ANKENY, Iowa – After nine months of tense negotiations on the West Coast, the dockworkers? union and the shippers? association representing 29 affected ports agreed on a five-year labor contract, according to a joint statement released late Friday. That contract is expected to be ratified by the membership of both organizations in the coming weeks.
During the dispute, commerce through the entire West Coast slowed down, with particular ramifications for meat exporters, whose chilled products have limited shelf life. Even with the new developments, Soy Transportation Coalition Executive Director Mike Steenhoek says the backlog of shipments delayed during the dispute will likely take weeks, if not months, to get back on track. Furthermore the price tag on all of those delays is likely in billion-dollar territory.
“We’re talking about perishable goods,” explains Steenhoek, “so fresh fruits, meat; they don’t have unlimited shelf life. There has been some spoilage. There are additional costs that have to be sometimes absorbed if you are able to get that product to your customers. Sometimes you may have to resort to rerouting that traffic up through the Canadian port system, or down through Mexico, or through the eastern United States. All of these things have additional costs associated with it.”
Steenhoek says bulk commodity exports, like soybeans or corn, were largely unaffected by the dispute. That’s because about one quarter of all soybean exports and just 13 percent of corn exports leave the United States through the Pacific Northwest. Steenhoek says most bulk ocean vessels have a separate agreement with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represented dockworkers in the labor dispute; that separate agreement insulted bulk grain and oilseed shipments from the backlog of farm products now sitting at ports.
He says the question now is how the reputation of the United States as a dependable supplier with be affected.
“We can’t keep having every few years these kind of large disputes that all of a sudden threaten our ability to export,” he says. “If the United States wants to be a leading exporter on the global market place, we have to have a port system that will work with us, to allow those aspirations to become outcomes.”
To hear more from Steenhoek on the resolution of the West Coast ports labor dispute, click the audio player above this story.
