The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are bringing in a surprising new commodity: jobs.

The first post-recession surge in employment at the nation’s busiest seaport complex began this month and appears to be gathering momentum. There has been as much as a threefold increase in the number of longshoremen finding work on the docks in the first three weeks of February compared with the same period last year, a review of daily employment dispatches shows.

Through the first three weeks there was an average of 2,679 longshore jobs a day during the usual three work shifts at the two ports, according to the summaries. That’s an increase of 34.5 percent over the 1,992 jobs that were available on average a year earlier.

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