Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/new-york-port-hustles-to-cut-rare-logjam-amid-covid-labor-woes-1.1704736
4h ago
New York Port Hustles to Cut Rare Logjam Amid Covid Labor Woes
Brendan Murray, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- The Port of New York and New Jersey is working to clear a small but rare bottleneck of container ships anchored off the coast of Long Island as Covid-19 cases among dockworkers collide with a pandemic-fueled surge in cargo volumes.
“We have seen a spike in the number of labor going out into quarantine,” Port Authority Director Sam Ruda said in an interview this week. The average wait at anchorage for container carriers was 4.75 days in the final week of 2021, compared with an average of 1.6 days for all of last year.
Jim McNamara, a spokesman for the International Longshoremen’s Association, said in an email that the number of its members unavailable to work because of Covid is running about 350 a day. Still, he called the impact “slight” because some crews are returning from quarantine or illness and others are available from cruise-ship terminals.
The New York area’s port terminals, the busiest on the East Coast, have largely avoided backlogs like those gripping the twin gateways of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, where scores of vessels are still running into delays of more than three weeks to offload.
Ruda credited the waterfront workforce and other stakeholders that run 24-7 operations for keeping short the anchorage waits for New York. But some factors have converged to require the queue: omicron’s spread across the region, year-end holiday time off for workers, and an increase in charter vessels needing one-time berth space...
4h ago
New York Port Hustles to Cut Rare Logjam Amid Covid Labor Woes
Brendan Murray, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- The Port of New York and New Jersey is working to clear a small but rare bottleneck of container ships anchored off the coast of Long Island as Covid-19 cases among dockworkers collide with a pandemic-fueled surge in cargo volumes.
“We have seen a spike in the number of labor going out into quarantine,” Port Authority Director Sam Ruda said in an interview this week. The average wait at anchorage for container carriers was 4.75 days in the final week of 2021, compared with an average of 1.6 days for all of last year.
Jim McNamara, a spokesman for the International Longshoremen’s Association, said in an email that the number of its members unavailable to work because of Covid is running about 350 a day. Still, he called the impact “slight” because some crews are returning from quarantine or illness and others are available from cruise-ship terminals.
The New York area’s port terminals, the busiest on the East Coast, have largely avoided backlogs like those gripping the twin gateways of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, where scores of vessels are still running into delays of more than three weeks to offload.
Ruda credited the waterfront workforce and other stakeholders that run 24-7 operations for keeping short the anchorage waits for New York. But some factors have converged to require the queue: omicron’s spread across the region, year-end holiday time off for workers, and an increase in charter vessels needing one-time berth space...