Tariff Fallout Hits LA Port: Cargo Decline Leaves Half of Dockworkers Idle
Dockworkers at the Port of Los Angeles are seeing a shortage of work opportunities due to the decline in cargo entering the California gateway as Chinese exports to the U.S. continue to plummet .
Nearly half of the longshoremen who support operations at the port went without work over the past two weeks, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, told The Los Angeles Times in a Saturday report.
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Over the last 25 work shifts, which span roughly two weeks, only 733 jobs per day were available for 1,575 longshoremen looking for work.
The cargo decline has stemmed from President Donald Trump's tariffs on U.S. trading partners initially imposed in April, led by duties on Chinese goods that at one point reached 145 percent. In the wake of those tariffs, American companies had been cancelling import bookings , while ocean carriers on the trans-Pacific trade lane from Asia to the U.S. West Coast began blanking sailings .
In May, 17 cargo ships canceled their planned trips to Los Angeles amid the plummeting demand.
Although China is just one of the dozens of countries slapped with tariffs on its exports, the magnitude of products flowing from the country to the U.S. gives it a more outsized role on the trade lane and at the Port of Los Angeles itself. About 40 percent of imports that pass through the terminals at the port originate from China, Seroka said in April.
In May, China's exports to the U.S. had their sharpest drop in five years—since the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic—to $28.8 billion, according to customs data. The 34.5 percent decline was the second-biggest pullback on record after the 54 percent collapse in February 2020 as the pandemic upended global trade.
The May export drop has been reflected in the decline in cargo at the Port of Los Angeles. While the California gateway has not yet released official statistics for May, the port processed 25 percent less cargo than forecast for the month, according to Seroka.
With less cargo comes fewer work opportunities. The 733 "job orders" are a significant decline from the usual range between 1,700 and 2,000 job orders posted during a typical day shift. For night shifts, 1,100 to 1,400 opportunities are typically posted.
At the Port of L.A., terminal operators post available work opportunities, known as job orders, on a digital board three times a day. Dockworkers can review the job orders at each shift and bid on the jobs they want to take. If there are more longshoremen than job orders, a portion of them will go without pay.
"They haven't been laid off, but they're not working nearly as much as they did previously," Seroka told The Times. "Since the tariffs went into place, and in May specifically, we've really seen the work go off on the downside."
Concerns over the lighter cargo loads have been apparent in industries across the supply chain impacted by port throughput, including trucking and rail, which are tasked with transporting the cargo to warehouses. Retail businesses that would otherwise be taking in these deliveries also remain concerned about the impacts, particularly SMBs that may not have had the luxury of front-loading goods into the U.S.
However, the 90-day rollback of the China tariffs in early May has since resulted in a rapid rush to bring goods into the U.S. ahead of a new Aug. 14 negotiation deadline, which could ultimately result in a flood of containers into the Port of Los Angeles and its sister port, the Port of Long Beach.
Hapag-Lloyd said it saw bookings out of China more than doubled in the three weeks after the trade truce went into effect, illustrating just how dramatic the swing has been. Such excess ordering, alongside an increase in trans-Pacific ocean freight capacity in line with demand, sets U.S. ports up for another likely escalation in freight handling.
This would benefit the dockworkers and result in an increase in job orders across ports once the first wave of post-tariff truce container vessels start to reach the U.S. later this month.
Although analysts have predicted that the San Pedro Bay ports could see record traffic across June and July due to the increased capacity from Asia to North America, Seroka has continually held a more reserved viewpoint about possible impacts on Los Angeles.
"The June numbers that we're projecting right now are nowhere near where they traditionally should be," Seroka said.
