10 things to know about California port standoff

LOS ANGELES- All U.S. West Coast ports spare Oakland have resumed full operations after a tentative labor deal was reached over the weekend, easing months of disruption to port trade.

The agreement, announced Friday, involves 29 ports whose 20,000 dockworkers have been without a contract since July, resulting in cargo backups and slowed freight traffic at the ports.

The only snag? Oakland. An arbitrator found that workers at a port in Oakland, CA, took part in an illegal work stoppage, resulting in the shutdown of daytime operations.

During the dispute, shippers suspended loading and unloading of cargo vessels for night shifts, holidays and weekends at the five busiest ports. The silver lining is that a full-scale extended shutdown of ports was avoided and that could have cost the U.S. economy about $2-billion each day.

Here’re a few other port-related numbers worth mentioning:

1,000: dockworker assignments filled Sunday at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, more than double the number of recent Sundays;
2,000: dockworker assignments expected to be filled on Monday;
25,000: vehicles Honda Motor Co. says were lost in production this month as a result of the dock backup. Honda’s Ohio plant is expected to resume full production on Tuesday, according to reports, but plants in Canada and Indiana will operate at lower production levels through March 2;
3.8: billion-dollars’ worth of goods that move in and out of U.S. seaports daily. According to reports, U.S. meat exporters were particularly affected by the port disruptions and were forced to put millions of pounds of meat into cold storage, ship by air or use Canadian or Mexican ports;
1: Trillion US$ of freight that the ports handle annually;
50 to 75: Percentage of truck drivers that Carson, CA.,-based Shippers Transport Express had to send home every day because freight slowed to a trickle;
10: Estimated number of full ships in the harbor waiting to be unloaded;
147,000: US$ amount in wages earned by the average longshoreman;
848: The Teamsters Local that  offered to provide unemployment benefits to truckers affected should the Port shut down;
1: The rank of Long Beach and Los Angeles ports on the “Busiest Ports in North America” chart. 


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