About 800 dockworkers, kind of 1 in 10 of the day by day group of workers on the ports of Los Angeles and Lengthy Seaside had been unavailable for Covid-related causes.
The Covid-19 Omicron variant is hampering efforts to transparent a backlog of about 100 container ships on the country’s busiest port as infections upward thrust amongst Southern California dockworkers.
Alan McCorkle, chief executive of Yusen Terminals LLC at the Port of Los Angeles, said the rise in coronavirus infections has extended a worker shortage that began over the Christmas and New Year holidays, reducing productivity at his terminal by about 20%.
Dozens of vessels have waited weeks or months to dump shipment on the ports of Los Angeles and Lengthy Seaside as a weigh down of imports has overwhelmed logistics operations that ship items to U.S. markets.
The Southern California port complex is the main ocean gateway for U.S. imports from Asia, handling about 40% of containerized cargo. The ports struggled last year to handle record import volumes that surged about 20% compared with pre-Covid levels in 2019 as businesses rushed to restock inventories and Americans switched their pandemic-era spending from services to goods.
The Biden management took measures aimed toward decreasing the backlog, together with efforts to prod Southern California terminals to transport towards 24-hour operations that had limited success.
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