We Have to Talk About the ILA Strike Threat
Time is ticking... All the way back in November, the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) warned its members to prepare for a strike in October of this year. ILA's contract, which [...]
Time is ticking... All the way back in November, the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) warned its members to prepare for a strike in October of this year. ILA's contract, which [...]
What were Universal Cargo's top blog posts of 2023? Every year, we like to count it down from 10 to 1, classic David Letterman style. Sometimes we do the top 10 international shipping news [...]
Sometimes bad news isn't as bad as it appears. This isn't one of those times. Last week, I wrote about the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) using the word shippers most fear [...]
If there was a war over freight rates, whoever ocean freight carriers' version of Paul Revere is would be riding out, yelling, "The ships are coming! The ships are coming!" Back in February, I [...]
One of the things we often do in Universal Cargo's blog is give shippers an outlook for how the international shipping freight rate market is behaving and looks to behave. Over the years, [...]
Air freight shippers may want to consider avoiding Chicago O'Hare until a bad and potentially very disruptive situation there is resolved. A Chicago mandate pushed forward by the city's [...]
2022 is just days away from being over, so it's time to look forward to 2023. We'll probably have a few posts focused on what the year will have in store for international shipping, but today we [...]
Importers, and shippers in general, had a rough couple of years when it came to international shipping after the pandemic hit. But the landscape, or ocean-scape, looks quite different now. [...]
Another union has voted to reject the tentative labor agreement the White House pressured union and railroad negotiators to reach back in September, at the last moment before unions could, and [...]
Imports for the end of the year were already expected to decline, but at the end of last week the expected decline for October basically doubled. November and December's expected decline [...]
News broke on Thursday of last week that a tentative agreement had been reached between the railroads and the two largest rail worker unions, BLET and SMART-TD, preventing a [...]
West Coast ports, East Coast ports, Gulf Coast ports... we're seeing congestion all over. A great deal of the focus lately has been on congestion at East and Gulf Coast ports as many shippers are [...]
In the last blog, we looked at how – with the slowing economy – retailers and shippers are decreasing their imports and expected to keep doing so in 2023. As discussed, that should mean [...]
Strike, strike, strike! The U.S. supply chain is in a triple strike threat from truckers, dockworkers, and rail workers. Normally, it's three strikes and you're out, but this is no game. Any one [...]
The Port of Oakland is back to full operation after truckers, with an assist from ILWU members, screeched the port to a halt last week over Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5). The port says it will take [...]
Yesterday (Wednesday, July 14th), truckers began protesting Assembly Bill 5, aka AB 5 or the gig worker bill, at and around the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland. Not merely did [...]
Shippers who import from China were likely relieved to hear the months-long "Covid Zero" lockdown in Shanghai had been lifted last Wednesday. However, they shouldn't expect the supply chain to [...]
U.S. ports are finally getting a period of time to recover from the unyielding demand and congestion that has plagued them since 2020. However, there are a few things that could make the relief [...]
Ocean freight rates are falling. Yes, they're still extremely high, but they're moving in the right direction. Greg Miller reported this week in Freight Waves that global spot rates for ocean [...]
There is still no end in sight to the horrific Shanghai lockdown, where the Chinese government has actually barricaded people inside their homes, worsening the struggle for citizens to get food [...]