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Twenty-year truck driver: America’s “shipping crisis” will not end
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoArtificial crisis manufacturing for profit. Makes way bigger profit margin for those who can sell fake scarcity priced goods. But even more for those who control delivery of said goods.
- zephyr9 5y agoOnce you see there is no connection between money and work it's like seeing the code of The Matrix.
- Wosiz 5y agoI see this type of comment frequently but I dont know what this means...can someone pls explain it! Thanks!
- rootsudo 5y agoWorking hard does not mean you'll be paid well, or have money. Then the other argument of money =/= wealth.
- SkittyDog 5y agoAre you American? I don't know about other countries, but here in the US there's a cultural trope that our economic system finnacially rewards hard work & effort. It's hard to point to a specific piece of propaganda, but it's definitely baked into our social mythology. OP is saying that the myth is a lie, and that hard work doesn't really guarantee you anything, in the United States.
- rootsudo 5y agoNo, it's calvanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
- jefurii 5y agoAlso, pay rates seem to be inversely proportional to the job's benefit to society. Vulture capitalists rake in the dough while workers who do essential tasks to actually make other people's lives better don't get paid shit.
- SkittyDog 5y agoWatching the port of Los Angeles & Long Beach, since the COVID pandemic began, the growing backlog of container ships waiting outside the port has been obvious. But this article helps explain the strange part, which is that the shipping backlog has been getting worse even as COVID cases & restrictions have steadily proved in California. I can't speak to whether this explanation is correct, but it's better than literally anything I've heard so far.
- totalZero 5y agoI get the feeling that the people in charge of the USA don't understand how markets work.
- klyrs 5y agoNo, but it sounds like the people managing ports sure do.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoEveryone understands their own bubble of experience, like this truck driver. But it seems like we often go off the rails on things outside that bubble, as this truck driver does when he starts generalizing (nobody will do this, everybody does that) and assigning motives (greed, stupidity, etc) to everyone else. I am trying to be better about this. It is definitely a bad habit of mine.
- klyrs 5y agoI dunno about that. A lot of the article is talking about incentives. The ports enjoy a monopoly, and the manner in which they're handling these delays allows them to charge exorbitant fees to everybody using the port. And, sure enough, cranes are expensive and have a long lead-time, especially when steel is bottlenecked. Fixing this would be costly and the ports are probably concerned about building up capacity that won't be necessary when the problem clears. When the solution is expensive and the problem is profitable, is inaction "greed?"
- refurb 5y agoI’m pretty sure a big percent of Congress has never worked a normal job in their lives nor created any jobs.
- redis_mlc 5y agoTrump, Pompeo and Bannon did. Biden, Harris, Pelosi and AOC despise working people - "deplorable racists." Congrats on electing a party that literally hates America, our constitution and its citizens, as seen in the current Open Border policy.
- etempleton 5y agoThere are plans to fine companies for slow moving freight (https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/10/25/ports-of-los-angeles-long-beach-to-fine-companies-for-slow-container-movement/ https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/10/25/ports-of-los-ange...). Additionally the east coast has been ramping up capacity for years. The port of Baltimore is experience no such slow-down and just added more cranes. It is one of the fastest growing ports in the nation.
- OldHand2018 5y agoThe medium post predicted that the ports would start implementing fines for slow moving freight as a money making scheme, because they know the freight can't move any faster. You know, your second point leads to a question: what would it take for a container ship to be willing to route to any of a collection of ports? If I am order a shipping container full of stuff from Asia, do I really care what port it arrives at? Someone is driving it from the port to my warehouse (with maybe a train ride along the way)? I have to think that my top priorities are 'what time will it arrive' and 'how much will it cost', right? But ships are waiting in a months-long line in LA and not rerouting to Baltimore. Or Oakland, Seattle, etc. So what gives?
- lazide 5y agoOnce someone pays for it to ship, the shipping company has their goods. If it's stuck in line, they can't get it out, and there are endless others to point fingers at too.
- slowhand09 5y agoI can see (eyes on) ships waiting to enter the Port of Baltimore. 6 Ships this morning at 830am Eastern time..
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago> The medium post predicted that the ports would start implementing fines for slow moving freight as a money making scheme, because they know the freight can't move any faster. It gets worse. They were talking about progressive fines. That means the slower it gets, the more money they make. That's not the incentive we want the ports to have...
- coolspot 5y agoJust wait until United States secretary of transportation comes back from paternity leave - he will fix it in a week or two.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoIs he doing nothing right now? Is his entire department stalled because he’s out of the office? Does he have a plan for a quick fix that can’t make any progress because of this? Just wondering where your info is from.
- iammisc 5y agoIf his presence means nothing, then why exactly do we have a secretary of transportation?
- SkittyDog 5y agoQuit your bullshit... The white house has been heavily involved in trying to fix the problem, for a while now: • https://www.dailynews.com/2021/10/13/biden-to-announce-that-ports-of-la-long-beach-will-begin-24-hour-operation/ https://www.dailynews.com/2021/10/13/biden-to-announce-that-...
- coolspot 5y agoThe WH is involved because it spiraled out of control. DoT should have resolved the issue without anyone higher up involved, that’s their job.
- ralph84 5y agoHopefully we can use this failure of globalization to finally take a step back and acknowledge globalization has been a net-negative for the majority of Americans. Instead of trying to band-aid globalization to make a minority rich, how about we reduce the need for so much international shipping in the first place?
- yosito 5y ago> how about we reduce the need for so much international shipping in the first place While there are a lot of negative aspects of international shipping, one major benefit of interinternational economic integration is that it serves as a deterrent to physical warfare.
- esarbe 5y agoThat's actually a good point. I'm quite against international economic integration since it usually ends in exploitation, stratification and social de-integration. But you've got a point with regards to physical warfare.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago> Instead of trying to band-aid globalization to make a minority rich, how about we reduce the need for so much international shipping in the first place? I think the answer is here: > Before the pandemic, through the pandemic, and really for the whole history of the freight industry at all levels, owners make their money by having low labor costs — that is, low wages and bare minimum staffing. Many supply chain workers are paid minimum wages, no benefits, and there’s a high rate of turnover because the physical conditions can be brutal (there aren’t even bathrooms for truckers waiting hours at ports because the port owners won’t pay for them. Making the goods onshore won't change the desire to drive labor costs as low as possible. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about truckers or factory workers. The American consumer wants more more more cheaper cheaper cheaper, and the people supplying the American consumer want as much profit profit profit as they can squeeze. This is always going to lead to a very unhealthy and unsustainable, and thus very vulnerable, supply chain. The pandemic was the straw that broke the camel's back, but the camel wasn't in very good shape before the pandemic. We just didn't notice how bad the camel was.
- yosito 5y agoSeem like the solution is simple: pay truck drivers to do the work that needs to be done.
- SkittyDog 5y agoThe article says different... The author's core claim is that unloading capacity is the bottleneck, specifically a lack of infrastructure (cranes - container chassis, mostly). The costs of slowdowns at the unloading bottleneck is passed on to truckers, because most of them are contractors, paid by the load and not by hours worked... They're waiting in much longer lines than pre-pandemic, but aren't compensated for the additional time. So lots of truckers have quit driving. So he's saying that the solution is to (A) invest in unloading infrastructure to remove the bottleneck, and (B) improve pay & working conditions to get the truck drivers back to work.
- shapefrog 5y ago> It’s important to understand what the cost implications are for consumers with this lack of supply in the supply chain. The sea is full of ships with 1000's of containers full of goods. The port is full of containers with goods. The warehouses are full of goods and have containers sitting around in the lots or on the streets, also full. Where is the lack of supply exactly?
- pif 5y ago> Where is the lack of supply exactly? There's a terrible lack in moving capacity. Sea, ports and warehouses are full of static containers, and that's bad: the optimal state for a container is "moving".
- SkittyDog 5y agoThe lack of supply is in the market for cargo unloading at the ports... There are not enough cranes & container chassis to service the combined weight of regular demand plus the backed-up pandemic demand. The unloading infrastructure is very capital-intensive, and highly localized, and so far the shipping companies have been unwilling to invest in expanding unloading capacity.
- ethagknight 5y agoI'm having trouble understanding the premise here. > Why is there only one crane for every 50–100 trucks at every port in America? No ‘expert’ will answer this question. Cranes should be THE bottleneck. They are massive, expensive and land intensive. Maybe LA needs more cranes, but it doesn't sound like that is the issue. The author states the problem is a trucker problem, "lines to get in, lines to get out" but that isn't a crane problem. The author gets paid by the hour, others get paid by the job, job duration is variable and undefined, so wages are undefined. One solution is to pay drivers more, and pay them per hour. I've had containers full of goods waiting somewhere around the port of LA in the last year. If there were way to pay more to move them on through the system, I'd gladly pay, but its a giant black box. My conjecture is that the REAL real issue is a very complicated and embedded union vs non-union vs contractor vs fed government vs state govt vs local govt pissing contest that could all be circumvented by federal government investing in alternative ports around the US border. Port of Louisiana, Port of Houston, Ports of Florida in the gulf. Lots of alternatives, and we are all sitting around like Port of LA is the sole option. Separately, I dont understand why Mexico isn't more prominent in container transport moved via trains into Texas.
- PKop 5y agoIt sounds to me like the bottleneck is wages paid to truckers, and probably other workers in the supply chain. The US has a ~$600 Billion trade deficit. It never really made sense to me that we could continue to massively import goods from rest of world (mostly China)...without eventually reaching some sort of labor parity where delivering those goods all the way around the world didn't make economic sense, and especially political sense, as the gains, whatever they are, mostly accrue to multi-national corporations profit margins and stock prices. It seems, much of this is built upon a foundation of crappy wages and under-investment in the people and infrastructure it all functions on top of. Doesn't sound sustainable as structured, and for many reason we should invest in labor and domestic production more than we have been. Inflation, like in the 2008 oil price spike leading to domestic production, might end up being the catalyst to this change.
- SkittyDog 5y agoThe impact on truckers is a side effect... At the core, he's saying that the problem is a lack of unloading capacity. There aren't enough cranes, chassis, and railcars to handle both the regular shipping traffic, plus the backed up traffic from the pandemic... And the throughput gets worse, exponentially, as the system becomes overloaded. So the lack of capacity is making things worse. But in the short term, the demand for cargo shipping is relatively inelastic. As costs rise, most shipping customers will just bite the bullet and pay the higher fees, because they'll go completely out of business without overseas shipping. If everyone knew the port cargo crisis was going to be a long-term phenomenon, the shippers would probably invest money in buying more cranes, chassis, etc. to increase capacity. But those capital investments cost a lot of money up front, so they don't make good business sense if you expect the cargo crisis to end relatively quickly. So far, the cargo shipping companies have just been jacking up prices, expecting that their customers will keep paying... But since they're not sharing the wealth with their drivers, by paying more & investing in infrastructure to improve throughout, they're exacerbating the problem.
- auroraceiling 5y agoYes, the situation is really touch. Especially for small businesses. So I thought of doing some logistics myself to lift off this third-party dependency on trucks. I found a website https://www.truck1.eu/trucks/from-germany https://www.truck1.eu/trucks/from-germany that sells used trucks from Germany, and even considering the export tax and shipment costs it looks to be cheaper and less risky.
- putlake 5y agoFrom the article: "So when the coastal ports started getting clogged up last spring due to the impacts of COVID on business everywhere, drivers started refusing to show up. Congestion got so bad that instead of being able to do three loads a day, they could only do one." I could not make the connection from the first sentence to the second. If drivers are not showing up, congestion (in the lines for drivers) should go down, shouldn't it?
- mk81 5y agoMake stuff closer to where it's used again.
- throwawayswede 5y agoCan't read because published on reader hostile platform.
- ryanmercer 5y agoI've been in international air freight for over 15 years, I don't see things getting even remotely "back to normal" until 2023, if it doesn't continue to worsen before getting better.