PORT of Los Angeles executive director Eugene Seroka remains hopeful that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) will resolve their differences, urging calmness in the talks, reports the American Journal of Transportation.
Mr Seroka assured US east and Gulf Coast ports that Los Angeles would resume its number one port position having recently been eclipsed by New York-New Jersey's tonnage figures.
Mr Seroka was responding to questions during his a presentation before the Propeller Club of Los Angeles and Long Beach on September 28 via Zoom.
"It gets a little more complex in contract negotiations when people start speaking out of school. I don't like reading articles where it says unnamed sources, so I let the experts continue to work on this. While those folks are at the bargaining table up in San Francisco, the rest of us are going to move this cargo," said Mr Seroka.
At the Port of Los Angeles, the average exchange of containers that are unloaded and loaded onto a containership is still "the best in the business".
"It's 12,000 container units per ship, and we have moved on average more than 200,000 container units off the docks and into the American economy for eight straight months," said Mr Seroka.
"Since January, when we had 109 ships backed up and waiting to unload, we have brought them down to eight ships as of this morning. Truck dwell times are 3.6 days which is near where we were before the import surge. I like where we're at right now. "
Mr Seroka is not worried about predictions that there has been a shift of cargoes away from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to US east and Gulf Coast ports.
"One month does not make a trend, so let those guys have their parades and parties. We have been in the pole position as the number one port in America for 22 consecutive years. I don't see that changing anytime soon. There will be movement on a month-to-month basis," said Mr Seroka.
"In August we did see a drop in our cargo of about 15 per cent for three main reasons. And one of them is that retailers and others brought in cargo much earlier than normal, thinking that they needed to pad their transits and their supply chains just a bit. We also saw about 10 to 12 per cent of those boxes go to the eastern and Gulf Coast ports. Folks made those decisions early on because they were tired of congestion and backups. And some hedged on the West Coast labour talks. Thirdly, we had a local issue here at one of our terminals that caused some of our ships to go into Long Beach ¡ (they) got that fixed. That's also temporary. So here we are crying in our beer, and we still did 805,000 TEU."
"This high roll of imports wasn't going to last. The inflation numbers on the wholesale and producer sides remain elevated because we keep buying. Even in the face of the 8.3 per cent inflation that we are facing, we are hungry as Americans to go out and do things and see each other. And you got a job market that looks very different from those inflation numbers. You have the lowest unemployment rate since 1969, and you still have 10.4 million jobs open nationwide," said Mr Seroka.
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