Posted on May 14, 2025
Monday’s reprieve in the U.S.-China trade wars did little to calm West Coast waters.
President Donald Trump gave West Coast ports a brief reprieve Monday when he agreed to temporarily pull back from sky-high tariffs on imported goods from China — but the industry remains in choppy waters.
“This is still a crisis,” Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said at a press conference Monday, where port and labor leaders touted a new study showing the Port of Long Beach’s jobs impact.
Trump’s agreement with China to lower tariffs from 145 percent to 30 percent did little to ease the growing drumbeat of unease from the shipping and logistics industries of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Together, the ports are the busiest in the nation, even discounting the dozen-odd ships that have cancelled their trips from China so far, leaving California workers with fewer shifts unloading and transporting the goods.
Representatives from across the shipping and agriculture industries detailed layoffs and cancelled orders at a Monday afternoon hearing in Sacramento called by California Treasurer Fiona Ma.
“I’m just going to be really frank, I don’t know what Trump is trying to do,” said Amanda Blackwood, the president and CEO of the Supply Chain Federation. “If there is a belief that creating disruption and leverage is going to create opportunity, I love your hope. However, that’s not real, right? Disruption in the market just causes disruption.”
West Coast import volumes have gone up and down over the past couple of months, most recently spiking over the weekend and into Monday.
Mario Cordero, the CEO of the Port of Long Beach, said it would take one to two months for the latest change in tariffs between the U.S. and China to show up in port activity.
“We’re still in an uncertain period,” he said.
Mike Jacob, the president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, said the uptick was likely from shipping companies responding to last month’s 90-day reprieve.
“We do expect there will be some hiccups because the supply chain works best when it’s steady and measured, and what’s been happening now is anything other than steady and measured,” he said in an interview.
He said Trump’s latest announcement was good news in that it would likely bring more short-term business.
“People have gone from talking about, ‘How many layoffs am I going to have to do?’ to ‘How am I going to handle additional cargo?’” he said.
Still, local elected officials were reckoning with the fallout.
“The damage is done,” Richardson added. “We’ve seen ships that never sailed.”
