Months of negotiation between the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) finally came to a long-awaited conclusion earlier this year, helping to free up a substantial backlog of containers that had gone unretrieved as a result of the contract dispute. At long last, though, ports activity is slowly getting back to normal along the West Coast, based on a new report.
NRF: 8 percent growth in import volume anticipated
“Inbound shipments are expected to increase 8 percent in April at West Coast ports.”
Import cargo volume at the nation’s more than two dozen container port locations along the West Coast is expected to increase by 8 percent in April when contrasted with the same period in 2014, according to a new Global Port Tracker report from the National Retail Federation (NRF).
Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy at NRF, noted that there’s definitely been a lot of progress in the few months since the contract resolution was reached. However, there’s a ways to go yet before things are flowing as quickly as they do traditionally.
“There’s still a lot of cargo waiting to be loaded onto trucks and trains and moved across the country even after it’s unloaded from the ships,” said Gold. “The situation is getting better but we’re still far from normal.”
Members of the ILWU and PMA will vote on the five-year contract agreement on May 22.This past February, the ILWU and PMA came to an agreement, in principle, that would guarantee current working conditions for the next five years. The deal has yet to be finalized, though, because members of the respective trade groups have yet to vote on the deal. That will happen May 22, NRF noted.
Ben Hackett, founder of Hackett Associates, said that in the meanwhile, “great measures” have been taken to clear the backlog that’s accumulated along the West Coast’s 29 port locations. In some cases, though, it’s led to landslide issues, caused by difficulties getting containers out of the water and onto trucks.
Container volumes surge in Washington State
With port workers endeavoring to ease the backlog as quickly as possible, they’re seeing volume levels rise with new shipments. At the Seattle-Tacoma gateway, for example, container volumes rose 21 percent last month compared to March 2014, the Journal of Commerce reported. The Washington State-based ports handled more than 361,951 twenty-foot equivalents (TEUs) in March, a six-month high.