News

Labor Secretary to tackle port problem

The White House is sending U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez to California to try to break the impasse between port operators and longshore workers on the West Coast.

The situation has worsened in recent weeks. Vessel loading and unloading operations were suspended the past two weekends because port operators say they cannot afford to pay longshore workers weekend and holiday premiums for what they say is “severely diminished productivity.”

Leann Saunders, chair of the U.S. Meat Export Federation, welcomed the White House announcement and said contract negotiations must be brought to a close soon.

“Yes, I think it’s reached the stage of actually being a crisis. We’re hearing from a lot of (our) members,” Saunders says, “and if you think about all of the product that we’re exporting that goes out of the West Coast ports, you’ve got 80 percent of your waterborne product that is going out—and that equates to about 150 million dollars per week, approximately.”

The impasse is especially concerning to exporters of chilled beef and pork because of the limited shelf life of those products. Delays have caused Asian buyers to be increasingly reluctant to place order for chilled product.

“If you think about all of that product being held up there on the port—and that’s high value, chilled product going into those Asian markets—it is all at risk and you just have a short period of time until you have millions of dollars of product that’s lost. And all of those Asian customers wanting product to come in and needing a readily available supply—so it’s a very critical situation for us,” Saunders says.

Saunders says a valuable global customer base that has taken the U.S. meat industry decades to build, is being placed in jeopardy by the port labor impasse.