Commentary

New rail regulation may be on the horizon in Canada, which CN believes would be a mistake.

There’s been a lot of talk and speculation about the “fiscal cliff.” It has the advantage of specific deadlines and consequences. One way or another, it will force action.

The marine drayage market is expected to remain challenging and highly fragmented in 2013. The 10 largest companies account for less than 15 percent of the overall market and only four have annual revenues exceeding $150 million. Further industry consolidation is expected in 2013.

As we begin the new year, more companies will recognize the competitive advantage their supply chains can offer and that success will rely on highly skilled logisticians, engineers and managers to mitigate the inherent risks involved and to fully seize this opportunity.

Addressing the anemic pace of economic recovery is of primary importance to our industry. The increasingly negative pressures on business and uncertainty over the economy only serve to challenge this recovery.

As a general proposition, companies divide their security considerations into physical security (facilities and people), supply chain security (goods) and financial security (internal systems).

The U.S. Department of Justice recently performed an enhanced review of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act as it pertains to transportation companies. The conclusion: FCPA risk still impacts the industry.

Q: As a broker, we handled a prepaid shipment of a pallet of confectionery products being returned from a distributor to the manufacturer. The consignee refused delivery, claiming the candy had been contaminated because it was delivered in a trailer also containing pesticides and fertilizers. The consignee stated that the trailer emitted a strong chemical smell.

With the International Longshoremen’s Association on the verge of its first Maine-to-Texas dock strike since 1977, the shipping industry and its customers are preparing for confusion and chaos.

It’s hardly new to say third-party logistics as an industry has been on a great run.

Here we are again, at the end of another year, and I’m worried that, collectively, we’re going insane — you know, the type of insanity defined by doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Harold Daggett isn’t saying so, but the International Longshoremen’s Association president seems to have opened the door for a second ILA contract extension.

In business, as in life, it’s all about leverage. And as leverage goes, the maritime- and port-related labor movement appears to be holding many of the cards.

In their exhausting daily struggle to prevent the breakup of the eurozone, Europe’s leaders are in danger of allowing their most successful project, the single market, to stagnate, at best, or unravel, at worst.

With Los Angeles-Long Beach dockworkers back to work, the port labor spotlight returns to the International Longshoremen’s Association on the East and Gulf coasts.

AMP Americas manages a fleet of 42 milk trucks for Fair Oak Farms with renewable natural gas made from manure from the same 30,000-cow dairy.

Q: In your Nov. 19 column, “Master of the Billing Domain,” you responded to a question from a shipper who’d had a carrier combine two shipments tendered on two separate bills of lading at different times on the same day into a single shipment, and then billed charges higher than would have accrued if the two shipments had been handled separately.

It’s well-known that global container volumes are slowing. But the impact this will have on the industry isn’t nearly as well understood, if only because a new era of slower growth is arguably just beginning.

Maybe it’s the approach of the holiday season and its inevitable references to “A Christmas Carol,” but the ghosts of intermodal past seem to be offering good advice for us now and for the future.

An unhappy freight forwarder questions why forwarders are being lumped in with brokers in the recently enacted MAP-21 law that raises the security bond required for motor carrier brokers to $75,000.

Happy holidays? Not for shippers. Last summer they sweated the possibility of a peak-season strike by the International Longshoremen's Association. Now they're facing the real threat of an ILA work stoppage at year-end.

With the U.S. presidential election over, let the hand-wringing begin. Between now and January — less, considering the upcoming holiday breaks — what will a lame-duck Congress accomplish on the numerous and important issues facing it?

A statement in a recent analyst report on forwarder Expeditors International of Washington stopped me in my tracks.

When Congress acts to avoid the year-end fiscal cliff threatening the nation’s fragile economic recovery, it should include a solution for an issue that threatens to curtail the country’s ability to maintain competitive ports and diverts import containers away from U.S. ports.