Commentary

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is preparing to protest the hiring of non-ILWU labor at the soon-to-be-opened EGT export grain terminal in Longview, Wash., although its response will most likely be more measured than the job actions it took last year.

As I prepared to write my last monthly column for 2011, I couldn’t help but think that I had just “recently” written my December 2010 article, which looked back over the first decade

Maritime transportation has steadily evolved in sophistication, with state-of-the-art equipment, global weather information gathering, GPS tracking and once-inconceivable capacity for container transp

It was a major breakthrough for container ship safety when ports this month joined with carriers in endorsing a global requirement that boxes be weighed before they are loaded.

Alfred Kahn, the late economist and noted transportation deregulator, once famously claimed that if we simply used the word “banana” in place of inflation we would find some sort of happy

Q: I’ve read your article in the Nov. 14 issue on the spoiled load of imported shrimp.

There is nothing on the books that President Obama can’t keep Alan Bersin at the head of Customs and Border Protection by makin

Two Japanese semiconductor makers, Elpida Memory and Renesas Electronics, were created through mergers of divisions spun off by other Japanese entities.

Anyone working for U.S. ports, or even generally associated with moving goods in and out of the United States, owes a very large thank you to the Occupy movement.

Q: Our Canadian division in Ontario shipped five machines to its customer pickup account in California. The shipment was freight collect via the customer’s Broker X.

Asked recently to explain an ocean container market in which freight rates and liner profits have collapsed this year after soaring in 2010, the Asia-based CEO of a Top 20 container line channeled bes

The Teamsters union played no active role in organizing the Occupy movements that attempted to shut down West Coast

Northern California motor carrier Devine Intermodal couldn’t send any truckers to the Port of Oakland Monday because the

While attending the TOC Americas 2011 Conference in Panama last month, I heard four ocean carrier executives say very similar things about the future of vessels and services.

The space-sharing pact APL and MOL announced last week on their intra-Asia services was hardly the largest slot agreement in the shipping world.

With this month’s United Nations climate change conference wrapping up in Durban, South Africa, the fissures around the world over the efforts to extend limits on greenhouse gas emissions after

Q: You’ve written lately about several truckers who have, as you’ve put it, “subcontracted” loads to other carriers.

I have speculated in recent weeks about the possibility the container industry will see consolidation in 2012.

The Containerization and Intermodal Institute chose well in selecting recipients of awards at CII’s annual New York-New Jersey luncheon.

YRC Worldwide eliminated another legacy of its former Roadway and Yellow subsidiaries — their tariffs.

It’s a reporter’s worst nightmare, or close to it. You file a story, it gets published in print and events overtake it that makes you as the writer look like an ignoramus.

An annoyance. A sideshow. A spectacle? All that, for sure. A serious threat to the West Coast as a port gateway? Not a chance.

For four of the most tumultuous years many of us have seen in the past half-century in terms of economic activity, consolidation in the transportation world has been like the weather, to borrow a phra

Q: I read something recently about a lawsuit by truck drivers who are complaining carriers underpay them based on something to do with how many miles they drive.

Importers and exporters are getting nervous as momentum builds for a Dec. 12 shutdown of West Coast ports by the Occupy movement. West Coast ports handle more than 50 percent of the U.S.

Proving again that shareholders no longer are willing to tolerate systemic shortcomings from those in charge of public companies, the Louisiana Municipal Police Employees Retirement System has filed a

Sea Star Line’s guilty plea to price-fixing and the indictment of its former president add to questions swirling around the future of the Puerto Rico trade and the U.S.-flag carriers that serve it.

At an economic moment when cost pressures on shippers are particularly intense, it’s tempting for many to shrug aside much thought about environmental issues.

Here’s one thing shipping customers and transportation operators certainly should agree on: Shipping goods from one point to another should be far simpler than it is today.

Q: Help settle an internal debate.

About 10 days after returning from last month’s TPM Asia Conference in Shenzhen, I turned around and headed back to Asia, this time to join two trade missions with Oregon companies to Hong Kong,

The nation’s truckers are not only movers of freight, they’re consumers, and they’re buying more goods on the road, according to the McLane-NATSO Index.

This just in from the “Closing the Barn Door after the Horse Escaped” department, Congress is saying “never again” to the U.S. flag cargo preference fiasco last summer.

The disconnect between carriers’ unwillingness to withdraw Asia-Europe capacity and the need to do so to put a floor

Perspectives, I’ve learned, are very much based on where you sit, so I was more than interested in what two of my favorite industry people had to say recently.

For the first time in a number of years we’re hearing serious talk about major container line mergers.

Are shippers staring at the possibility of significant capacity being laid up by container lines and non-operating shipowners next year?

Barely a month into retirement, Ron Widdows looks like a relaxed man.

Q: We’re involved in a claim for $117,000 on a load of imported frozen raw breaded shrimp.

A quick digest of my Journal of Commerce column this week: Capacity is being pulled from the trans-Pacific but not Asia Europe.