Speaker 1: Welcome to on the Job. This season, we're focusing on
Speaker 1: how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's
Speaker 1: call it a great transformation, a change in the way
Speaker 1: workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever,
Speaker 1: putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll
Speaker 1: be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves
Speaker 1: as they find their life's work. Great transformations come after
Speaker 1: moments of great calamity. The reason people are taking big
Speaker 1: risks today and finding new jobs that fulfill them is
Speaker 1: because COVID threw all of our values into question and
Speaker 1: made us reevaluate well. In twenty twenty one, a similar
Speaker 1: event happened that through the world once again into uncertainty,
Speaker 1: but may have been a lesson that came and went.
Speaker 1: So today we look back at the story of a ship,
Speaker 1: a canal, and some gusts of wind that brought a
Speaker 1: global industry to a complete standstill. People like stuff. We
Speaker 1: love stuff. If you're listening to this right now, in
Speaker 1: your living room or your office, look around. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff. Chairs, computers, paper clips, drywall, your phone,
Speaker 1: a coffeemaker. If you were asked, hey, where'd that coffeemaker?
Speaker 1: Come from. You might say Walmart, But where does it
Speaker 1: really come from? The truth is it comes from all
Speaker 1: over the world, different parts coming from different countries, being
Speaker 1: assembled in factories across the world, and crossing thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of miles of ocean to get to that shelf
Speaker 1: at the Walmart fifteen minutes away from your door. And
Speaker 1: if your coffeemaker breaks, you know you can go get
Speaker 1: another one. We are completely separated from the process of
Speaker 1: how we get the stuff we want, and most of
Speaker 1: us are probably totally okay with that as long as
Speaker 1: it's convenient, who really cares. But what happens when stuff
Speaker 1: hits the fan. A giant container ship is blocking the
Speaker 1: Siouez Canal, One are the world's busiest waterways. The route
Speaker 1: is vital for the movement of everything from oil to consumer.
Speaker 1: Almost all the stuff around you in that room right
Speaker 1: now comes to you on ships. Many of those ships
Speaker 1: passed through the Suez Canal in Egypt, and on March
Speaker 1: twenty third, twenty twenty one, the Siouez Canal was blocked.
Speaker 1: This ship is so huge, it's as long as the
Speaker 1: Empire state building is tool and it is blocking the
Speaker 1: entire wich of the Sioux Canal since it run aground
Speaker 1: on Tuesday. The ship was called the ever Given And
Speaker 1: some of you probably remember this because it kind of
Speaker 1: took the world by storm when it happened during the
Speaker 1: six full days that it was stuck. Why did this
Speaker 1: situation even nacer in the first place. The entire globe
Speaker 1: was affected when this one ship with twenty five crew
Speaker 1: members got stuck for six days. So today, instead of
Speaker 1: interviewing someone within the economic landscape, we're going to look
Speaker 1: at the economic landscape as a whole to talk about
Speaker 1: what the ever Given being stuck in the Siouez Canal
Speaker 1: says about us. I think most of us aren't aware
Speaker 1: of just how much global trade hangs by a thread. First,
Speaker 1: a little history. The Siouez Canal was built and opened
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty nine as global trade continued to intensify.
Speaker 1: It's a long, narrow corridor that runs through Egypt, connecting
Speaker 1: the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. Before that ship's coming
Speaker 1: from East Asia to Europe or to North America, they
Speaker 1: had to go around the entirety of Africa. So by
Speaker 1: punching this canal through Egypt to the Mediterranean, the journey
Speaker 1: for ships was shortened by about six thousand or ten
Speaker 1: full days at sea. This was obviously a game changer
Speaker 1: for world trade. The Suez Canal connected the world in
Speaker 1: a time of science leading up to the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: and was a historic milestone in human engineering and collaboration.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty eight, a massive treaty called the Convention
Speaker 1: of Constantinople was signed by Egypt, most European countries, the Russians,
Speaker 1: the Ottomans, and in it there was a clause stating
Speaker 1: that the Suez Canal was open for any country to
Speaker 1: use quote in time of war as in time of peace,
Speaker 1: by every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction
Speaker 1: of flag. The thing is, the Suez Canal became so
Speaker 1: important and so vital that, maybe unsurprisingly, it became a
Speaker 1: point of conflict. Power struggles over the canal led to
Speaker 1: a major crisis between Egypt and Israel in nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: and then it was completely shut down during the Six
Speaker 1: Day War in nineteen sixty seven, closing for eight full years.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, the Egyptian government underwent a nine billion
Speaker 1: dollar project to expand the canal in certain parts in
Speaker 1: order to double the number of ships going through from
Speaker 1: forty nine ships a day to ninety seven. So by
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen this construction was finished, global trade was booming,
Speaker 1: and that brings us up to modern day, the age
Speaker 1: of clicking a button on Amazon and magically getting whatever
Speaker 1: it is you ordered in two days. Again, that stuff
Speaker 1: it comes on boats. Everything from oil, gas, your coffee maker, food,
Speaker 1: it all comes on boats. And twelve percent of stuff
Speaker 1: on boats, twelve percent globally comes through the Suez Canal.
Speaker 1: On average, fifty one massive boats called ultra large container
Speaker 1: vessels or uclvs go through the canal daily, roughly equating
Speaker 1: to nine billion dollars every single day. Until March twenty third,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, a ship called the ever Given was
Speaker 1: about to enter the Suez Canal. The ever Given is
Speaker 1: one of the biggest objects people have put on water.
Speaker 1: It's a quarter mile long. Ships have gotten this big
Speaker 1: over the years because consumers consume more and more. But
Speaker 1: at a certain point, ships can't get longer or bigger
Speaker 1: because they wouldn't be able to navigate things like the
Speaker 1: Suez Canal. So shipping companies started stacking their shipping containers
Speaker 1: higher and higher on board. On March twenty third, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, the ever Given was headed toward the Netherlands,
Speaker 1: loaded up with nearly twenty thousand containers, stood fifty meters
Speaker 1: above the water, and was carrying about one billion dollars
Speaker 1: worth of goods. It was a windy day, severe storm winds.
Speaker 1: They're often our severe storm winds in the Suez, and
Speaker 1: they were bad enough that day that some captains decided
Speaker 1: not to go through the canal. But Captain is Non Cantabell,
Speaker 1: a very experienced seaman, decided to keep going. The reason
Speaker 1: he take the risk is there are huge financial pressures
Speaker 1: to get your cargo where it needs to be on time.
Speaker 1: The shipping industry is a just in time business, so
Speaker 1: Captain Cantabell knew there was an enormous amount of money
Speaker 1: riding on his delivery. From a bird's eye view, the
Speaker 1: canal looks like a straight shot through, pretty easy. But
Speaker 1: seafarer is going through it say it's incredibly stressful. It's narrow,
Speaker 1: it's shallow. Any mistakes could have huge consequences, and there's
Speaker 1: a line of ships right behind you also with hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars on the line, and they're all
Speaker 1: in a hurry, so As the ever Given enters the
Speaker 1: south end of the canal, the wind starts to push
Speaker 1: the ship. Because ships like this stack their containers so
Speaker 1: high to make the trip worth it, there's a ton
Speaker 1: of surface area, and the entire ship starts to act
Speaker 1: like a sail. The ship starts swerving back and forth
Speaker 1: in the narrow canal. The captain and the navigators on
Speaker 1: board are arguing with each other about what to do.
Speaker 1: They decide to increase their speed, which the way that
Speaker 1: these ships work would normally give it control, but because
Speaker 1: of how narrow the channel is, physics takes over and
Speaker 1: the boat starts to get pulled towards the sides. The
Speaker 1: faster it goes, orders are getting thrown around to go
Speaker 1: hard left, then hard right, back and forth, essentially fishtailing.
Speaker 1: And then one of these turns throws the ship out
Speaker 1: of control where a hard turn can't recover it, and
Speaker 1: the bow of the ever Given crashes into the sandy bank.
Speaker 1: The ship is stuck in the front. Not only that,
Speaker 1: but the back of the boat swings across the canal
Speaker 1: and grounds itself on the other side. So now you
Speaker 1: have a boat that's a quarter mile long diagonally lodged
Speaker 1: across the Suez Canal. The four hundred meter long cargoes ship,
Speaker 1: the ever given is stuck in the Suez Canal, and
Speaker 1: it is fouling up global trade, and it is also apparallel.
Speaker 1: The ship was stuck for six whole days. And you
Speaker 1: probably remember this because it was a year into the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and the story went totally viral, with every armchair expert
Speaker 1: and news anchor across the world all trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to get this thing unstuck. It kind of
Speaker 1: confounded everyone, like how did this happen? And how was
Speaker 1: it so hard to fix? They eventually tried to dig
Speaker 1: it out, scooping out the bank at the front of
Speaker 1: the boat with huge excavators that just look comically small
Speaker 1: next to this mammoth ship. A picture of one of
Speaker 1: these little excavators became a meme synonymous with trying to
Speaker 1: conquer a hopeless task. Every day the ship was stuck.
Speaker 1: All this stuff, these ships waiting to go through and
Speaker 1: deliver virtually anything you see around you, those all stopped.
Speaker 1: The delay is costing essentially four hundred million dollars an hour.
Speaker 1: I'll spare you the minutia of how They eventually got out,
Speaker 1: but on March twenty ninth, six days later, due to
Speaker 1: some creative engineering and a lucky supermoon that pulled the
Speaker 1: tides up, Yes, a supermoon, the ship eventually became buoyant
Speaker 1: enough and got unstuck. When it did, the innumerable ships
Speaker 1: and tugboats that were on the canal all sounded their horns, celebrating.
Speaker 1: Over those six days, one ship with twenty five crew
Speaker 1: members got hit with some wind and got stuck in
Speaker 1: a bank and disrupted more than fifty four billion dollars
Speaker 1: worth of goods, affecting the entire global economy from months
Speaker 1: on end. The fact that this ship being stalled in
Speaker 1: the Suez is costing the globe billions of billions of
Speaker 1: dollars by the hour is a reminder that this distances
Speaker 1: we have in place are not particularly resilient. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back after the break. A strong work ethic takes
Speaker 1: pride in a job well done, sweats over the details.
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Speaker 1: professionals can help. Finding the best people requires more than
Speaker 1: sorting through applications. You need to conduct a thorough search.
Speaker 1: Express understands what it takes to hire the right person.
Speaker 1: It takes real people, real interviews, discovering the talents you need.
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Speaker 1: go to expresspros dot com to find a location near you. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the reason I wanted to tell the story of
Speaker 1: the ever Given for this season is because we are
Speaker 1: in this great transformation. When COVID hit in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: it threw everything we knew into complete chaos across the globe.
Speaker 1: It affected everyone this flew, and as we exist in
Speaker 1: this new reality a couple of years into it, we
Speaker 1: can see that COVID really showed us how unsustainable and
Speaker 1: fragile this world is that we built. It's caused a
Speaker 1: lot of people we've talked to on this show to
Speaker 1: reevaluate what it is they want to do if they
Speaker 1: want to spend the precious time that they have working
Speaker 1: a particular job because that's just the path that they chose.
Speaker 1: It's made people want to take bigger risks because the
Speaker 1: quote safe standard options they've been following turned out to
Speaker 1: be not as safe and secure as they were made
Speaker 1: to believe. The ever Given getting stuck in the Suez
Speaker 1: Canal shine a light on the exact same thing that
Speaker 1: we've created, a rapidly moving world that can't keep up
Speaker 1: with itself and has real consequences because of it. The
Speaker 1: world's consumers keep consuming more stuff, and we want it cheaper,
Speaker 1: and we don't really want to know or care how
Speaker 1: it happens. What that means, though, is that more parts
Speaker 1: four things have to come from more places to keep
Speaker 1: the cost of things down, which means more ships. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, the average number of ships passing through
Speaker 1: the Suez Canal was twenty seven. In twenty nineteen, that
Speaker 1: average has almost doubled to fifty two ships a day.
Speaker 1: That's a lot more stuff in a short period of time,
Speaker 1: and we consumers still expect smooth delivery no matter how
Speaker 1: much strain we put on the shipping industry. Just get
Speaker 1: us our stuff. When you look at a picture of
Speaker 1: the ever Given, you can visually see how crazy this looks.
Speaker 1: One giant ship with a billion dollars worth of shipping
Speaker 1: containers stacked fifty meters above the water, operating in risky environments.
Speaker 1: It's kind of preposterous and really really risky. All companies
Speaker 1: account for risk and loss of goods, but now with
Speaker 1: so much product on one vessel, the loss when things
Speaker 1: go awry is huge, and today more and more things
Speaker 1: are going awry than ever before. For one, as we
Speaker 1: saw with the ever given, the more stuff on these ships,
Speaker 1: the harder they are to navigate, and again they turn
Speaker 1: the ship into a giant sail. Another byproduct of this
Speaker 1: overpacking is that it turns these boats into political targets.
Speaker 1: If one country has a beef with another and wants
Speaker 1: to see seriously disrupt their supply chain, targeting even one
Speaker 1: of these massive ships would have a huge impact. Iran
Speaker 1: and Israel have been engaged in and on and off
Speaker 1: conflict where they harm each other's boats. This is happening,
Speaker 1: and the laborers that work on and depend on these
Speaker 1: boats are the ones that suffer greatly. The kind of
Speaker 1: demand an extraordinary value placed on these boats and getting
Speaker 1: them to their destination on time causes extreme pressure on
Speaker 1: the captains that are in charge of them and can
Speaker 1: really cloud their judgment. Take Captain cant of All, for instance,
Speaker 1: Captain of the Ever Given, he knew that there were
Speaker 1: dangerous winds going into the canal that day. It was
Speaker 1: so bad that other captains turned back. But there is
Speaker 1: so much commercial pressure for crews to keep on schedule,
Speaker 1: and such huge demand from people at home buying things
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, that he had to weigh that against
Speaker 1: the safety risks. In a perfect world, the captain's priorities
Speaker 1: would be the safety of his ship than crew, But
Speaker 1: the rising number of accidents on the sea showed that
Speaker 1: ship captains are taking much bigger risks under financial pressure.
Speaker 1: We are in the biggest spike in maritime accidents in
Speaker 1: the last seven years, and three quarters of those accidents
Speaker 1: are attributed to human error. Burnt out, overworked crews making
Speaker 1: small mistakes with huge consequences. Captains who look at heavy,
Speaker 1: dangerous weather coming and take it on instead of waiting
Speaker 1: it out because they can't be late. The general attitude
Speaker 1: is don't go around the storm, go through. On top
Speaker 1: of that, this weather is becoming more unpredictable due to
Speaker 1: climate change. Rough weather events are actually causing massive amounts
Speaker 1: of containers to fall off of these ships. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: over three thousand containers were recorded to be dropped into
Speaker 1: the sea, with that number is staying steady over the
Speaker 1: last couple of years. In twenty twenty one, almost a
Speaker 1: hundred billion dollars in cargo was just lost overboard due
Speaker 1: to accidents like this one hundred billion, And most importantly,
Speaker 1: these accidents are extremely dangerous and sometimes fatal for the
Speaker 1: crews on these ships. Being on one of these ships,
Speaker 1: when huge stacks of forty foot containers are all toppling
Speaker 1: over during a raging storm, it's stuff in nightmares, so
Speaker 1: much so that PTSD is pretty common among shipping crews
Speaker 1: because of things like this. The mishapps that happen in
Speaker 1: the shipping industry have a real human cost, physically and economically,
Speaker 1: and those mishapps are byproducts of a system we've demanded
Speaker 1: and one that is constantly under an extreme amount of strain.
Speaker 1: When we buy stuff, we don't really think about how
Speaker 1: that stuff gets to us. It's truly just a marvel
Speaker 1: of efficiency and speed happens like magic, and while we
Speaker 1: don't have to think about it, what that physically looks
Speaker 1: like is the twenty thousand containers stacked on the ever
Speaker 1: given about to go through the Suez Canal, but the
Speaker 1: captain who wants to get that stuff delivered on time
Speaker 1: despite the risks. The entire world was brought to a
Speaker 1: halt in twenty twenty when a virus broke loose, and
Speaker 1: we lived in a society that wasn't built to stop
Speaker 1: for a second and fix it. A year later, a
Speaker 1: global shipping industry was brought to a halt by some
Speaker 1: unfortunate gusts of wind and an economy that couldn't afford
Speaker 1: to wait it out. Most of the people we talked
Speaker 1: to in this show are reacting to situations just like
Speaker 1: this in their personal lives. They're going about their day
Speaker 1: as they always did, until something happens, and suddenly they
Speaker 1: realize that the way they're living isn't really making them happy,
Speaker 1: or it just doesn't make sense at all, and they
Speaker 1: decided kind of oud of desperation to change course into
Speaker 1: their own great transformation. Maybe the lesson here is that
Speaker 1: the ever given in our shipping industry have not changed course.
Speaker 1: Ships keep having accidents, containers are still going overboard, and
Speaker 1: the Suez Canal is as precarious as it was two
Speaker 1: years ago, and we still just want our stuff. It's
Speaker 1: all proof that if a major calamity shows you the
Speaker 1: error of your ways, you have the capability to get
Speaker 1: back on the water and make those same errors again.
Speaker 1: But you don't have to. If you're in a job
Speaker 1: or a life that doesn't make sense, a house of
Speaker 1: cards that could fall to a gust of wind, you
Speaker 1: do have the choice to steer away and make a
Speaker 1: new course. If you don't, you could really get stuck
Speaker 1: for on the job. I'm otus Gray, Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Special thanks for the sources on this show, Elizabeth brows
Speaker 1: article and Foreign Policy and and Co's article in The
Speaker 1: Economic Times, and Bloomberg's reporting on the Ever Given music
Speaker 1: by Blue Dot Sessions