The choking of the US supply-chain has officially begun, when as the LA Times reported “West Coast ports – including the nation’s busiest in Los Angeles and Long Beach – have partially shut down for four days as shipping companies plan to dramatically slash dock work amid an increasingly contentious labor dispute.”
Terminal operators and shipping lines said that they would stop the unloading of ships beginning Thursday, Lincoln’s Birthday, leading up to Presidents Day on Monday, which are holidays for the workers. Terminal operators and shipping lines say they don’t want to pay overtime to workers who, they allege, have deliberately slowed operations to the point of causing a massive bottleneck.
Work delays and stoppages over the past three months have caused mounting problems for Bay Area importers and small-business owners, who say they are losing money as trucks line up daily outside the Port of Oakland waiting for container ships anchored in San Francisco Bay to unload.
The economic fallout of a port shutdown is challenging to measure and depends heavily on the technique of analysis. Economic impact studies of West Coast port shutdowns have yielded loss estimates as high as $2bn per day.
What could go wrong?
So the bottom line is that nobody really knows what will happen if the “partial” stoppage becomes a permanent one, as dockworkers try lever their influence on the US economy but it is safe to say that the final outcome will be somewhere between the “catastrophic” devastation for the economy which the retail industry predicts or an economic recession, if only temporary.
One thing, however, about which there is no doubt at all, is the unprecedented congestion that has slammed the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor: that is very much real, as can be seen on the series of photos below.
All of these giant container ships anchored are anchored offshore:
Cargo ships have been backed up for weeks on end at the ports of LA and Long Beach amid a labor dispute.The size of these ships blows the mind; many of them are over a thousand feet long.
Cargoes from around the world are backed up right now.
I’ve never seen ANYTHING like this, even rush hour at the 405 doesn’t look so bad.Colorful and massive, this ship is over 1000 feet from end to end.
From this angle, the scale and size of the city and ships becomes quickly apparent.
And trucks are backed up waiting to load cargo containers.
Finally keep in mind that to many economists, or at least those who realize that the US economy is in a far worse shape than what official government data represents, an “exogenous” event like a West Coast port strike, just like a “Polar Vortex” is precisely what the doctor ordered.
After all, what better scapegoat for the lack of growth than a few thousand dockworkers who are merely leveraging capitalism as much as they can… even if it means shutting down key US economic supply-chains in the process.
I’ve already noticed problems in our local grocery stores, I wonder how long it will be until everyone else does as well.
-Kelleigh
