Shipping Hold Up

Shipping Hold Up

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Think about the timeline. Early spring you Idaho farmers were hard at work getting your crops into the soil. From that point forward you nurture whatever it is you're growing and, at the end of it all comes the harvest. Now what? You want to sell and ship. However, that may be difficult if not impossible because, ports up and down the West Coast have been delayed and upheld due to labor disputes since the beginning of November which prevents many ag companies from shipping their products internationally.

Vice President of Bosco Trading Company Shelly Boshart is a member of the U.S. Forage Export Council: "The numbers are staggering. We're talking about hundreds of hours lost for our hard working hourly employees. We're talking about over $25 million since November 3rd — in our industry alone trying to ship product that we cannot ship — whether that is rolled bookings or whether that's cancelled booking from the ship lines because they are so backed up. Or containers that are just sitting on docks for weeks that can't be shipped. So the numbers are quite large and the layoffs and hours lost are huge and sometimes irreplaceable." She adds the the USFEC is writing letters to all West Coast U.S. Senators and Congressmen: "Asking for them to really push President Obama for a federal mediator and then also once when this is finally contracted and approved and we're able to move on. It will weeks and months to get back to normal. But in that time, I hope we don't forget. We're going to continue to push Congress and look at these labor laws and say lets not let this happen again. Everything they are doing is not illegal. They are not doing anything illegal — that's what is crazy is that they are holding America hostage and they aren't doing anything wrong. So we need to relook at the labor laws and ensure this doesn't happen again.

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