Hieronder het verhaal van een vrachtwagenchauffeur die al 20 jaar containers van en naar haventerminals rijdt. We hebben hier al veel gehoord over een tekort aan chauffeurs in Groot-Brittannië (GB), maar weinig of niets over een soortgelijke crisis in de VS, een crisis die men daar ‘shipping crisis’ noemt.
De chauffeur begint ermee om (bij wijze van spreken) experts te vragen, althans die denken te weten wat de oorzaak is van de shipping crisis, of ze weten hoeveel kranen er in de havens zijn om containers* op trailers te zetten dan wel die eraf te halen, het antwoord is: één voor 50 tot 100 vrachtwagens (nogal een verschil, maar goed zelfs één kraan voor 50 vrachtwagens lijkt me te weinig)
Ongelofelijk als je leest wat deze chauffeur te vertellen heeft, zoals de niet aan een vakbond verbonden chauffeurs, deze haken steeds meer af daar ze nauwelijks nog wat kunnen verdienen, terwijl ze zelfs 14 uur per dag werken (in het land van de onbegrensde mogelijkheden heeft men de werkdag voor deze chauffeurs opgerekt tot 14 uur per dag….)…. Chauffeurs die zelf opdraaien voor de kosten aan hun trekker en die bovendien zelf voor de brandstof moeten betalen…… Niet zelden maken deze chauffeurs meer kosten dan ze verdienen, daar vanwege het tekort aan afvoer van containers soms wel tot 8 uur moeten wachten voor ze een container kunnen lossen dan wel laden (kan me zelfs voorstellen dat deze chauffeurs geen zin hebben om lege containers terug te brengen, immers ook dat kost een berg tijd…..)
Ben trouwens wel benieuwd of e.e.a. terug is te zien in het aantal ongelukken met vrachtwagens, het zal me weer niet verbazen als deze fiks zijn toegenomen, ach men heeft in de VS schijt aan de onderlaag, zie ook de ‘Sacrifice Zones’** in steden, waar arme wijken die tegen industrieterreinen zijn gebouwd ervoor zorgen dat een groot aantal mensen diverse kankers oplopen en waar de levensverwachting een stuk lager ligt dan elders, terwijl veel van deze mensen niet eens verzekerd zijn tegen ziektekosten en kankertherapieën niet kunnen betalen…… (de VS anno 2021…..)
Intussen heeft de Biden administratie die al meer dan 750 miljard had uitgetrokken voor oorlogsvoering in landen waar de VS niets te zoeken heeft, nog eens 29 miljard extra uitgetrokken voor het Pentagon, terwijl die slangenkuil gevraagd had om een extra bedrag van 19 miljard dollar!! (dus ongevraagd 10 miljard extra, ach de persen voor bankbiljetten maken al jaren overuren in de VS…. Elk ander land met zo’n schuld was al 10 keer failliet verklaard……)
Onbegrijpelijk dat men zo met mensen omgaat in de VS en ze zo mag uitbuiten, de VS ‘the land of dreams and opportunity’, echter de werkelijkheid is de VS het land van: nachtmerries voor de grote onderlaag en ongekende mogelijkheden voor de welgestelden en plutocraten, figuren die niet hoeven te dromen over een financieel onbezorgd leven, dat hebben ze al (lang)……
Lees het verhaal van Ryan Johnson, de chauffeur en zie dat het wel lijkt of het neoliberaal-kapitalistinsche systeem aan het instorten is, waarvan zoals gewoonlijk bij een crisis vooral arme hardwerkenden, daklozen en zieken het eerste slachtoffer zijn, terwijl die al met een veel te karig salaris naar huis gaan, althans als ze nog steun krijgen…… (de armoede in de VS is groot en wijdverbreid….)
Volgens Ryan kan men deze crisis zelfs niet oplossen als de chauffeurs 24 uur per dag moeten werken, wat fysiek uiteraard onmogelijk is, voorts stelt hij dat niemand wil betalen om deze crisis op te lossen en vandaar ook dat hij denkt dat deze shipping crisis nog wel jaren kan aanslepen en je kan er bijna de klok op gelijkzetten dat dit het geval zal zijn…. Benieuwd wanneer wij hier vanwege tekorten in de rij moeten staan voor een brood of een krop sla….. Intussen is als slecht voorteken de inflatie ‘een beetje aan de hoge kant’ met een percentage van 3.4, zo werd vandaag bekend gemaakt……..
Nogmaals >> de VS: het land van de ongekende mogelijkheden, in uiterst negatieve zin wel te verstaan…….
Het volgende artikel komt van ZeroHedge, en werd ook op de site van Ryan Johnson gezet, mijn excuus bij plaatsing vergeten te vermelden.
(On
the top right hand side of this page you can choose for a translation
in the language of your choice, first choose ‘Engels’ [English] so
you can recognise your own language [the Google translation is first
in Dutch, a language most people don’t understand, while on the other
hand most people recognise there language translated in English])
(als
je het Engels niet machtig bent, kopieer dan de Engelse tekst en plak
die in deze
vertaalapp,
de app werkt snel en de vertaling is van een redelijk goede
kwaliteit)
I’ve Been Driving Trucks For 20 Years, I’ll Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End
Authored by Ryan Johnson via Medium.com,
I have a simple question for every ‘expert’ who thinks they understand the root causes of the shipping crisis:
Why is there only one crane for every 50–100 trucks at every port in America?
No ‘expert’ will answer this question.
I’m
a Class A truck driver with experience in nearly every aspect of
freight. My experience in the trucking industry of 20 years tells me
that nothing is going to change in the shipping industry.
Let’s start with understanding some things about ports.
Outside
of dedicated port trucking companies, most trucking companies won’t
touch shipping containers. There is a reason for that.
Think
of going to the port as going to WalMart on Black Friday, but imagine
only ONE cashier for thousands of customers. Think about the lines.
Except at a port, there are at least THREE lines to get a container in
or out. The first line is the ‘in’ gate, where hundreds of trucks daily
have to pass through 5–10 available gates. The second line is waiting to
pick up your container. The third line is for waiting to get out. For
each of these lines the wait time is a minimum of an hour, and I’ve
waited up to 8 hours in the first line just to get into the port. Some
ports are worse than others, but excessive wait times are not uncommon.
It’s a rare day when a driver gets in and out in under two hours. By
‘rare day’, I mean maybe a handful of times a year. Ports don’t even
begin to have enough workers to keep the ports fluid, and it doesn’t
matter where you are, coastal or inland port, union or non-union port,
it’s the same everywhere.
Furthermore, I’m fortunate enough to be a
Teamster — a union driver — an employee paid by the hour. Most port
drivers are ‘independent contractors’, leased onto a carrier who is
paying them by the load. Whether their load takes two hours, fourteen
hours, or three days to complete, they get paid the same, and they have
to pay 90% of their truck operating expenses (the carrier might pay the
other 10%, but usually less.) The rates paid to non-union drivers for
shipping container transport are usually extremely low. In a majority of
cases, these drivers don’t come close to my union wages. They pay for
all their own repairs and fuel, and all truck related expenses. I
honestly don’t understand how many of them can even afford to show up
for work. There’s no guarantee of ANY wage (not even minimum wage), and
in many cases, these drivers make far below minimum wage. In some cases
they work 70 hour weeks and still end up owing money to their carrier.
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. They took a 2/3 pay cut and most of
these drivers were working 12 hours a day or more. While carriers were
charging increased pandemic shipping rates, none of those rate increases
went to the driver wages. Many drivers simply quit. However, while the
pickup rate for containers severely decreased, they were still being
offloaded from the boats. And it’s only gotten worse.
Earlier this
summer, both BNSF and Union Pacific Railways shut down their container
yards in the Chicago area for a week for inbound containers. These are
some of the busiest ports in the country. They had miles upon miles of
stack (container) trains waiting to get in to be unloaded. According to
BNSF, containers were sitting in the port 1/3 longer than usual, and
they simply ran out of space to put them until some of the ones already
on the ground had been picked up. Though they did reopen the area ports,
they are still over capacity. Stack trains are still sitting loaded,
all over the country, waiting to get into a port to unload. And they
have to be unloaded, there is a finite number of railcars. Equipment
shortages are a large part of this problem.
One of these critical shortages is the container chassis.
A
container chassis is the trailer the container sits on. Cranes will
load these in port. Chassis are typically container company provided, as
trucking companies generally don’t have their own chassis units. They
are essential for container trucking. While there are some privately
owned chassis, there aren’t enough of those to begin to address the
backlog of containers today, and now drivers are sitting around for
hours, sometimes days, waiting for chassis.
The impact of the container crisis now hitting residencies in
proximity to trucking companies. Containers are being pulled out of the
port and dropped anywhere the drivers can find because the trucking
company lots are full. Ports are desperate to get containers out so they
can unload the new containers coming in by boat. When this happens
there is no plan to deliver this freight yet, they are literally just
making room for the next ship at the port. This won’t last long, as this
just compounds the shortage of chassis. Ports will eventually find
themselves unable to move containers out of the port until sitting
containers are delivered, emptied, returned, or taken to a storage lot
(either loaded or empty) and taken off the chassis there so the chassis
can be put back into use. The priority is not delivery, the priority is
just to clear the port enough to unload the next boat.
What happens when a container does get to a warehouse?
A
large portion of international containers must be hand unloaded because
the products are not on pallets. It takes a working crew a considerable
amount of time to do this, and warehouse work is usually low wage. A
lot of it is actually only temp staffed. Many full time warehouse
workers got laid off when the pandemic started, and didn’t come back. So
warehouses, like everybody else, are chronically short staffed.
When
the port trucker gets to the warehouse, they have to wait for a door
(you’ve probably seen warehouse buildings with a bank of roll-up doors
for trucks on one side of the building.) The warehouses are behind
schedule, sometimes by weeks. After maybe a 2 hour wait, the driver gets
a door and drops the container — but now often has to pick up an empty,
and goes back to the port to wait in line all over again to drop off
the empty.
At the warehouse, the delivered freight is unloaded,
and it is usually separated and bound to pallets, then shipped out in
much smaller quantities to final destination. A container that had a
couple dozen pallets of goods on it will go out on multiple trailers to
multiple different destinations a few pallets at a time.
From personal experience, what used to take me 20–30 minutes to pick up at a warehouse can now take three to four hours.
This slowdown is warehouse management related: very few warehouses are
open 24 hours, and even if they are, many are so short staffed it
doesn’t make much difference, they are so far behind schedule. It means
that as a freight driver, I cannot pick up as much freight in a day as I
used to, and since I can’t get as much freight on my truck, the whole
supply chain is backed up. Freight simply isn’t moving.
It’s
important to understand what the cost implications are for consumers
with this lack of supply in the supply chain. It’s pure supply and
demand economics. Consider volume shipping customers who primarily use
‘general freight’, which is the lowest cost shipping and typically
travels in a ‘space available’ fashion. They have usually been able to
get their freight moved from origination to delivery within two weeks.
Think about how you get your packages from Amazon. Even without paying
for Prime, you usually get your stuff in a week. The majority of freight
travels at this low cost, ‘no guarantee of delivery date’ way, and for
the most part it’s been fine for both shippers and consumers. Those days
are coming to an end.
People who want their deliveries in a
reasonable time are going to have to start paying premium rates. There
will be levels of priority, and each increase in rate premium
essentially jumps that freight ahead of all the freight with lower or no
premium rates. Unless the lack of shipping infrastructure is resolved,
things will back up in a cascading effect to the point where if your
products are going general freight, you might wait a month or two for
delivery. It’s already starting. If you use truck shipping in any way,
you’ve no doubt started to see the delays. Think about what’s going to
happen to holiday season shipping.
What is going to compel the
shippers and carriers to invest in the needed infrastructure? The owners
of these companies can theoretically not change anything and their
business will still be at full capacity because of the backlog of
containers. The backlog of containers doesn’t hurt them. It hurts anyone
paying shipping costs — that is, manufacturers selling products and
consumers buying products. But it doesn’t hurt the owners of the
transportation business — in fact the laws of supply and demand mean
that they are actually going to make more money through higher rates,
without changing a thing. They don’t have to improve or add
infrastructure (because it’s costly), and they don’t have to pay their
workers more (warehouse workers, crane operators, truckers).
The
‘experts’ want to say we can do things like open the ports 24/7, and
this problem will be over in a couple weeks. They are blowing smoke, and
they know it. Getting a container out of the port, as slow and
aggravating as it is, is really the easy part, if you can find a truck
and chassis to haul it. But every truck driver in America can’t operate
24/7, even if the government suspends Hours Of Service Regulations
(federal regulations determining how many hours a week we can
work/drive), we still need to sleep sometime. There are also
restrictions on which trucks can go into a port. They have to be
approved, have RFID tags, port registered, and the drivers have to have
at least a TWIC card (Transportation Worker Identification Credential
from the federal Transportation Security Administration >> TSA). Some ports
have additional requirements. As I have already said, most trucking
companies won’t touch shipping containers with a 100 foot pole. What we
have is a system with a limited amount of trucks and qualified drivers,
many of whom are already working 14 hours a day (legally, the maximum
they can), and now the supposed fix is to have them work 24 hours a day,
every day, and not stop until the backlog is cleared. It’s not going to
happen. It is not physically possible. There is no “cavalry” coming. No
trucking companies are going to pay to register their trucks to haul
containers for something that is supposedly so “short term,” because
these same companies can get higher rate loads outside the ports. There
is no extra capacity to be had, and it makes NO difference anyway,
because If you can’t get a container unloaded at a warehouse, having
drivers work 24/7/365 solves nothing.
What it will truly
take to fix this problem is to run EVERYTHING 24/7: ports (both coastal
and domestic), trucks, and warehouses. We need tens of thousands more
chassis, and a much greater capacity in trucking.
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. The truckers aren’t port employees
and port owners are only legally required to pay for bathroom facilities
for their employees. This is a nationwide problem). For the whole
supply chain to function efficiently every point has to be working at an
equal capacity. Any point that fails bottlenecks the whole system.
Right now, it’s ALL failing spectacularly TOGETHER, but fixing one piece
won’t do anything. It ALL needs to be fixed, and at the same time.
How do you convince truckers to work when their pay isn’t guaranteed, even to the point where they lose money?
Nobody
is compelling the transportation industries to make the needed changes
to their infrastructure. There are no laws compelling them to hire the
needed workers, or pay them a living wage, or improve working
conditions. And nobody is compelling them to buy more container chassis
units, more cranes, or more storage space. This is for an industry that
literally every business in the world is reliant on in some way or
another.
My prediction is that nothing is going to change
and the shipping crisis is only going to get worse. Nobody in the supply
chain wants to pay to solve the problem. They literally just won’t pay
to solve the problem. At the point we are at now, things are so
backed up that the backups THEMSELVES are causing container companies,
ports, warehouses, and trucking companies to charge massive rate
increases for doing literally NOTHING. Container companies have already
decreased the maximum allowable times before containers have to be back
to the port, and if the congestion is so bad that you can’t get the
container back into the port when it is due, the container company can
charge massive late fees. The ports themselves will start charging
massive storage fees for not getting containers out on time — storage
charges alone can run into thousands of dollars a day. Warehouses can
charge massive premiums for their services, and so can trucking
companies. Chronic understaffing has led to this problem, but it is
allowing these same companies to charge ten times more for regular
services. Since they’re not paying the workers any more than they did
last year or five years ago, the whole industry sits back and cashes in
on the mess it created. In fact, the more things are backed up, the more
every point of the supply chain cashes in. There is literally NO
incentive to change, even if it means consumers have to do holiday
shopping in July and pay triple for shipping.
This is the new normal. All brought to you by the ‘experts’ running our supply chains.
==========================================
* Hoorde vanmorgen op BNR dat het aantal containers op de
grootste containerschepen achter elkaar gezet een rij vormen van 120
kilometer (lijkt me overigens wel wat lang)…….
** Zie o.a.: ‘De gezondheid van gekleurde mensen in de VS wordt opgeofferd voor de winsten van grote bedrijven: Sacrifice Zones……‘
Ik heb ook het label ‘BLM’ (Black Lives Matter) toegevoegd, zodat je berichten kan vinden over politiemoorden en de daaropvolgende grote demonstraties die vooral vorig jaar plaatsvonden.