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