‘Like a freeway in traffic’: America’s busiest ports choked by a pandemic holiday
The holiday season at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, America’s busiest shipping complex, has always been hectic. But 2021 is a year unlike any other.
A pandemic-induced buying boom and supply chain crisis led to an unprecedented backlog of ships lingering offshore and towering stacks of colorful containers clogging the entirety of the dockyard. Inside the port, thousands of workers are laboring around the clock to unload these containers one by one, sending the televisions, bicycles, medical supplies and more that they contain out to trains and waiting truckers, whose rigs stretch into nearby residential neighborhoods. The goods eventually make their way to warehouses and stores and into the arms of eager consumers.
“It’s like being on a freeway in traffic”, Danny Miranda, the president of ILWU Local 94, the union that represents dockworkers, said of the port complex. “There’s nowhere to go. Every space is being utilized.”
The frantic holiday season caps an unprecedented year for the port. Climbing consumer sales, worker shortages and the slowdown of major transportation hubs during the pandemic created a crisis in the global supply chain, leading to increasing costs and shortages of goods and containers.
In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12-month period. Month after month, the complex has regularly seen record-breaking numbers of cargo ships stuck waiting in nearby waters. The backlog, which left some ships idling in the waters outside the ports for weeks, churning out pollutants, is creating challenges for consumers and retailers alike, particularly amid the holiday season.
“The last quarter of the year is always busy. You get out of the summer, bathing suits and lawn chairs and you get into the normal Christmas flow of cargo,” said Miranda, who started working at the port in 1978. “Never before have we had this much cargo come to our port in my experience.”
Local officials and the Biden administration are working to reduce the backlog, including moving to 24/7 operations. But with a shortage of truck drivers to transport the goods and warehouse space to hold them, a return to normal levels of traffic is still far.
As the pandemic took hold in
the US, it brought lockdowns and restricted access to services, which sent consumer spending on goods surging. Americans are continuing to spend significantly more on goods than ever before and the supply chain is struggling to keep up.
“Americans are buying 20-25% more containers from China. If you have a system that is designed to grow between 2-4% and you ask it to grow overnight by 25% … It’s not feasible,” Edward Renwick, vice-president of the Los Angeles board of harbor commissioners, said at a recent board meeting.
The increased consumer demand, along with supply chain issues and a steady backlog of ships outside the ports which together move 40% of container imports in the US – are certain to affect holiday shopping this year. Experts expect to see shortages of items such as bicycles, toys and personal electronics and long delays for home appliances.
“I think there’s gonna be quite a few things that are not going to be available for Christmas,” said Bill Michels, vice-president of operations, Americas at Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply. “I don’t think people will be able to get the kinds of gifts they were intending to get. There’s gonna be less choices.”
Retailers have encouraged consumers to buy early this holiday season. Meanwhile, the port complex has been working for months to address the backlog, teaming up with the Biden administration to find solutions, expanding working hours, pushing companies to clear out empty containers more quickly and securing additional storage space.
In the early days of the pandemic, the ports were almost at a standstill, Miranda recalled, as imports slowed dramatically with Covid-19, creating supply chain issues around the world. Infections, too, slowed things; at one point earlier this year, before the widespread availability of vaccines, just over 5% of the 15,000 dockworkers at the two ports were infected with the coronavirus. Twenty-two workers have died of Covid over the course of the pandemic.
“The pandemic created a lot of different things. People want their next day delivery. Amazon created that model and now we’re all stuck with it,” Miranda said. “People stayed home bunkered down during the pandemic and started utilizing online shopping. That’s where I think it started.”
Port employees are moving more cargo than the complex has seen in more than a century of operation. Marine terminals are operating above 100% capacity to handle the surge, Gene Seroka, the LA port executive director, said at a recent meeting of the Los Angeles board of harbor commissioners.
“There is no one lever that we’re gonna pull that simply gets all this cargo moving out of anchor as quickly as anyone would like,” Seroka said. “It’s all of these succinct efforts in unison that will continue to free up our docks to move more cargo.”
Reducing the backlog at the port complex will ultimately require more truck drivers, experts warn, and a decrease in consumer demand. America needs about 80,000 more drivers than it currently has, according to the industry’s main trade body – a shortage fueled by low pay, long hours and challenging work conditions.
California has increased the weight of loads truck drivers are allowed to carry on state highways and expanded the department of motor vehicles’ capacity to hand out commercial licenses. But without significantly more drivers to transport goods, the backlog will remain, said Katheryn Russ, an economics professor at UC Davis.
“The only thing that will solve this, is having more truckers,” Russ said. “The most effective thing [would be] a boost in trucking wages and that lies with the trucking companies.”
Supply chain issues can also serve as a wakeup call for consumers to consider their buying behavior, Russ said. “It gives me a reminder of the excess in my daily life,” she said. “That’s not the case for everybody but for a lot of us, we have too much stuff, so it’s a great reminder of how we can be gentler to the environment.”
Miranda and port officials are hopeful that the $1.2bn infrastructure bill recently signed by Joe Biden will help alleviate long-term issues, with $17bn set to go to ports. Investments in the rail industry will also expand capacity, which will allow goods to move out more quickly.
But in the meantime, the best approach to eliminate supply chain shortages, Russ said, is mitigating the spread of Covid-19, increasing the availability of rapid testing and resolving the pandemic.
“Everyone who is complaining about supply chain shortages, whether it’s top of the government or people on the street doing the shopping, we should all be thinking what can we do to stop the pandemic,” she said. “There are things we can all do: masks, we can wash our hands, we can get vaccinated.
“Those are all things we, as individuals, can do and should do as a patriotic duty to help the world to mitigate the virus and that will help our economy and prevent these supply chain related shortages.”
People want their next day delivery. Amazon created that model and now we’re all stuck with it.
Danny Miranda