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Labor shortage idles
ships at LA-Long Beach
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The
port of Long Beach is the largest in the U.S. |
The JOURNAL of
COMMERCE ONLINE
Ocean carriers continue to
wrestle with delays amid a shortage of longshore labor at the Port of
Los Angeles-Long Beach.
The Marine Exchange of Southern
California in an e-mail notice Tuesday said the Pacific Maritime
Association reported it was 25 gangs short Monday night, leaving eight
vessels unable to be worked including Gosport Maersk, CMA CGM
Sapphire, and Ever Result. Marex said there were 73 gangs available to
work the vessels that had qualified for labor pursuant to their
arrival times.
On the day shift, Marex said the PMA
was short 34 gangs, leaving 12 ships idle at berth, including CMA CGM
Sapphire, Ever Result, Hyundai Explorer, Wan Hai 306, Hanjin
Washington, and APL England. There were 91 gangs working on the
dayside Tuesday.
The labor shortage is also delaying
intermodal rail shipments heading to inland destinations. Sources in
Southern California said some ships have bypassed LA-Long Beach to
offload cargo in Oakland. The containers are then moved by rail back
to Los Angeles.
Union Pacific Railroad earlier said it
plans to increase rates for intermodal shipments by 9.5 percent
beginning Aug. 17 while Burlington Northern Santa Fe will implement a
similar rate increase starting on the same date in part to help both
carriers improve services to handle the surge in container cargo.
The increase will reportedly boost the
cost of moving a 40-foot container out of California by rail to about
$95.
Container
ships are being delayed in berthing and intermodal shipments are
expected
to be delayed between 24-72 hours after they are discharged.
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Labor
Shortages at the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports
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Rail car
shortages affecting both UP and BNSF
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Strong peak
season container volumes
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Southern
California forest fires Impacting the rail roads’ ability to
re-position empty rail cars into the area
As of Friday
morning, there were 43 ships in port and 8 at anchor; of these
51 vesels, 28 are container ships.
Container ships
are scheduled to sail every day, which will open more berths for
arriving ships. The total number of ships set to depart now
exceeds the total number of ships expected to arrive. Forest
fires are reportedly 80% under control which will enable the
rail roads to supply us with empty rail cars. Additional
longshoremen are being added to the labor pool.
The
congestion affecting the LA/LB ports may improve over the
next week or ten days. |
July 27, 2004
Journal of Commerce Reports:
LA-Long Beach adds 1,000
dockworkers, but vessels still wait
Waterfront
employers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union put
more than 1,000 new longshoremen to work last week at the Port of
Los Angeles-Long Beach, but dozens of vessels remain backed up at
the nation's largest container complex. The ILWU on Thursday is
presenting to the Pacific Maritime Association a proposal to
immediately promote 2,000 part-time longshoremen, known as casuals,
to registered status. Also, the plan calls for adding 11,000 new
casuals to the rolls within eight weeks, said David Arian, president
of ILWU Local 13 in Southern California.
The ILWU Thursday
held a national press teleconference to address what it terms the
port infrastructure crisis on the West Coast. The problems surfaced
last year when Union Pacific Railroad's operations suffered from a
crew shortage. The railroad has hired thousands of new workers over
the past year, but delays of one to two days on its network have
continued over the past year.
Also, western rail
operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe in June began to suffer
capacity problems. It later put all intermodal customers in LA-Long
Beach on an allocation system, causing containers to back up on the
docks.
According to the
Marine Exchange of Southern California, terminal operators were
shorted 22 14-man gangs, or work crews, on the Wednesday night shift
and were 46 gangs short on the Thursday morning shift. When
employers cannot obtain all of the gangs they need, vessels are
delayed in port for an extra day or two. While today's labor
shortage and infrastructure limitations are severe, they will grow
even worse in the years ahead as projections call for more than a
doubling of cargo volume in LA-Long Beach by 2020, said Blair
Garcia, vice president of strategic planning at TranSystems Corp. in
Norfolk, VA.
Garcia said West
Coast ports must take a systemic approach to the infrastructure
crisis, with ocean carriers, terminal operators and railroads
communicating with each other electronically to streamline the
transportation supply chain and reduce container dwell time on the
docks from an average of seven or eight days at present to less than
two days.
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