Abuse Part of Dock Life for Women : Labor: Longshoremen are slow to accept them as equals in the hard task of shiploading. But the pay is a strong attraction.

With a bachelor’s degree in German and French and a master’s in education, Shanaz Ardehali-Kordich never figured she would wear steel-toed boots and a hard hat to work.

But in 1985, three years after a federal lawsuit cleared the way for women to load and unload cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the one-time school librarian and creative writing teacher decided she could make a better living working the docks.

Today she is part of a local industry that, at least on the surface, has made great strides toward breaking down sex barriers in a profession that for centuries has been dominated by men. Of the 2,837 registered longshore workers in Los Angeles Harbor, 245 are women, and industry sources say that figure is greater than at any other major port in the country.

But as Ardehali-Kordich and other longshore workers--both men and women--attest, the numbers do not tell the whole story. While some women say life on the waterfront is just fine, others have reported a wide range of harassment--from dirty jokes to death threats.

“For so long,” Ardehali-Kordich explains, “the docks have been a boys’ club. Women just weren’t allowed. . . . And then all of a sudden they let women in and there was a lot of--and there still is--men going home to their wives and telling them, ‘I had to work with this dumb broad today and she didn’t know how to do anything.’ ”

Eight years after the signing of the so-called “Golden Decree”--the court order that opened the docks to women--there are still no female supervisors on the waterfront. And though the longshoremen’s union did recently elect its first woman executive board member, women are working far fewer hours than men and thus within the union, far fewer are being promoted from probationary to permanent status.

At a federal court hearing in February, the union--Local 13 of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union--and the Pacific Maritime Assn., the organization that represents the terminal operators who employ longshoremen, agreed to grant permanent status to the latest group of women hired. But at least six women dock workers who spoke out at that hearing say they have since received repeated death threats and have been physically harassed by their male co-workers.

One suspects fellow longshoremen of killing her cat with rat poison and pouring sugar in the gas tank of her car. Another said she was recently spit on while dozens of men applauded. “The same man,” she said, “two times has threatened me that if I was ever on his ship and he was on the crane he would make sure that I was crushed.”

Yet even before this most recent clash, men have not exactly rolled out the welcome mat for women. Last year, a Local 13 official issued a written apology after making what he termed “regrettable remarks concerning our women work force” during a stewards’ meeting.

Other men, meanwhile, feel no need to apologize. They complain that women are not strong enough to do the work, that they sign up for assignments they can’t handle and that, especially on jobs that require heavy lifting, men have to “carry” women--do extra work to make up for them.

“I think they ought to be at home wearing their aprons, washing dishes,” said one dock worker.

And, most men do not seem to look forward to having women supervisors. “We’re waiting to see who the first woman boss is going to be,” said a longshoreman who, like the others, would not be named. “It would be real hard for me to take orders from a woman.”

This is, of course, not the official union view. Rene Herrera, president of Local 13, says anyone who can handle the work is welcome on the docks.

“The one good thing about the waterfront is it allows you the chance to prove yourself,” Herrera said. “When a person comes down and proves they can do the job, the waterfront opens its arms to them. And when a person comes down and proves to be a crybaby or a whiner, whether it’s a man or a woman, they’ve never been accepted down here.”

Sometimes, men’s feelings toward women crop up in a benign, subtle way. Explained Astrid Thangren, a dock worker for the last five years: “A man will say, ‘Oh here, let me get that for you.’ And right then he puts you in a less powerful position. All of a sudden, there it is, the male-female role.”

But others are more blatant. Sexist graffiti, for example, routinely pops up on cranes and shipping terminal walls around the harbor. “Women go home,” is one of the few sayings fit to print.

Some women say they have become inured to such remarks.

“Hey, that’s the territory,” said Lori Sullivan, a 28-year-old dock worker who said she loves her job and is treated well by her male colleagues. “You can’t change something that’s been around forever. You just turn the other cheek.”

Indeed, ever since there has been shipping, the hard, heavy job of stevedoring--loading and removing cargo--has been a man’s domain. The very title “longshoreman” is a derivative of “alongshoreman,” which evolved from calls in colonial times for “men along the shore” to unload and load ships.

Even today, with the introduction of women into the work force not only in Los Angeles but in small numbers in other parts of the country as well, the name remains unchanged. In industry circles, there is no such thing as a “longshorewoman.” They are called “women longshoremen.”

It is without a doubt a dangerous job. According to a study published last year by the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, there were 17 injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time longshore workers in 1987, more than double the national rate for all private industries that year.

Moreover, the study found, the number of lost workdays due to injury--422 days per 100 full-time workers--was the highest of any industry and six times greater than the national rate for industrial injuries.

Yet the work has gotten easier over the last two decades, with mechanization bringing about dramatic changes in the way dockworkers do their jobs. At least at Los Angeles Harbor, much of longshoring now involves driving--either forklifts, trucks or the foreign cars that arrive at the ports by the thousands.

Still, some tasks are grimy and intimidating. Longshoremen must be willing to climb up greasy ladders and wrestle with the often rusty chains that secure the vessel’s cargo, which can be anything from boxes of grapes to huge farm tractors. They must be willing to ride in an open crane basket five or six stories high to the top of a container-laden ship, and then lean over the edge of the massive containers to remove the steel locks that keep them in place.

For all the danger and the aching muscles, the pay in longshoring is good. And that’s what attracts most people to it.

Thangren, for instance, was earning $7 an hour as a pattern maker for a children’s clothing company when, in 1984, she decided to quit and become a “casual” longshore worker--a non-union member who picks up jobs on an infrequent basis. Two months ago, she was registered as a union member; her hourly wage is now $15.

Depending on experience, dock workers can earn as much as $20 an hour. With overtime, an industrious longshoreman can earn $45,000 a year. Another bonus, especially for mothers, is the flexible schedule; if the kids are sick or there’s a school play to attend, all they need do is not show up at the dispatch hall for work.

One woman who is raising her young daughter alone said that for her, longshoring is a matter of financial independence. “When I got a divorce,” she said, “I started thinking, ‘What could I do to support myself so I didn’t have to go through another bad relationship?’ ” Ironically, though, the women who 10 years ago brought the class-action suit that helped land this woman and 244 others their jobs had no desire to do longshore work.

Rather, they wanted to be clerks.

The marine clerks, who are paid equally well as longshoremen and are also members of the ILWU, keep records of the cargo that comes through the harbor. Traditionally, clerk openings have been filled by longshoremen who have paid their dues on the docks and want to take it easy before retiring. On the waterfront--a place replete with its own expressions--clerking is known as “a gravy job.”

In 1979, a small group of women, most of them daughters of longshoremen, complained to lawyer A. Thomas Hunt that they had been unfairly denied jobs as clerks. At that time, Hunt said, there were 359 male clerks and just one woman--and the woman had been admitted under a special waiver that allows wives and daughters of deceased union members to fill their slots.

Hunt went to U.S. District Court and filed a class-action civil rights suit against the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Assn. (PMA). Although the suit initially sought only to force the hiring of women as clerks, it was later expanded to include longshore jobs as well.

The case was eventually settled in 1982 with the Golden Decree, named after one of the original plaintiffs. It calls for women to eventually hold 20% of all longshore jobs and 25% of all clerks jobs. To meet those goals, the union and the PMA are currently required to offer 30% of all clerks jobs and 35% of all longshore jobs to women.

So far, according to figures provided by the PMA, women hold 20% of the clerks jobs and 8.6% of the longshore jobs.

By contrast, there are no women dock workers in Boston, although there are women clerks. In Seattle, there are 510 longshore workers; about a dozen are women. In Savannah, Ga., the longshore work force of 600 includes just one woman. In Norfolk, Va., union officials estimate that, including clerks, about 5% of the 2,000 dock workers are women.

And at the Port of New York/New Jersey--the only port complex in the United States that is larger than the ports at Los Angeles Harbor--officials said just 16 of the 6,000 longshore workers are women. The small number is in part due to a lack of opportunity; there haven’t been any longshore openings in New York Harbor for more than a decade. But even when there were openings in 1979, only 55 of the more than 700 stevedores hired were women.

At Los Angeles Harbor, PMA officials say women have generally performed well, especially in driving jobs. However, according to Chuck Wallace, the PMA’s area manager, women “flop”--turn down--more jobs than men and on the whole, they work fewer hours.

No one seems to have a concrete explanation for this. Hunt blames it on poor recruitment efforts by the PMA and the union, women say it is because they have pressing family obligations and some men say it is because women don’t want to--or can’t--do the work.

Whatever the reason, the disparity means that women are being elevated to permanent status at a much slower rate than men. According to the PMA, of the more than probationary 100 dock workers promoted since October, only four were women. The remaining probationers, including more than 60 women, will be elevated under the agreement reached in February.

Given the forthcoming elevations--and the overall number of women working the Los Angeles docks--Hunt says he is pleased with the progress made since the Golden Decree.

But the tension between men and women, he said, is another matter entirely: “There’s really almost nothing you can do about it. We can’t go down there and tell them to straighten out their attitudes.”

Those who work there say it is no surprise that traditional male-female images die hard on the waterfront. In some ways, it is a place stuck in time, a real-life caricature of those old Hollywood movies that depict the rough and colorful world of the docks.

Family relationships are important; many longshoremen are related to one another. And allegiance to the union is paramount.

Proud longshoremen often recall the general strike in San Francisco in 1934, in which two dock workers died at the hands of police. And they don’t appreciate it when anybody messes with their union--not the press, not U.S. District Court Judge Robert M. Tagasuki, who has presided over the integration of the docks, and especially not the women who were let into the union as a result.

“I’ve been down here for 39 years,” groused longshoreman Eddie Marconi recently as he supervised the unloading of 109,000 cases of bananas that had just come in from Ecuador. “I got a son at home and I can’t bring my son into this union because we’ve got to bring all these women down here, and this is because of them lousy laws this Tagasuki is coming up with down there in L.A.”

Women like Ardehali-Kordich say they don’t expect such views to change any time soon. “In education and in school,” she said, “I was respected for what I knew and for what I could do. And then all of a sudden I get down here and you’re essentially treated like crud, like you’re a second-class citizen. I used to get really angry, but I don’t get angry any more. I think I’ve just accepted it.”