Apr.20--IMMEDIATELY after the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Pacific Maritime Association reached a tentative contract agreement on February 20, truck turn times improved rapidly at the ports of Los Angeles-Long Beach.
According to Val Noronha research they reached a plateau quickly after the agreement and have since held steady at that new level of productivity, providing acceptable one-hour turn times.
When the docker slowdown was initiated by the ILWU in early November, 40 per cent of truck visits to the US port complex lasted more than two hours, said the study by Mr Noronha, president of Digital Geographic Research Corp.
"It was heartening to see an immediate and substantial improvement in turn times," said Mr Noronha, who analyses truck turn times at ports based on his gathering of global positioning system (GPS) data.
Mr Noronha noted that congestion had been building at the ports even before the previous ILWU contract expired on July 1, 2014.
Container volumes were rising, larger ships were discharging and reloading 5,000 to 10,000 containers in a single visit, and chassis shortages were affecting productivity, as were disruptions in intermodal rail service.
Nonetheless, the deep dive in productivity was not noted until November. Truck turn times remained slow until February 20, and then the improvement was "like day and night", reported Newark's Journal of Commerce.
(Source:shippingazette)