Labour issues: ports should ramp up their engagement

Certainly, it seemed that any maritime news during 2022 and 2023 always included some snippet or another about negotiations around the West Coast of the States and Canada. Flows of containerised cargo imports did indeed shift from Pacific ports into the Atlantic. And now, at the time of writing, a labour-related shutdown of the St. Lawrence Seaway (not quite an actual port, but almost) is in its early stages. Hopefully, this one will be short-lived.

Why should ports ramp up their engagement on such matters? After all, many ports have landlord status, and don’t actually operate facilities. Ports, however, need to be responsive to the general public’s changing moods, and also to the ability of bad news, albeit of the trade press variety, to permeate into mainstream media. “Cargo doesn’t vote, people do,” is something we heard frequently prior to the Supply Chain Crisis of 2020 – 2022, intimately tied to the unprecedented (well, for 100 years) pandemic environment of those years.

While I would not use the cliché of “sea change”, it is fair to say that the general public (the consumers of the aforementioned import flows) – the majority of whom don’t have bedroom views of the big ports or channels such as the Seaway, is much more keenly aware of cargo flows than in previous years. Mainstream media outlets are now watching such issues closely; even the venerable New York Times – NYT  (sometimes called the Gray Lady), which had a “shipping reporter” back in the day, now has multiple writers covering logistics. As an aside, the NYT used to publish lists of vessels inbound to the docks, but doesn’t do so anymore.

Ports can exert important influences on labour issues. On the West Coast earlier this year, the big ports did get involved in the nuts and bolts of actual logistics by fi ne-tuning vessel queueing practices. Behind the scenes (not directly visible to me… but maritime writers must frequently draw inferences), potential and actual political favours were presumably an ancillary add-on to the actual bargaining that occurred.

It’s no longer enough to leave it to the feuding parties to resolve their differences in a timely manner – ports should make efforts to get out in front of negotiations before trade flows are disrupted.