imkittymyers at hotmail dot com
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM
Lucianne's blogtruth of the day ...
Dubai Port deal - good or bad? Everyone needs to calm down and take a deep breath.
The critical point is that Dubai Ports World won't be running the port of Baltimore, or any other U.S. port for that matter. What it would be doing, as ex-Rep. Helen Delich Bentley (R-MD), a respected expert on Maritime matters, explained in a Feb. 18th letter, to the "Baltimore Sun," is hiring the longshoremen to load and unload the cargo from the vessels. The Maryland Port Authority, an agency of the state, she underscored, would continue to "run the port of Baltimore's public terminals and be the spokesman for the port in general." Bentley added that this transaction only means that the "UAE's Dubai Ports World will be the firm bidding competitively for contracts to handle cargo coming off or loading on to ships in the six ports where P&O Ports has contracts. Baltimore is one of those ports."
(2) It is also important to emphasize that the vast majority of the cargo handling in the six U.S. ports mentioned above is done by union labor, who are locally based workers. They are card carrying members of the International Longshorman's Association (AFL-CIO), which is headquartered in New York City.
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