Doesn’t take a long time if you have the right “connections”, but it is difficult to get in. For a Union gig they get paid very well.

It’s definitely a highly coveted position

It's incredibly difficult to get a job at the port nowadays despite them desperately needing people.

Honestly, the whole agency is really bizarre. The headlines from their news releases all look like they could be from the 1950s. All of these headlines are from this past year:

1. Nine Members and Associated of Genovese and Bonanno Organized Crime Families Charged with Racketeering and Illegal Gambling Offenses
2. Genovese Soldiers Elia “Chinatown’ Albanese and Carmine “Baby Carm” Russo and Seven Others Arrested After Joint Investigation
3. Gambino Crime Family Captain Sentenced to 37 Months in Prison and Ordered to Pay $1 Million in Restitution for Racketeering Conspiracy

And apparently, the agency themselves are engaged in seriously shady activity. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/nyregion/12waterfront.html

>The 61-page report, deploring a “complete breakdown of the commission’s audit and enforcement functions,” found that the commission’s general counsel, Jon Deutsch, later fired, masterminded a scheme to conceal a convicted felon’s ownership of a company so he could continue to operate on the waterfront. It also found that federal antiterrorism grants were misused or could not be accounted for, calling for further investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.
>
>The reported failings ranged from the critical to the comical. The report said the commission often stalemated by differences between the two $43,500-a-year commissioners abandoned background checks on the longshoremen who unload ships and the stevedoring companies that employ them, creating a critical breach in the nation’s security web. Instead, the report said, commission detectives spent their mornings parked in the commissioners’ designated parking spots in Lower Manhattan, guarding them from interlopers.
>
>It portrayed the agency as a patronage-laden favor bank where staff members took cars for personal use, a boat that was bought with federal money to fend off a “waterborne attack” was used primarily to ferry V.I.P.’s during Fleet Week, and friends got friends jobs with high salaries and little work.
>
>One detective failed his entry exam twice, for example until Commissioner Madonna himself slipped him the test, the report said, and he ended up turning in the highest score in the history of the commission.
>
>“The most egregious instances of misconduct” were committed by the general counsel and former licensing director, Mr. Deutsch, who was “plagued with conflicts of interest” before being dismissed last October, the report said. It said he covered up the drug-related arrest of a former state senator’s son who was hired for a stevedoring job and intervened on behalf of a friend’s father, Albert Cernades Sr., a longshoremen’s union official later indicted in a federal inquiry.
>
>It also found that none of the 53 stevedoring companies supervised by the commission had been granted permanent five-year licenses, as required, and that payroll audits of them were as much as 14 years behind.

Yikes.

Now New Jersey wants out and New York refuses to let them leave, so it's going to the Supreme Court.

According to the Commission's press reports, they've been cleaning up Genovese and Bonanno activity all year.

Only in NJ could someone be a longshoreman AND an assemblyman.

What do you think?