“You have to be familiar with global shipping to understand a lot of this,” McGrath said. “When I explain it to reporters, their eyes just glaze over.”
For example, the chassis — the wheeled trailers used to move shipping containers in and out of ports — used to be owned by the shipping companies. In 2010, a number of large ocean carriers, including Maersk Line, Yang Ming, and Evergreen, announced that they would no longer provide chassis because they were not in their new business model.
“Maintenance was the cost they were trying to avoid, maintenance covered under our contract,” McGrath said. “They were only trying to shift out of their responsibility.”
“The shippers sold all those chassis to third-party companies not covered under the union contract, saying it was no longer part of their business model,” he said. “But in the process, they lost control of the chassis. Now there’s a huge shortage of them, and (the shippers) don’t have control. They are being hoarded or contractors are using them to their benefit. It’s happening at the worst possible time in already overstressed port infrastructure.”
“The frustrating part is the finger-pointing at us as if we’re the ones who have caused all these problems and created the delays that have resulted,” McGrath said. “We want to talk about solutions to these problems and find a way to ease port congestion while maintaining good family-wage jobs. But they aren’t interested in that. Instead of solving problems, they just want to cut our jobs and our benefits.
