From the nonviolent viewpoint of Angels Gate Park over San Pedro Bay, a traffic jam of bulk floating shipments was obviously visual when it peaked at 109 ships in January, leaving stranded toys, clothing, semiconductors, cars and a long list of parts heading to stores. factories and the doors of online shoppers.
The protection that began in early 2020 no longer exists, but major disruption remains for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and, by extension, the tens of thousands of Southern California employees whose jobs count on the dual ports and foreign industry passing through. through them.
That’s because U. S. stores and brands are not allowed to do so. U. S. troopers, damaged by traffic jam and worried about an imaginable dockers’ strike, discovered alternative solutions that shipped their shipping boxes to the East Coast and Gulf ports, which invested heavily for years to take over the Southern California shipping business.
The lost freight is a blow to Southern California’s economy if that company doesn’t return. And experts say some are forever.
“Ports have a massive impact on the regional economy with dock stowage jobs, truck jobs, and warehouse and distribution jobs extending into the Inland Empire. And that’s just the direct effect,” said John Husing, an economist specializing in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
“The effect is that those salaries are spent on the local economy,” generating profits for a wide variety of local businesses, he said.
Long Beach’s ports of L. A. et mix to handle nearly 40 percent of U. S. imports from Asia arriving in giant steel boxes aboard ships that span nearly the length of the Empire State Building. But shipping movement has plummeted in recent months. , allowing the mixed ports of New York and New Jersey to intermittently snatch the bragging rights of No. 1 away from Los Angeles.
The local downward trend is worrisome not only for officials at the dual ports, but also for Southern California’s 175,000 employees, hired at the ports themselves and at similar companies, who carry shipments valued at $469 billion annually, according to port data. It stakes this chain of fountains, functioning as a line of other people moving from buckets of water to the user putting out a fire.
These kinds of jobs have come to the region, said Gigi Moreno, lead economist for Southern California Association governments, especially for Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which are home to many giant warehouses and distribution centers.
“The Inland Empire workforce is now larger than it was before the pandemic,” Moreno said. “A lot of that has increased through the logistics industry,” thanks to an explosion in online grocery shopping that outpaced the entire supply chain for a while.
Logistics is the word used to describe the movement of uncooked materials, portions, and products from factories to ships, trains, and trucks to their final destination, which can be a retailer’s shelf, a car factory, or an online shopper’s closet.
At docks, other people load and unload ships, stack and arrange shipping boxes before moving them to trucks or train cars. Warehouse staff and those working in distribution centers are taking on the next round of work.
The ports provide some of the few well-paid manual jobs in the region. At the other end of the pay spectrum are other people who work in distribution and warehousing, where staff earn low wages and struggle for their families with inflation approaching 40. elevated.
Among them are port truckers, many of whom are independent contractors. Cargo diversion may be what drives them into bankruptcy, said Matt Schrap, CEO of Harbor Trucking Assn.
Trucker David Alvarado enjoyed seeing a massive backlog of ships offshore because “it meant there would be a lot of work. “
Alvarado, 38, is the sole breadwinner for his wife, two sons and a daughter. In one year, it will generate up to $80,000 by transporting shipments from Long Beach on short trips through Southern California.
“It’s wrong now. I would say my jobs have decreased by 50% and I know other drivers who haven’t worked for two weeks,” Alvarado said.
“Before, when there was a lot of demand, I could charge $1,000 for a job,” he said. “Now it’s ridiculous at $300 or $400.
“It’s like spitting in the face of a truck driver. “
Though it’s on and hoping for the best, Alvarado said some port drivers are already giving up.
“Other guys there, I’m serious, are already hanging around. They are already promoting their trucks,” Alvarado said.
Until November, traffic at the Port of L. A. decreased 7% from the 2021 record. Container movement at the Long Beach Port closure has been unusually robust during the same period. New York-New Jersey treated 9. 4% more boxes in October than a year earlier
Experts hope some of the lost business will never return, in part because stores and brands have spent on new services or otherwise replaced their shipping practices to favor other ports to protect themselves from long-term calamities in the West.
West Coast ports can lose up to 10% of ocean cargo to the Atlantic coast, according to research by New York-based investment firm Cowan.
The big winners were the fast-growing port of Savannah, Georgia, which ranks fourth in shipping container traffic, and Houston, which ranks sixth.
But the biggest challenge to Los Angeles’ longstanding dominance and Long Beach as the nation’s busiest port has been the New York-New Jersey Array, a collection of berths in two states. Long Beach first took the name in New York-New Jersey in 1995, and Los Angeles surpassed any in 2000.
Warnings abound. In some of the “No. 1” months, more than a third of the New York-New Jersey boxes were empty, meaning the port complex wasn’t the first in number of loaded boxes.
In addition, knowledge per month can be volatile. Therefore, top business experts don’t mind the jokes per month that are the first, who prefer calendar year totals as a measurement criterion.
By the end of 2022, it is imaginable that the Port of Long Beach will be third, behind New York-New Jersey, to challenge the Port of Los Angeles for first place. Together, Los Angeles and Long Beach will remain, by far, the nation’s largest Asian gateway for trade.
Any point of deviation has consequences. The ships are so large that the lack of a single one can mean enough cargo loss to fill a five-mile-long freight train.
Two points have contributed to the change, experts say.
Some shippers have turned to ports for fear of protracted union negotiations between the 22,000 West Coast ports International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association, which represent 70 employers from the 29 West Coast seaports.
Negotiations began in May and the union has been operating without a contract since July 1. Neither side responded to requests for comment on the prestige of the contract negotiations.
The other thing is the accumulation of more than a hundred ships in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach earlier this year, waiting to unload their cargo.
The supply chain mess started with factories in China and was exacerbated by a shortage of truckers and mile-long railway safeguards. East coast and Gulf ports also had ships waiting outside their docks, but this attracted far less publicity.
Senior of the dual ports, noting that the backlog has since disappeared, says they have a fight they can win.
“We want this shipment from the East Coast and the Gulf,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. “Possibly we would have to do a little more marketing. Possibly we would have to do other things about prices. , however, more burden means more jobs. And surely it’s sacrosanct here in Los Angeles.
Mario Cordero, executive director of the nearby Port of Long Beach, said, “My colleagues in other parts of the United States are doing a very smart job by investing in their own infrastructure for their ports. U. S. carriers have more options.
“But we’ve come here before with a cargo loss,” he said, adding that he would do everything imaginable to make sure Southern California “remains the most vital strategic gateway to the country” for Asian trade.
The San Pedro Bay port complex is planning marketing and pricing measures and is strengthening its position through more investment projects.
Before the pandemic, Seroka had spent 60% of her time traveling around Asia and Europe, taking advantage of the benefits of running with Los Angeles for cargo transportation. He said he gradually climbed back up to that level, after receiving all his COVID reminders.
“East Coast ports have benefited from increased shipping in our collective bargaining. By the first quarter of next year, we will have this contract in place and until next summer, the East Coast longshoremen’s union will negotiate their contract,” Seroka said.
“As history has shown my career, there will be a shipment to the East Coast next summer because of this. That’s why we want to have our paints in order, our processes in place and we want to be in a position for shipping. next summer.
In Long Beach, the investment includes a $1. 6 billion high-tech overhaul of the Pier B railroad backyard to increase the capacity and speed of handling shipments.
“We are very confident that at the end of this decade this is going to change the rules of the game,” Cordero said.
In addition, BNSF Railway said in October that it would build the $1. 5 billion foreign gateway allocation on 4,500 acres of Barstow to “help decrease traffic congestion, the regional economy, and unleash critical efficiencies to meet the demands of our nation’s supply chain. “
While other ports have done work to improve their shipping infrastructure, some benefits will continue to paint in Southern California’s favor, some experts said.
Even after the final 2016 touch of the expansion of the Panama Canal, the main transit point for Asia’s largest ships to succeed on the Gulf and East coasts, those ports still can’t accommodate Asia’s largest container ships, said Jerry Nickelsburg, director of UCLA Anderson Forecast and professor of economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
In addition, the shorter direction between Asia and the West Coast, combined with rail transportation, remains the fastest way to move passports across the United States, Nickelsburg said. Going east by boat, shipping requires much more time through waterways “because you pass to the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico or beyond. Therefore, it may be just an additional week or two weeks.
Weather also plays a role, as hurricanes and other severe storms in the Atlantic tend to occur during peak periods, he said.
For staff, life becomes more complicated as consumers pull out amid peak inflation and recession fears. The consequences can leave even more truckers and warehouse personnel competing for jobs that cargo diversion has eliminated.
Some businesses were emerging and developing the brief boom of the pandemic and were unprepared for recession.
United Furniture Industries was one of the corporations that benefited from better furniture sales to others trapped at home by the pandemic.
Just days before Thanksgiving, United Furniture closed and laid off its 261 employees, who suddenly found themselves without pay or health insurance. The frenzy would continue.
Mario Gonzalez, the company’s former chief operating officer, said he worked without pay to find new jobs for the other people who worked for him.
“The shipping guys, the truckers, I’ve already been able to position 32, and I have a lot of others who go on to interviews and driving tests and all that, looking to position them as well,” he said. Like I’m running more for the company now than when it was still open. “
Dominick Alcantara, a long-haul truck motive for United Furniture, was sleeping on his platform somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, waiting for a shipment of wood, when his phone rang to announce he was out of work.
I tried to apply for a job at a local trucking company, but was turned down because of the slowdown in hiring.
Now he thinks he’s going to have to resort to “hot shoot,” a car trailer in his truck, moving confiscated cars from Southern California to a giant auction site in Albuquerque.
“There may be a lot of cash in it. It will take time to identify yourself. . . It’s ideal,” Alcantara said. The timing couldn’t have been worse for me. “
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Ronald D. White is a general reporter for the Los Angeles Times whose paintings include leadership profiles, inventions in manufacturing, retail and trends.
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