With a near-record 75 container ships waiting outside the U.S.’s largest port complex in southern California, unionized dockworkers have strengthened their indispensable role in the supply chain.
Amazon warned Wall Street that it will have to spend billions of dollars hiring workers, paying them more and even speeding partly empty trucks to their destinations to ensure that supply chain snarls don’t derail the holiday shopping season.
German delivery firm DHL expects global supply chain bottlenecks to ease next year as the return of air travel adds cargo capacity and higher vaccination rates keep a lid on COVID-19 infections.
A requirement for federal workers and contractors to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 — which would affect a number of transportation companies that work with the U.S. government — won’t exacerbate a backlog of shipping and deliveries, according to the Biden administration.
Shippers around the world are scrambling to keep up with surging freight costs, and the logistics organizations that support them are being challenged in unforeseen ways.
With shipping logjams slated to continue throughout the next six months, some are predicting what’s being called “a never-ending peak season” for all of 2022, in which there’s less supply than demand.