HOW MANY HOURS DOES IT TAKE TO LIFT A CONTAINER?

Six.  Got a problem with that?

Crane operators who belong to a powerful union and earn up to $250,000 a year transferring containers from ships to trucks are worsening the supply chain crisis that threatens Christmas by goofing off on the job, frustrated truckers told the Washington Examiner.

The finger-pointing at the busy Los Angeles County ports comes as scores of container ships are anchored off the California coast, waiting in some cases for weeks to unload their freight. The Biden administration has scrambled to get shipping executives, port officials, and labor to tackle the problem. While the reasons for the burgeoning backlog are complex, truck drivers say not everyone seems to be working together.

Finger-pointing might be apposite, as operators of heavy machinery in transportation, including commercial truckers, are pretty good at extracting rents.  Favors for favors are part of the business.

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. None of the truckers interviewed for this story wanted to provide a last name because they fear reprisals at the ports.

It sounds like the truckers are learning the same lesson the manager of the itinerant circus learned when he pushed the blacksmith or the electrician too hard. (Do it yourself, Mac.) “This is all a reflection of the management they have down there, the inmates run the asylum. The managers are all afraid to say anything because the operators are so powerful they get management fired if they don’t like them.”

An executive with a freight-forwarding company called Flexport might have seen the rent-extraction in action.  "There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only ~7 that were even operating and those that were seemed to be going pretty slow."  It might be that the cranes are only going as fast as the draymen can clear space on the ground or for chassis for the containers to be landed.  "If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed."

I'm encouraged that an academic expert on the operation of those California ports is currently chief economist at the Federal Maritime Commission, although her current portfolio seems to be compensation, rather than port operations.  Getting the ports fluid, though, might be as simple as all-hands-moving-trains to get containers to someplace not in California where truckers not constrained by La-La-Land's environmental foolishness can get at them. "Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port."

I'd note only that forcing the railroads is likely to be as effective as forcing the crane operators.  For years, the freight railroads' dispatching has been a sore point for Amtrak, and I suspect telling that Union Pacific or BNSF dispatchers that emergency container moves get priority over the intermodals that UPS and other high-value shippers have paid for is going to get pushback.  I also wonder where all the lift capacity at these emergency container bases on federal property will come from.