Yesterday (Sunday) USA Today ran a major story on the Panama Canal and the $46 billion that has been spent on upgrading U.S. ports.
The article has useful information – but the newspaper pointed their finger at the wrong parties when they said there was a “West Coast dockworkers strike that shooed away a lot of business”
A clip from the article U.S. ports prepare for Panama Canal expansion as of today:
The truth? The dockworkers did not strike.
As the U.S.A Today reported in February, the labor stoppage was due to the dockworkers’ employer, the Pacific Maritime Association, cutting work hours.
Furthermore, as the Washington Post reported in February, labor problems were not the root cause of West Coast port cargo delays,
“A rapidly increasing amount of cargo arriving in ever larger ships has scrambled normal operations in west coast ports, requiring costly and time-consuming infrastructure upgrades and leaving the dockworkers union trying to maintain as much control over the process as it can. “
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