Posted on 09/24/2024 9:23:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Even before the expected longshoremen's strike begins, we have learned a great deal about the shortsightedness and incompetence of the modern Democrat party.
First, some background is in order:
The United States have several dozen cargo-handling seaports, divided between the West Coast, the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the Great Lakes.
While the Great Lakes still have a good deal of bulk shipping, the slick supply chain facilitated by modern containerization (the switch from moving cargo a pallet or crate at a time to moving it all in 20’ and 40’ intermodal containers, stacked by the thousands on containerships) has caused the lion’s share of ocean freight to skip the Great Lakes and be concentrated on the three coasts.
Almost half of the containers that the U.S. imports and exports by ocean move through the massive port complex of Los Angeles and Long Beach, with a little more distributed between the other small ports of the West Coast.
And that means that the other half of the U.S.’s container volume is spread between dozens of ports from Texas to Maine, primarily these seven giants: Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk, and New York.
The longshoremen – the container handlers – in all those unionized East Coast and Gulf Coast ports belong to a union known as the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). They operate on a six-year contract with the container ship lines and their port terminals. This contract is due to expire at midnight on Sept. 30.
The ILA walked out of negotiations early this summer, refusing management’s constant entreaties to return to the table. The ILA has announced their intention to strike on Oct. 1. Normally, the public can hope that negotiations are fruitful in the final days leading up to such a deadline...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
To get some idea of the scale: These ships range from $50 to $150 million each to buy, and another $10 million or so per year in fuel, insurance, port charges and personnel to operate. Every day that fifty, or a hundred, or two hundred such ships are stuck in port, the shipping lines suffer a crippling loss.
They can’t let that happen.
It will destroy what economy is left. It will expose the manufacturing failure of the US in spades. It will demonstrate yet a new level of incompetence for the Democrats.
Economically, expect the market to tank, if this happens.
When I was a kid, auto parts stores used to have this little fable tacked up on the wall about a certain very unpleasant body part that nobody respected deciding not to function, bringing the entire body to its knees. It always struck me a schoolboy toilet humor, not a warning.
Even a short strike will affect Christmas inventories, hurting an already weak retail sector.
If the ships have cranes, those cranes would be outside US labor law and could be operated by Chinese workers.
Gantries might be operated by remote control by shipboard workers outside US labor law.
Dear Chinese Citizen and West Coast Resident with Legal Right to Work in USA:
Please help out unloading the ships.
Xi
Is there a law that prevents the companies from hiring non-union employees?
Democrats want to destroy the nation.
I remember the longshoremen’s strike of 1971. Shippers got around the strike by unloading their cargo in Ensenada, Mexico. Sitting in my friend’s house up on the hill overlooking Bahia Todos Santos, I could view through his large arcadia doors the normally empty bay filled up with mighty ocean freighters lined up to and beyond the horizon, and watch the caravans of Datsuns and Volkswagens make their runs down the highway between the harbor and the staging areas where they were loaded onto car hauler trucks headed north to the States.
As a union hand myself, this is exactly why unions get a bad rap. Deservedly so.
These are greedy, rotten SOB’s; and represent all the worst of unions. I wish they could all be fired and a law passed to never allow union work at these facilities ever again.
They want an $80/hr raise over 10 years. Over $13/hr each year. completely ridiculous.
Think 2020 when WuFlu shut down all the ports. They weren’t allowed to work so the cargo ships sat off the coast. Store shelves were pretty bleak because so much is imported. It took a heck of a long time to recover from that mess and if this strike goes on long enough, we’ll go through all of that again.
Some of us are ready and will get through ok but many aren’t.
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