Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is traveling the country, giving local speeches celebrating federal spending in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill while another major slowdown is hampering cargo at West Coast ports.
This time, the cause is not a backup of cargo ships, but a labor dispute between the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) that has continued from last week.
In a statement on Monday, the PMA blamed the ILWU for a slowdown of cargo processing at West Coast ports that, it said, risked shifting shipping to Atlantic coast ports — perhaps permanently, it warned.
The ILWU has tweeted that it is merely seeking better terms for a collective bargaining agreement.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week:
A new wave of job actions halted cargo operations across major West Coast ports, with dockworkers effectively shutting down the Port of Oakland for a time and hampering handling at some of the country’s busiest trade gateways in an escalating confrontation with employers over long-running contract talks.
…
Shipping industry officials said dockworkers failed to show up for work and slowed operations at the ports starting Thursday evening and continuing into Friday morning.
“We are moving at half of the velocity that we normally operate with,” an official at one cargo-handling terminal at Los Angeles-Long Beach said Friday. Some terminals in Southern California opened Friday morning and then stopped accepting trucks a few hours later as traffic built up because of the slowed operations.
Buttigieg, whose department administers the infrastructure funds, was away during the cargo crisis of 2021, taking two months’ unannounced paternity leave. He was on vacation in Portugal in 2022 during a potential rail workers’ strike that would have crippled the U.S. economy.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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