Locals suggest alcohol may have been a factor. By Olivia Carville , Matt Bowen and Times reporters. -------------------- As a stricken container ship, aground on Tauranga's Astrolabe Reef, continues to take on water, local boaties have begun the search for blame.

They are astounded as to how the 236-metre modern ship Rena ended up on the isolated reef yesterday, with one Ports of Auckland insider saying human error was the most likely cause.

Local sailor Darryl Herbert likened the incident to "hitting a coffee cup in the middle of the harbour" because the reef - at 80m or so wide and about 12 kilometres from Tauranga Harbour - is so small. It is well known and almost always visible.

Whispers of alcohol being involved in the collision have started to surface, but Maritime New Zealand (MNZ) won't confirm or deny if alcohol was a factor. Local police had not boarded the vessel to do any breath or alcohol tests.

Mr Herbert has lived and sailed Tauranga waters all his life. "If you tried to run into the Astrolabe you would probably turn 10 times and keep missing it," he said.

Asked what he would be thinking if he was the captain of the Rena, he replied: "I'd probably be looking at early retirement."

The reef was well marked on charts and the first or chief officer would have had to have created a track around the reef and had it confirmed before setting off, he said.

"There are a lot of ways human error can occur, fatigue is one."

A spokesman for the Port of Tauranga Seafarers Centre could not fathom how the ship had hit the reef.

Several other boaties spoken to by the Waikato Times were also perplexed.

The Rena was doing a steady 17 knots (31 kmh) when it ran aground about 2.30am yesterday.

During an aerial flight over the lodged vessel, the Times saw the huge ship stranded in open water, leaning precariously to the port side.

It is carrying 2017 cargo units and Maritime NZ, which is investigating the incident, believed some contained dangerous goods.

The agency monitored the situation overnight and was this morning assessing how to pursue the salvage operation.

The front of the ship has been taking on water but a pump had been working constantly to keep it under control, Maritime NZ said.

The 25 Filipino crew members were unhurt and spent last night on the vessel.

Maritime NZ said it could take days, even weeks, to salvage the ship and any decision to take the crew off the vessel lay with the master.

It was not known whether the Rena had come into Tauranga port before.

International Transport Workers Federation inspectorate Grahame McLaren said the Rena had only recently started visiting the country and he was not aware of any New Zealand-based complaints against it.

However, in August the Australian Maritime Safety Authority ordered the Rena detained for more than a day after it found the 32-year-old ship had several serious deficiencies.

Rena is owned by Costamare Inc, of Greece, and was under the charter of the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC).

MSC NZ general manager Phil Abraham said salvage people would look at the ship this morning to ascertain how to get the cargo off.

An oil sheen could be sighted from the air above the vessel yesterday but Maritime NZ said it was hydraulic oil from the engine, which was "quite normal" and would break up naturally.

The heavy fuel tanks were reportedly damaged but still intact last night. An oil spill response team is on high alert in Tauranga.

Environment groups say a large oil spill would be devastating for the vast array of flora and fauna in Tauranga Harbour and its surrounds. Lydia Hale, the sustainability co- ordinator at the Tauranga Environment Centre, said the area was home to one of the only mainland colonies of little blue penguins and grey-faced petrels (also known as North Island mutton birds) in New Zealand.

She said a government-funded project on Tauranga Harbour had identified many birds, fish and shellfish living in the area, all of which could be harmed.

CAPTION:

Stuck fast: The cargo ship Rena ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef, about 12 kilometres off Port Tauranga.

Picture: Chris Hillock/Fairfax NZ

When the International Longshore and Warehouse Union violently protested the hiring of non-ILWU workers at a Pacific Northwest grain elevator, the union's East and Gulf Coast counterparts were quick to offer moral support.

Harold Daggett, newly elected president of the International Longshoremen's Association, said his union would provide "any help it can." Ken Riley, an ILA vice president from Charleston, S.C., accompanied Bob McEllrath when the ILWU president surrendered to face misdemeanor charges for blockading a train at the EGT terminal in Longview, Wash.

The ILA's symbolic gestures were a sign of increasingly close ties between the ILWU and ILA, a development that's raised concern among shippers in advance of next year's ILA contract negotiations. Those concerns were heightened this month when the Panama Canal Pilots Union signed on as an ILWU affiliate.

Related: ILA, ILWU Not Going Away .

As shippers and carriers become increasingly global in their operations, the major U.S. longshore unions are pursuing their own form of globalization through partnerships with each other and with overseas labor organizations.

Daggett is pledging to work with the ILWU and the International Transport Workers Federation, a London-based umbrella group, to organize workers "up and down the logistics chain," including dockworkers at Freeport, Bahamas, and other Caribbean transshipment hubs.

"It is my intention to bring the ILA closer to the ILWU, as we have many matters of mutual interest in dealing with management in protecting our jurisdictions and memberships," Daggett told ILA convention delegates in July.

Underscoring his desire for closer ties with the ILWU, Daggett invited McEllrath to sit in as an observer during next year's ILA contract negotiations. "We'll be there, because we are one," the ILWU president said.

ILWU spokesman Craig Merrilees said Daggett's statements reflect "a growing understanding that as the companies we work for have a global reach, the unions need to cooperate at an unprecedented level on the international scene."

The cooperative talk represents a significant shift from the dock unions' sometimes strained relationship over the years. The talk may make shippers and carriers nervous, but legal and practical issues may limit the extent to which the talk will lead to concrete action.

The ILA and ILWU have made no move to seek common contract expiration dates, which would increase their negotiating leverage but would invite a public backlash against an all-ports strike. The ILA's current contract expires Sept. 30, 2012; the ILWU's in July 2014.

And although Daggett has pledged full support to the ILWU in its dispute with the EGT grain elevator in Longview, Wash., it's not clear what the ILA can provide beyond moral support. Secondary boycotts, or sympathy strikes supporting other unions in unrelated disputes, are illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act.

However, every job action isn't a formal strike. The ILWU is infamous for "hard-timing" employers through tactics such as work slowdowns that disrupt operations and force employers to pay longshoremen working at half-speed.

The U.S. dock unions' cultivation of closer ties with their overseas counterparts also is getting the attention of shippers. The ILA and ILWU have long been active in the International Transport Workers Federation, and occasionally have sought and received help from unions in other countries.

The ILWU has proved its ability to make even loose international cooperative pacts work effectively. West Coast dockworkers have boycotted ships loaded in Asian and Australian ports in response to calls for cooperation for dockworkers in those countries, and overseas unions have reciprocated by supporting ILWU requests for help.

Last year, the ILWU supported Costa Rica dockworkers resisting port privatization. Merrilees said armed military forces supported efforts to replace the existing union with "puppet union leaders." But with ILWU assistance, "the union dockworkers were able to resist that attempt and they held on to their jobs."

The ILA has been less visible on the international front. However, Ken Riley, a member of the union's activist Longshore Workers Coalition, credits the ITF's Spanish dockworker affiliate with pressuring Nordana Line to rescind a 2000 decision to hire non-union longshoremen.

Five ILA members, including Riley's brother Leonard, were arrested after a melee that followed Nordana's hiring of non-union workers at Charleston. The ILWU's Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area called a one-day work stoppage in support of the "Charleston 5."

Over the years, the ILWU has periodically conducted boycotts simply to make a political statement. The union has limited those actions since Joseph Miniace, president of the Pacific Maritime Association employers group in the 1990s, began bypassing waterfront grievance procedures and taking the ILWU to court.

International labor solidarity remains part of the ILWU's "bedrock foundation," but that principle "has to be done according to the rules and processes we work with under the contract," Merrilees said.

To avoid lawsuits alleging illegal secondary boycotts, recent ILWU job actions have been targeted at specific employers and limited in duration.

An example came in early September when ILWU locals closed container ports at Seattle and Tacoma to join the union's demonstrators at Longview. The ILWU's international office in San Francisco disavowed responsibility for the shutdown, and Seattle and Tacoma workers were back on the job for the next shift. ILWU locals in Southern California stayed on the job.

Under its longtime leader Teddy Gleason, the ILA was fond of using boycotts to express its views on foreign policy and other issues, often from a diametrically opposite point of view from the left-leaning ILWU.

The ILA lost its enthusiasm for international boycotts after being socked with a nearly $10 million legal judgment for boycotting Russian ships and cargoes following the Soviets' 1980 invasion of Afghanistan.

Now the ILA is fighting a $6 million damage suit filed by the New York Shipping Association over a two-day work stoppage last fall in support of Philadelphia dockworkers protesting the shift of Fresh Del Monte's fruit imports to a non-ILA terminal.

Carriers involved in the NYSA lawsuit said they pressed legal action not only to recoup losses from the surprise work stoppage, but also to warn the ILA that employers wouldn't accept similar actions without fighting back.

The current ILA-ILWU cooperation is aimed not merely at employers but at fending off incursions into traditional longshore work by unions including the Teamsters and Seafarers International Union on the East and Gulf coasts, and the International Union of Operating Engineers in Longview, Wash.

The ILWU's dispute with the EGT grain terminal at Longview stems from the company's hiring of a subcontractor employing members of the operating engineers union. At Philadelphia, the ILA is upset with Fresh Del Monte's shift to a terminal employing members of a small independent union.

Speaking at the ILA convention last July, McEllrath noted the word "longshoremen" dates to the sailing-ship era when seafarers docked their ships and asked for dockside help by calling out, "Along shore, men! Along shore, men!"

"They didn't drift up to the dock and say, 'Along shore, Teamsters!' 'Along shore, SIU!' 'Along shore, operating engineers!' " McEllrath said. "These are our jobs, and we are going to take them back."

ILWU protests at Longview began last summer when demonstrators blocked a BNSF Railway train from carrying grain to the EGT terminal. Despite a federal judge's restraining order, union demonstrators this month blocked another BNSF train, dumped grain from railcars, damaged terminal property and threatened workers.

The ILWU has gone to the mat with EGT because the union sees much more at stake than just the few dozen jobs at the grain terminal. The ILWU is determined to avoid what happened in the 1980s to the ILA, which lost virtually all its bulk cargo and much of its breakbulk work after high costs drove shippers to seek non-ILA alternatives.

The ILA's bulk and breakbulk losses didn't spread to the union's container business. Unlike bulk and breakbulk operators, major container lines are tied to the ILA's coastwide master contract.

Likewise, the ILWU's dispute at Longview is separate from the West Coast union's relationship with container lines represented by the Pacific Maritime Association. ILWU locals engaged in container work normally don't become involved in contract disputes at Pacific Northwest grain terminals, which are covered by separate contracts. The bulk shipping operators that call at the grain terminals have, at best, limited affiliation with the container lines.

A similar situation exists with other ILWU-affiliated unions such as the Office Clerical Union in Southern California. The OCU has been working without a contract for the past year and, even though McEllrath has sat in on negotiations, the ILWU workers at the container terminals have refrained from taking job actions to support the OCU workers.

Notwithstanding the fears of many retailers and other shippers, the ILWU's new partnership with the Panama Canal Pilots Union does not appear to be an attempt by two powerful unions to place a chokehold on Asia-U.S. trade.

Merrilees said the ILWU and Panamanians will discuss the framework of their partnership in the coming months but will wait until the ILWU convention next July 2012 before voting on the details of the pact.

If the relationship between the ILWU and ILWU Canada is any guide, the Panama partnership will most likely be a loose arrangement in which each union has its own contract with different starting dates. Panamanian law prohibits canal pilots from striking, and any ILWU sympathy strike would almost certainly be met by a secondary-boycott lawsuit by the PMA.

And ILWU Canada seemed to suggest at last month's Journal of Commerce Canada Maritime Conference that there are limits to cross-border labor cooperation when it comes to job-generating cargo volume.

At a session on what U.S. ports say is unfair Canadian government support that is luring trans-Pacific container volume to the Port of Prince Rupert, ILWU Canada President Tom Dufresne said the Canadian port boasted "a motivated work force that's dedicated to doing a good job."

The International Maritime Employers’ Committee (IMEC) now has more than 750 cadets in its enhanced training programme, split equally between the deck and engine disciplines. In late June, 250 cadets joined the scheme being run at the Maritime Academy of Asia and the Pacific (MAAP) and at the University of Cebu (UC), both in the Philippines.

“The past couple of months have been an extremely busy time for us within the enhanced cadet programme. A further 26 IMEC cadets graduated from MAAP in June and are now studying for the final licence examinations. We expect them all to be qualified by November,” Adam Lewis, IMEC’s manager, operations and training, told SASI.

“Over the past 12 months we have also invested heavily within computer-based training. Through the unique funding of the programme by the International Maritime Training Trust (IMTT) we have purchased a suite of computers loaded with the Seagull program at both of the colleges. This investment has been made to ensure our cadets have the very best resources available to them during their individual study periods,” he added.

The IMTT receives payments refunded from the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) Welfare Fund under an agreement made at the International Bargaining Forum. Last year the trust approved a grant at University of Cebu for hydraulic and pneumatic training laboratories, a GMDSS simulator and an engine simulator with a connection to the bridge simulator. Lewis said: “All of our cadets at UC have access to this new equipment, which ensures our training remains modern and meets the requirements of our members.”

IMEC is not just active in the Philippines, for it funds an English language programme in the Russia. The course runs within the Admiral Ushakov Maritime State Academy in Novorossiysk and the Maritime University in Vladivostok.

The programme comprises two 100-hour courses, elementary and pre-intermediate, which are open to any cadet within the academies. The aim of the programme is to bring the cadets’ English language ability to a level that allows them to communicate effectively with fellow crew members and shoreside personnel.

***Coast Guard leads Maritime Week's nationwide coastal clean-up drive