https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/20 ... ornia.html
Empty Christmas stockings? Don't blame COVID; blame California
By Andrea Widburg
The conventional wisdom from the left is that COVID is the reason that shipping containers are in the waters off California with no stevedores or truckers available to take care of them. The implication is that if people would stop being selfish and take the vaccines, the whole problem would magically vanish. That's nonsense. As a couple of astute articles explain, the problem is that California has passed two laws — one for "climate change" and the other as a sop to the unions — that destroyed much of California's trucking industry. Add in woes unique to the industry and COVID payments that discourage people from working and...voilà!...empty Christmas stockings.

Stephen Green, at PJ Media, explains some of what's going on. As a preliminary matter, truckers are aging out of the job, and new ones aren't coming along. Because federal law requires that truckers be at least 21, kids who leave school at 17 or 18 get involved in other careers, leaving trucker shortfalls. Women don't offset this problem because, as is typical for most physically difficult jobs, it's not their thing. Those are long-term problems.

The short-term problem, though, is that California has passed laws taking trucks off the road:

Twitter user Jerry Oakley reminds us that "Carriers domiciled in California with trucks older than 2011 model, or using engines manufactured before 2010, will need to meet the Board's new Truck and Bus Regulation beginning in 2020." Otherwise, "Their vehicles will be blocked from registration with the state's DMV," according to California law.

"The requirement is to purchase electric trucks which do not exist."

Sundance, at Conservative Treehouse, expands on this, explaining that the EPA reached an agreement with the California Air Resource Board

to shut down semi tractor rigs that were non-compliant with new California emission standards. [snip] In effect, what this 2020 determination and settlement created was an inability of half the nation's truckers from picking up anything from the Port of LA or Port of Long Beach. Virtually all private owner operator trucks and half of the fleet trucks that are used for moving containers across the nation were shut out.

In an effort to offset the problem, transportation companies started using compliant trucks (low emission) to take the products to the California state line, where they could be transferred to non-compliant trucks who cannot enter California. However, the scale of the problem creates an immediate bottleneck that builds over time. It doesn't matter if the ports start working 24/7, they are only going to end up with even more containers waiting on a limited amount of available trucks.

That's Problem No. 1.

Problem No. 2, again according to Green, is California's infamous AB-5, the law that, as a sop to the Democrats' beloved unions, killed the gig economy:

"Traditionally the ports have been served by Owner Operators," Oakley says, who are non-union. But under AB-5, "California has now banned Owner Operators."

Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can't accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.

(Incidentally, Green says AB-5's language is included in the "Build Back Better" bill in Congress.)

All of this means that Biden's grandstanding about having the ports operate 24/7 won't make a difference. The greenies and the unions killed the infrastructure to unload those ships, with COVID restrictions, trucking restrictions, and free money landing the coup de grâce that led to this situation. Biden does have the emergency power to order those California laws in abeyance, but you know he's not going to do so….

Way off, I worked at the shipyards loading/unloading container ships in college, and we were much faster than that. Not all the unions are about slowing everything down, as they were bonuses for getting some out early. The interesting thing is that you have the young guys, doing the grunt work, stacking and lashing the containers, then their fathers were driving the trucks and forklifts, while their grandfather's ran the cranes. My father was the agent for the southeast for the NMU, course he was retired by then (although he did go back to sea at age 60 as a merchant) and I was being encouraged by those on the docks to drop out of college and stay there, a few told me that I wouldn't be loading/unloading for long and would be in 9ne of the offices overseeing until moving into a union position. It was like some had my future planned out. Mind you, while the cranes or anything we did, was not rocket science, we did work 12 hours (and sometimes 15) shifts if a ship really needed to get underway. Even then, at the bottom of the bottom, the money was good, and after 8 hours, it went automatically to time and a half.
That is so last year, it has nothing to do with healthy people NOT SHOWING up for work at the ports today.

As above, I got the impression from the one longshorman I know pretty much sounds like the above. A family affair with a few years of actual hard dangerous work up front followed by a generous number lucrative years after. The part that blew me away though is the easy jobs like working the cruise terminal paid the same as the crane jobs as well as the getting paid for a full day just showing up and checking in.

It wasn't that here, the crane guys were definitely making much more money than the guys like me stacking containers, the risk and danger is very real. Nothing opens your eyes as you are finishing your 12 hour shift, watching the sun come up and the morning do making the top of the container slippery, and you on the cop container, in what seems like a different zip code from the water, waiting for the crane operator to swing a basket up so you can get back to the ground. It literally felt like you were so high, back then, no harnesses (I don't know if they even do that now) and if you took a leak off the side( literally, there is no where else to go) you could put your junk back up and walk to the other side before the pee hits the water.

Naw. All you get with unions is the ability to bargain collectively. Longshoremen benefit from even more fundamental forces. Market forces. Leverage. Same thing that allows the shipping companies to bend the rest of the world over. The cost of shipping a container has grown tenfold just recently. Longshoremen had nuthin' to do with that.

And with the massive interruption of the international supply chains, the winners (besides the shipping companies) will be the companies that had already won their industry championships. The losers will be the mom-and-pops. As always. If there is one thing that limits opportunity for small businesses it is....big businesses.

Whining about unions is as dumb as liberals whining about conservatives and vice versa. This is what big businesses want you to believe is the problem.

It's real, superman. I shelved a whole container, someone had to. Not another one coming for awhile, and they are top supplier within the industry, but certainly not Walmart material.

With that in mind, where exactly is the break down? Unions?

Not sure what any of that means, Matt. What's real? What is "shelving?" Who is "they?"

Sure, I know what longshoremen make. Many of them subcontract their jobs. That's right, they "own" the jobs and get paid silly money while subcontracting with someone else who actually goes to work for them and does the job.

I also know there is HUGE money in shipping and there have been some very big conflicts "On The Waterfront" in many places throughout the world. The site of the nation's only general strike was Seattle and it started on the waterfront, in 1919. Whoever controls the waterfront wins bigtime. And the shipping companies win that tussle. But the longshoremen score some points of their own. It's a game of muscle, and longshoremen have some of that. Either you believe in market forces or not.

Ah! As I hit "post" I may have figured out your question. "Where exactly is the breakdown?" You may be thinking something went wrong. If so, then that's the breakdown. I don't think something went wrong. The big shipping companies have to pay very high costs for longshore labor. This means the small guy got somethin' out of the deal. By using their clout. When Seattle wins a football game, or when they lose one, I don't think the system failed or that something was unfair. Same with the tension between shipping companies and longshoremen. That has been a LONGSTANDING battle. Heck....the shipping companies have made some major victories lately. I think the west coast longshoremen's labor agreement collapsed. Those agreements became more localized. Divid and conquer. A victory for shipping companies.

Longshoremen wages have almost no affect on shipping prices. Containers are handled very quickly in Seattle. Many per hour. Lets pretend the cost of unloading a container is $50, which is probably way higher than actual. Another $50 to load it in China, which is pure fantasy. That is four tenths of a percent of the cost to ship that container, assuming what I hear is the current rate of $25K. 0.4%. This is what could be saved if longshoremen worked for free.

I'm okay with that money falling out of the pocket of Hanjin and into the pocket of some American.

Why are the cartels so good at moving product, Superman?

What cartels?

because it's extremely lucrative, and because it's illegal, they don't have to worry about all of the bureaucratic BS. Also because if the folks doing the moving don't, they get killed. I suspect that may be a motivating factor.

I'm just guessing.

Port of Rotterdam fully automated.

Impressive. Crazy fast. No humans.

I bet the robots can't unionize ... ha

Watch some of the online videos.

Yes sir, and my Father was part of more than a few, in his day.

I know as much about shipping containers as I do about Mars orbital calculations.

For the price to have gone up so much, someone is making major money all of a sudden.

No doubt having all those very expensive cargo ships just sitting out there has to be mega millions per day so that is a lot of the increased cost.

With luck maybe the manufacturers and resellers will figure out how to just make the stuff right here in the USA and keep the money at home. Screw China and all those garbage products. Make it here in the USA.

California stupidity and avarice adversely affecting the entire country

When the robots unionize, we are all FUcHeD!

I call B. S. On the article.
First it state operators make $250k a year so you're pissed off because they are over paid. What does it matter what their pay is?
Then the source is.

The Washington Examiner spoke to six truck drivers near the Long Beach/Terminal Island entry route, and each described crane operators as lazy, prone to long lunches, and quick to retaliate against complaints. The allegations were backed up by a labor consultant who has worked on the waterfront for 40 years.
What capacity does the labor consultant have?
6 truckers said. Give me a break.
It's all to distract from what ever the real problem is.
Mike

I tend to agree and there are efforts reduce the balance of trade and intellectual property transfer. Here is a bit on what's going on.....
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/made-china-2025-threat-global-trade