LA-Long beach yard crane productivity is choked by mega ships cargo surges and all focus must concentrate on productivity in this quarter, said the president of the biggest International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) local in southern California, Bobby Olvera.

Mr Olvera, president of Local 13, told a Toy Industry Association seminar that this is a key performance indicator because yard cranes deliver inbound boxes from stacks to trucks that take them away.

The training and dispatching of yard crane operators was one of the issues that contributed to the congestion that crippled west coast ports during the eight-month docker contract talks, reported Newark's Journal of Commerce.

Pam’s vice president of labour relations, Chad Lindsay, said the PMA has been training crane operators all along, but as a result of the contract negotiations, both parties agreed to train another 250 operators using state-of-the-art simulators.

Each trainee will go through an intensive 23-day course, and the result that Los Angeles-Long Beach will have "the best crane operators in the US, bar none", Mr Olvera said.

The ILWU leader also called on the other participants in the supply chain, especially cargo interests, to do their part to reduce marine terminal congestion.

"The marine terminal is not a storage yard. Containers should come off the ship and move out the gate," he said.

Ideally, importers should keep their warehouses open round the clock, and terminals should work through the night, to move containers to distribution centres while the roads are not congested. "The third shift is underutilised," Mr Olvera said.

Vessels should be stowed in Asia so boxes are sequenced to come off and placed in upper piles to allow truckers to take them in a free-flow operation, Mr Olvera said.

Information technology is available to make more effective stowage in Asian ports possible, he said.

Overall port productivity would also be enhanced if terminal operators would agree upon a single operating system for the harbour, he added.

In Los Angeles-Long Beach, there are 13 container terminals and 13 terminal operating systems. "None of them are compatible," he said.

Mr Lindsay and Mr Olvera agreed it is time to right-size the labour force and open the longshore rolls for more part-time workers, known as casuals. The last time the rolls were opened in southern California was in 2004.