Bad, Bad Ports Authority

Less than a year after padding the wallets of its top bureaucrats with a quarter million dollars worth of “performance” bonuses, the S.C. State Ports Authority (SPA) is now laying off workers and forcing all of its employees to take mandatory furloughs.

Yeah … happy pink slips and unpaid holidays, everybody! Yippee!

Of course none of the SPA’s worthless bureaucrats got the ax, they decided instead to let the bad news fall on seventeen dock workers (i.e. less “important” people). And in typical asshole Ports Authority fashion, this bad news was rolled out on a Friday in the middle of the political “slow season” so as to attract the minimum of public attention.

Thankfully, this latest in a long line of anti-competitive shenanigans down at Bill Stern‘s ass-backward SPA did not escape the attention of the Charleston Regional Business Journal and their crack reporter Molly Parker.

To wit:

The staff reduction comes less than a year after the SPA awarded a half million dollars in employee bonuses as a reward for hitting earnings goals. Of that amount, about $280,000 worth of bonuses went to the executive team and the rest to rank-and-file employees.
The SPA was roundly criticized for awarding the bonuses last fall. The rewards were doled out based on results in the previous fiscal year, but the payday timing coincided with the capital market implosion that tanked world trade.

The SPA is re-engineering its bonus plan to tie it more closely to container traffic instead of profits. But Hassell said the bonuses would not have been able to save the current positions that are being eliminated and were owed to employees under a board-approved plan.

“The 17 employees, assuming they were on board and qualified, all benefited from the bonuses paid out in September,” Hassell said.

Yeah we’re sure they “benefited” from those bonuses … right before they got the dreaded “Dear Dock Worker …” letter.

Anyway, the story also notes that the SPA is anticipating a 6% decline in container traffic for the coming year, which is on top of the almost 20% drop that’s expected this year. Again, nothing new there … South Carolina’s government-run ports have been dropping like a rock in the rankings for years.

Of course rather than deciding to give up state control and run the port more like a business, our lawmakers have (surprise, surprise) decided to seize additional control for themselves.

Can’t wait to see how that works out …