Selecting a new triathlon bike involves attention to a list of specifications that initially seems like a NASA bill of materials: carbon fiber composition ratio, computational fluid dynamic and wind tunnel testing, integrated cable management systems, electronic shifting mechanisms, crank vs. hub power meters, blah, blah blah. In January, I visited my bike guy, Rob. After we spent 90 minutes building and tearing apart bikes in our heads and in paper sketches, and predicting the performance of possible bikes in races I might possibly do, we settled on this (with Rob's customizations, naturally):
This is a Cervelo P3. Cervelo is a Canadian company. They build their bikes in China. Rob checked with his Cervelo rep, and his rep estimated that they'd have my bike to Rob by the middle of March.
It's the middle of April and I don't have my bike yet. Which brings us to the subject of West Coast dock strikes. All 29 West Coast ports are represented by a single union of dock workers, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. All 29 West Coast ports are represented by a single association of shipping companies and terminal operators, the Pacific Maritime Association. Yes, that's right--if the representatives of just two entities can't agree, no shipping traffic moves into or out of the entire West Coast.
For about nine months, during the negotiation of a new contract between the ILWU and the PMA, shipping traffic slowed dramatically, causing massive congestion, cancelled orders, and rotting produce. The effect on retailers was significant of course--estimated in billions of dollars. A new contract has been agreed, and traffic is moving again, but it's taking a long time to catch up with the traffic jam created since last summer. Oakland cleared the backlog of ships waiting outside its ports 10 days ago, but other ports may take much longer.
If you thought that the rather unique ability to control trade on the entire West Coast, which is 25% of the entire US transportation business, might be a lucrative business for the ILWU and the PMA, you'd be right. Members of the ILWU are well compensated: dock workers average over $100,000 a year, and can make double or triple that I couldn't find good numbers on PMA member profits, but they must be significant to allow them to pay their average employee a six-figure salary. The price of this generosity rests on retailers and ultimately consumers, of course.
There's a long history of government intervention to break up monopolies, and the West Coast shipping situation might be interesting to Department of Justice attorneys concerned about economic harm, if there are any. But the hostages of a monopoly can have their own methods of getting themselves free. There are indications that shippers will use the 5 year labor contract term to find ways to get goods to market other than West Coast ports. One way of doing that is to send traffic to East Coast ports, which do not have the same monopoly union representation as their West Coast counterparts. That has its own costs, but the monopolists may have pushed their customers too far.
If they rerouted my bike to the East Coast, I'll go pick it up myself.
