12 dock workers reveal the 'never-ending'
chaos at shipping ports: 'We can't keep
this pace up forever'
Business Insider,
by
Grace Kay
Original Article
Posted By: NorthernDog,
10/28/2021 9:37:55 AM
Dock workers have long been working day and night to keep the supply chain running. But, since the pandemic started, COVID-19 shutdowns and surging demand have cast the ports into chaos - and workers say there's no end in sight. Insider spoke with 12 dock workers from across the US, including seven that work at ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach - locations responsible for over 40% of the nation's imports. The workers asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about their jobs, but their identities have been verified by Insider. Four longshoremen with more than 20 years of experience at
Reply 1 - Posted by:
red1066 10/28/2021 9:44:15 AM (No. 959639)
This is what you get when all your manufacturing moves to a foreign country.
26 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
NamVet70 10/28/2021 9:47:00 AM (No. 959641)
The media is still ignoring the truck shortage caused by the agreement between the EPA and the State of California to render about half the truck fleet unavailable to service at the ports. California recently prohibited use of any except the very newest trucks. The real bottleneck at the ports is the inability to move containers out of the ports quickly enough due to the truck shortage. This action is not getting attention, and the fake news reports on the backlog are actually just distracting attention from the real cause.
33 people like this.
Maybe we should make this crap in America and tell both the Chinese commies AND the California commies to shove it.
20 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Anti_democRAT 10/28/2021 10:07:14 AM (No. 959669)
Seems the problem described is making the containers go away from the unloading area.
6 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
bad-hair 10/28/2021 10:16:04 AM (No. 959679)
And our transportation Sec is at home with his husband and his bay bee.
13 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
curious1 10/28/2021 10:43:25 AM (No. 959706)
#2, for a work-around, find a group of available warehouses with large loading docs in Nevada/Arizona just over the border from cali, use the new trucks to run from the dock to the warehourse and and all the rest of the trucks that CA is blocking can make the runs from there through the sane states. Or get a tilt-up project going pronto - should only take a couple months until it would be built out and ready if the urgency was there.
Until the people in CA have enough and clean out the commies they've allowed to take over their government (see Athens,TN just after WWII) - or maybe it will just keep on this way if the people in CA like what's happening.
8 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Starboard_side 10/28/2021 12:08:07 PM (No. 959788)
While it sounds simple that it's just the "truck shortage", it's not that simple.
If a trucker can't return the empty container, it sits on the chassis, which means a new arriving container is not able to be picked up as efficiently due to lack of chassis available.
And, if they can't return the container due to shortage of terminal space, they'll need to find new areas for the containers to be returned to, which is on-going topic.
Empty containers are stacking up all around the San Pedro port complex.
Just read the ILWU lost 8,000 members last year (my brother in-law being one of those who retired - one less skilled labor person as he was a crane operator).
You can't dispatch a "gang" to work the vessel if you don't have the requisite number of skilled labor positions first.
Now, the fine against ocean carriers when they don't control the terminal operations, the space available to put those containers, or dictate if an empty can be returned.
However, they do control the use of Demurrage and Detention free time that has been used for decades in many of the large-box retailer ocean bids, but that is a negotiated item, and not something easily un-done in the middle of the contract.
6 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
DVC 10/28/2021 12:32:49 PM (No. 959816)
Never lose track of the fact that Business Inside has been a Never Trump site, so may well be covering for the incompetents in charge now.
From this report it sounds like an incompetently designed handling system....to hear them tell it, they have no system for actually sorting and classifying, and handling the containers as they come off the ship into rational, manageable flows to trucks, trains, local, long distance, etc. This is hard for me to believe, there has to have been a system in place up until now to do just that.
Something suddenly crashed the system that was working.....what has changed?
We have read elsewhere that the issues are
1) California made a huge swath of semi-trucks suddenly illegal with their idiot California-only air regulations, 2) California's 'no contract workers' law has made some independent truckers literally illegal in the state. Both of these cause a shortage of semi-trucks to move the containers away.
The article mentions neither of these issue, and I am suspicious if it is anything but a "gosh what a mess, there's nothing anyone can do, nobody's to blame" kind of a coverup article. I learned to not trust Business Insider's motives when they went all against Trump.
12 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Strike3 10/28/2021 1:21:29 PM (No. 959857)
Go on strike and make things really painful for Senile Joe and Newsom. They will cave.
3 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Heil Liberals 10/28/2021 1:47:52 PM (No. 959876)
#6 - They actually did that. It doesn't work. There aren't enough trucks to move the loads out of California to the border states. It also necessitates a new logistical solution that costs many millions of dollars and doesn't solve the underlying cause: Marxist government.
4 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
mean Gene 10/28/2021 2:17:05 PM (No. 959899)
Joe had just kicked the consumers in the gut before leaving for Europe:
He added a $100/container/day for every container on every container ship that sits off shore more than 3 days!
One of the most recent container ships has been moored off shore for 14 days and has hundreds of conationers on it with not date to get unloaded in sight.
The newest container ships are so large that, ideally, it takes 7 or 8 cranes to unload them in 3 days of less.
BUT Los Angeles and Long Beach Ports only dedicate one or two cranes per ship!
Bring back the hundreds of trains that used to serve the prots back when I moved into Long Beach's downtown 30 years ago.
They kept things moving at fast speed while the freeway was clear.
4 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Venturer 10/28/2021 5:26:17 PM (No. 960021)
Just another problem we never had under Trump.
8 people like this.
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The ports were not designed to handle this much cargo. And there is no incentive to knock themselves out with 24/7 operations - it will just dramatically increase costs.