Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been touring the country, delivering speeches to celebrate the federal spending in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.
However, a new labor dispute between the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) has caused a significant slowdown in cargo processing at West Coast ports. This has led to concerns that shipping may be permanently shifted to Atlantic coast ports, according to a statement by the PMA on Monday. The ILWU has tweeted that it seeks better terms for a collective bargaining agreement.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that a new wave of job actions had halted cargo operations across major West Coast ports. Dockworkers effectively shut down the Port of Oakland for a time. They hampered handling at some of the country's busiest trade gateways in an escalating confrontation with employers over long-running contract talks. Shipping industry officials said dockworkers failed to show up for work and slowed operations at the ports starting Thursday evening and continuing into Friday morning.
"We are moving at half of the velocity that we normally operate with," an official at one cargo-handling terminal at Los Angeles-Long Beach said Friday. Some airports in Southern California opened Friday morning and stopped accepting trucks a few hours later as traffic built up because of the slowed operations.
Buttigieg, whose department administers the infrastructure funds, was away during the cargo crisis in 2021, taking two months' unannounced paternity leave. He was on vacation in Portugal in 2022 during a potential rail workers' strike that would have crippled the U.S. economy.
Joel B. Pollak, Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News, has been critical of Buttigieg's absence during these crises. Pollak has pointed out that Buttigieg was not present during the cargo crisis in 2021 and was on vacation during a potential rail workers' strike in 2022.
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