Posted on July 26, 2021
A critical player in the choreography of global trade, Oakland’s congestion is delaying shipments and pushing up prices
As the morning sun climbs over the Port of Oakland, a hive of workers are hustling to move tens of thousands of shipping containers and unclog a lifeline of California commerce.
Thousands more containers await them tomorrow, and the day after, in the largest, longest and most expensive backlog in the history of the port, delaying global shipments of everything from Adidas to Zinfandel.
While impatient vessels float on the San Francisco Bay horizon, waiting a week to enter, “we’ve got to work harder. We get ships in, we get ships out,” said Michael Adams, a muscular Oakland native with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s Local 10, who drives the tractors that stack the fully loaded 20 or 25-ton steel boxes.
“If that ship needs to leave at 7 o’clock, we’ve got to get it out of here,” said Adams, 50. “It’s got to be fully loaded.”
The extraordinary surge of incoming cargo — combined with a shortage of labor — is creating unprecedented challenges at the nearly century old Port of Oakland. Before the pandemic, the ships would generally come straight to berth. Now they wait for space.
