Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This strike is bananas.
Speaker 1: B A N A n A S. Strike is bananas.
Speaker 1: Remember bananas, Joe.
Speaker 2: Are you talking about the fruit or something else here?
Speaker 1: Well, I'm talking about the fruit, so.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like bananas. I remember bananas?
Speaker 1: Okay? Are you worried about the bananas supply chain?
Speaker 3: Enlighten? I believe we're dealing with this again. Oh my god, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's another issue.
Speaker 2: I did a deadlift one, Jimmy.
Speaker 1: Okay, uh, barges.
Speaker 3: This isn't after school Special, except.
Speaker 1: I've decided I'm going to base my entire personality going
Speaker 1: forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the US.
Speaker 2: Where's the best imposta?
Speaker 1: These are the important question? Is that robots taking over
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 3: I think like in a couple of years, the AI
Speaker 3: will do a really good job of making the Odd
Speaker 3: lotch podcast and people Today. I don't really need to
Speaker 3: listen to Joe and Tracy anymore.
Speaker 1: We do have Touching the Perfect You're listening to lots
Speaker 1: more where we catch up with friends about what's going
Speaker 1: on right now, Because.
Speaker 2: Even when The Odd Lots is over, there's always lots more.
Speaker 1: And we really do have the perfect guest. So it
Speaker 1: looks like the International long Shoreman's Association ILA. There's going
Speaker 1: to be a lot of acronyms. They're kind of struggling
Speaker 1: to work out a deal with the United States Maritime
Speaker 1: Alliance USMX, and so we might have disruption at the ports.
Speaker 1: It's twenty twenty all over again.
Speaker 3: The entire East Coast. From my understanding, every port on
Speaker 3: the East Coast, which I think has all kinds of
Speaker 3: influence from bananas to cheries to auto parts, could be
Speaker 3: on strike as soon as October. Verse Craig, what's going
Speaker 3: to happen? What's going on?
Speaker 4: A lot of people asked years ago, how could you
Speaker 4: set up a media business based on supply chain?
Speaker 2: There's endless stuff, isn't there?
Speaker 4: This always happens, but nobody cared before twenty twenty. You know,
Speaker 4: everyone's aware that these supply chains are vultable and these
Speaker 4: issues happen. They've always It's always been this way. It's
Speaker 4: just that up until recently, no one really paid attention
Speaker 4: to them because they didn't experience them personally. But this
Speaker 4: stuff is always taking place. We are up to a
Speaker 4: new union contract, the ISLA is insisting that if their
Speaker 4: demands aren't met that they're going to strike, and that
Speaker 4: would be potentially catastrophic to supply chains if it goes
Speaker 4: on for a long period of time.
Speaker 3: We are, of course speaking Tracy. We are speaking with
Speaker 3: Craig Fuller. He is the founder and CEO of Freight
Speaker 3: Waves And to his point, Tracy, I don't think we
Speaker 3: ever once talked to him before twenty twenty, and now we've.
Speaker 2: Probably talked to him like seven times or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's very true. Okay, So Craig, what
Speaker 1: are the main sticking points here? Because the coverage that
Speaker 1: I'm reading about, like the tensions between the ISLA and USMX.
Speaker 1: I see issues on wages, issues on benefits, issues on
Speaker 1: port automation. When I read the list, it kind of
Speaker 1: feels like there's disagreement on everything pretty much.
Speaker 4: At the end of the day, I think it comes
Speaker 4: back to the fact that labor has more leverage today
Speaker 4: than they've had in decades. And it's really a couple
Speaker 4: of things. One is, you have a very friendly administration
Speaker 4: to labor, probably arguably the most labor friendly administration in decades.
Speaker 4: It's in the White House currently, and you have a
Speaker 4: lot of leverage because of a supply and demand problem.
Speaker 4: Is that they're just aren't enough workers that want these
Speaker 4: types of jobs, and that gives them enormous amount of
Speaker 4: leverage in these contract negotiations. But fundamentally their arguments are
Speaker 4: that they don't want automation and they want significant pay
Speaker 4: increases is really what it comes back to. Those are
Speaker 4: the fundamental disagreements here is really the economic and really technology,
Speaker 4: and it's concerned that it's taking jobs or potential jobs
Speaker 4: away from their members.
Speaker 3: Setting aside the politics, and we know the politics are
Speaker 3: going to be very complicated for a democratic administration that's
Speaker 3: prided itself on being a friend of labor but also
Speaker 3: doesn't want to have a massive economic disruption just a
Speaker 3: few weeks out.
Speaker 2: From the election.
Speaker 3: But setting all that aside, maybe we can talk about
Speaker 3: that a little bit more. Does the government have tools
Speaker 3: to stop a strike in the same way it apparently
Speaker 3: can sometimes with potential rail strikes.
Speaker 4: They can ask for a koling off period, So this
Speaker 4: is not subject to the same regulatory environment that you
Speaker 4: have with railroads. Have a very specific group that govern
Speaker 4: a lot of the relations with the railroads because they
Speaker 4: we can you know, there's a lot of history to that,
Speaker 4: but effectively, what is in the arsenal of the White
Speaker 4: House is the tatt Heartley Act. I mean, essentially, what
Speaker 4: they're able to do with that is force them into
Speaker 4: a kuling off period of eighty days, and so they
Speaker 4: can actually make them go back to work. The question is,
Speaker 4: if you make people who don't want to go back
Speaker 4: to work, how hard are they actually going to work?
Speaker 4: And I think that's the big concern is, yes, you
Speaker 4: can force them for at least eighty days to cool off,
Speaker 4: can force them into effectively a mediation and arbitration environment,
Speaker 4: but you can't force them to work if they're called
Speaker 4: back in.
Speaker 1: So I kind of think the interesting thing about the
Speaker 1: potential strike is it's already or it seems to already
Speaker 1: be having an impact on shipping. And I saw that
Speaker 1: announcement from Hapik Lloyd that they were going to implement
Speaker 1: a work interruption destination surcharge. How common are those? Is
Speaker 1: that like a normal thing?
Speaker 4: Well, this is an interesting environment because not only have
Speaker 4: has labor gained an enormous metal leverage, but really since COVID,
Speaker 4: the ocean container lines have gained enormous metal leverage. I mean,
Speaker 4: what is untalked about are undiscussed in the public, and
Speaker 4: I think the Biden administration for all of the sort
Speaker 4: of you know, as a supply chain professional, we're pretty
Speaker 4: critical of, you know, every administration when it come to
Speaker 4: supply chain issues. But one thing that I think the
Speaker 4: Bide administration actually got correct was back in two thousand
Speaker 4: and when we had the big function in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: as sort of the peak or the sort of apex
Speaker 4: of the or the climax of all the supply chain
Speaker 4: challenges with the ports is they had correctly identified that
Speaker 4: the big port containers had an enormous amount of pricing
Speaker 4: power that really made them a cartel. And I think
Speaker 4: they have a lot of validity and data to support that.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you think about this, the top ten
Speaker 4: ocean container lines have ninety percent of the market share
Speaker 4: of international container movements. I mean, they have an enormous
Speaker 4: amount of power. Ten companies controlled ninety percent of the
Speaker 4: flow of cargo. To put that in perspective, OPAK is
Speaker 4: approximately forty percent of global oil supplies, and so if
Speaker 4: you could argue that OPEC is a cartel, you should
Speaker 4: be able to argue and I think rightfully so so
Speaker 4: that the ocean container lines are cartail. What's happened over
Speaker 4: the last really thirty to forty years, this has been
Speaker 4: massive consolidation in the international ocean container market. They're not
Speaker 4: subject to US antitrust rules the way that almost every
Speaker 4: other company is, and so they sort of live outside
Speaker 4: this framework where it enables them to do things that
Speaker 4: in every other industry you would have regulators pounded on
Speaker 4: the door. And so this is what the Biden administration
Speaker 4: identified back and came out and talked about it. There
Speaker 4: was some laws passing Congress that you know, we haven't
Speaker 4: seen any real outcome in terms of change of how
Speaker 4: these guys operate. But what you're seeing now is the
Speaker 4: ocean Contato Lioness have realized that they can use their
Speaker 4: pricing power and their leverage over shippers to really increase
Speaker 4: and put these search charges. We saw it during the
Speaker 4: attacks that happened to the Red Sea. We're now seeing
Speaker 4: it related to the Boord strike. And look, you know,
Speaker 4: off the record, a lot of folks that we've taught
Speaker 4: to sort of through channels that are very close to
Speaker 4: some of the executive leadership at these lines will tell
Speaker 4: you that they in some ways kind of want a
Speaker 4: strike to happen. They would never admit that customers, but
Speaker 4: they actually gain an enormous amount of levers. Think about
Speaker 4: the capacity that pulls off the market, like these are
Speaker 4: capacity constraining businesses. If you have ships that are sitting
Speaker 4: fully loaded outside of US ports and can't be moved
Speaker 4: or offloaded, then you've pulled off an enormous amount of
Speaker 4: capacity out of the market. That demand is still going
Speaker 4: to be flowing, and so for them, it gives them
Speaker 4: an enormous amount of pricing power. A search charge is
Speaker 4: only one, you know, one piece in that arsenal. What
Speaker 4: you'll also start seeing is aggressive spot pricing if that
Speaker 4: capacity gets pulled out, And what will happen is all
Speaker 4: of those container ships will sit off the coast, they
Speaker 4: will wait to be unloaded. And let's say this strike
Speaker 4: goes on for a couple of days, probably not a
Speaker 4: big impact. You may see, you know, a week of
Speaker 4: slow down. You may it may take a week or
Speaker 4: two to get back to where we're at. But if
Speaker 4: this goes on for a few weeks, it could be
Speaker 4: months before we see the system sort of adjust to
Speaker 4: those changes, simply because all those container ships have to
Speaker 4: be unloaded. They all get loaded in a sort of
Speaker 4: as a big bottleneck, and so there's a significant delay
Speaker 4: to unload those because it's a finite amount of capacity
Speaker 4: to actually do so. And then those ships then have
Speaker 4: to go back to pick up more cargo, and so
Speaker 4: that will pull a lot of capacity out the market,
Speaker 4: and so that I think the ship lines actually it's
Speaker 4: in their interest to actually see labor disruptions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Joe, this reminds me so much of sam Brine's's
Speaker 1: argument about price over volume and this idea that in
Speaker 1: an environment of disruptions and capacity constraints, as Craig just
Speaker 1: put it, you can raise prices to offset the loss
Speaker 1: of volume and still make a decent amount of margin.
Speaker 2: I'm just curious.
Speaker 3: This is actually a little bit separate from the strike.
Speaker 3: What are we seeing right now with trade flows that
Speaker 3: perhaps are anticipatory of trying to get ahead of possible
Speaker 3: increase in tariffs next year.
Speaker 4: Look, I think the facts are that we have record
Speaker 4: container volumes into the United States like this is. You know,
Speaker 4: if you we had talked about this, I think in
Speaker 4: twenty three and I had argued and I was wrong,
Speaker 4: clearly wrong in this that we've seen record volumes in
Speaker 4: the ocean container market. This is what I argue back
Speaker 4: in twenty two, and we were unlikely to see a
Speaker 4: repeat of that. Well, that's clearly not true, because this
Speaker 4: year we've actually seen records broke or at least matched
Speaker 4: back where we were in twenty two, and so we
Speaker 4: are seeing record volume of imports and there's been a
Speaker 4: lot of question about what's causing that. A lot of
Speaker 4: theory is that the port strikes that are causing shepherds
Speaker 4: to move right in advance. Certainly some of that's happening
Speaker 4: no one. You know, these labor issues are not black
Speaker 4: swan events. They aren't expected. They're dissipate. Everybody knows when
Speaker 4: the contract comes up, and everybody knows that there's going
Speaker 4: to be some level of pressure in terms of both
Speaker 4: parties sort of posturing. There's a lot of stuff that
Speaker 4: was behind the scenes that we don't actually get to
Speaker 4: see or hear about that's actually taking place. But the
Speaker 4: reality is these two sides are very far apart, as
Speaker 4: Tracy correctly identified, and that's one issue that supply chain
Speaker 4: professionals have had to account for, and that's causing some
Speaker 4: volume surges. The second is this threat of tariffs. Donald
Speaker 4: Trump has come out and talked about increasing tariffs on
Speaker 4: China by as much as sixty percent or has been
Speaker 4: reported as much as sixty percent and ten percent for
Speaker 4: everywhere else. That is part of the calculus. And even
Speaker 4: if Harris wins the election, as we've seen with Biden,
Speaker 4: he didn't reverse any of Donald Trump's original trade policies
Speaker 4: or in original tariffs, so we will. I think can
Speaker 4: see a continuation and doubling down of tariffs as an
Speaker 4: instrument in policy that makes supply chain organizations prepare for
Speaker 4: these types of events. I mean, Donald Trump's changes would
Speaker 4: be pretty significant, or not even pretty would be very significant,
Speaker 4: whereas Harris is probably going to take a little bit
Speaker 4: more of a measured approach in terms of her But
Speaker 4: the reality is we're dealing with this. And then the
Speaker 4: other thing that I think is really interesting is that
Speaker 4: if you look at the Chinese economy, and I know
Speaker 4: you guys have covered this a few times, is Chinese
Speaker 4: consumers are suffering one of the biggest recessions and downturns
Speaker 4: and activity that we've seen since it opened up trade.
Speaker 4: And so we're seeing a situation with China where they
Speaker 4: have all this excess capacity and production capacity that some
Speaker 4: of that was built for domestic consumption, that frankly, none
Speaker 4: of that stuff is being bought. So they're producing these
Speaker 4: manufactured goods and they're effectively dumping them on US consumers.
Speaker 4: Because what's happened is the big box retailers have gone shopping.
Speaker 4: They're loading up the ships with a lot of discounted
Speaker 4: merch to sell to US consumers. And because what happened
Speaker 4: during COVID is we saw these record inflationary impacts for
Speaker 4: about two years, the retailers just took it. They didn't
Speaker 4: have a choice. Is the fear of running out was
Speaker 4: a bigger issue than actually paying high prices, so that
Speaker 4: showed up inflation. But over the last eighteen months, because
Speaker 4: of what's happening in the domestic Chinese economy, we're seeing
Speaker 4: significant price concessions offered to US retailers, and US retailers
Speaker 4: have taken advantage. So that's why we're seeing a lot
Speaker 4: of additional volume. All of the geopolitical stuff is certainly
Speaker 4: real and it's happening, but I also think that there's
Speaker 4: a pure economic driver due to just significant price concessions
Speaker 4: offered by Chinese manufacturers.
Speaker 1: Wait, so just going back to the idea of record
Speaker 1: volumes meets a potential strike. But how much volume could
Speaker 1: be diverted away from the East coast, Like if I
Speaker 1: go back to shipping a Teddy Bear from Hong Kong
Speaker 1: to the US, can I just I'll just ship it
Speaker 1: to la instead of I don't know, Baltimore.
Speaker 4: You would certainly think you could. Unfortunately, the West Coast
Speaker 4: Union that is under a different contract has said that
Speaker 4: they will not unload any ships that were diverted to coast.
Speaker 4: So now we have a.
Speaker 2: Real solidarity coast to port solidarity.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Absolutely, they are not going to cross the line.
Speaker 4: And so effectively what you have is this refusal to
Speaker 4: unload cargo at US ports on both sides of the coasts.
Speaker 4: And you do have some non unit You know, Savannah
Speaker 4: is an interesting sort of city because it's sort of
Speaker 4: not a union. I mean, it's a southern city and
Speaker 4: it's not a part of the isle A. So we
Speaker 4: have this sort of couple of exceptions that are not
Speaker 4: don't have to play ball if you will or won't
Speaker 4: play and participate in the labor issues. But for the
Speaker 4: most part. This is a situation where retailers and importers
Speaker 4: don't have a lot of optionality, and this is a
Speaker 4: relatively new development. There have been whispers about this for
Speaker 4: some time. It's been conversations, but now they've come out
Speaker 4: and said basic in solidarity, they're not going to unload ships.
Speaker 4: That is a huge development. I think if you'd asked
Speaker 4: me a month ago, I had believed that the Biden
Speaker 4: administration was going to force a cooling off period for
Speaker 4: eighty days. But we've seen recent reports where they've said
Speaker 4: they're not going to do that. How much of that
Speaker 4: is official posturing of hey, we're not going to intervene.
Speaker 4: But as Joe correctly identified, this is an election season
Speaker 4: in a very contested election, and it's really a no
Speaker 4: win situation for the Biden administration or the Democrats. I
Speaker 4: shoulday because the bi adminstration is are the way out.
Speaker 4: It's really a no win situation if they don't intervene.
Speaker 4: We have potential massive supply chain issues right before the holidays,
Speaker 4: which I think they would prefer not to have those headlines.
Speaker 4: Just generally, nobody really wants me coming back on odd
Speaker 4: lots to talk about disasters. We do we do because
Speaker 4: these things happen so like in the reality, like you
Speaker 4: want things to be kind of boring. Yeah, but then
Speaker 4: you have these union membership, which is incredibly contested this
Speaker 4: time around. You know, Trump actually is winning a lot
Speaker 4: of union support in rank and file, and so the
Speaker 4: question becomes it's a no in situation in my opinion
Speaker 4: for the Bide administration. They really don't have a winning
Speaker 4: answer on how they sort of resolve this, and so
Speaker 4: I would assume that there are a ton of back
Speaker 4: conversations that we're not pretty to. You know, those take
Speaker 4: place anyways, Yeah, but I would assume there's a lot
Speaker 4: of stuff is happening to try to get some resolution here, Craig.
Speaker 4: The official ports is they're not meeting, but the reality
Speaker 4: is they certainly having conversations.
Speaker 2: Craig.
Speaker 3: If you know, you woke up tomorrow and you're in
Speaker 3: a different life and it turned out your job is
Speaker 3: a spokesperson for the Long Short Men, needing to convince
Speaker 3: me that there's some reason not to aggressively automate our
Speaker 3: ports and that this risk of occasional strikes.
Speaker 2: Is worthwhile risk.
Speaker 3: I'm curious. I'd say we should have someone from the
Speaker 3: Long short men on to talk about this. My experience
Speaker 3: practically is that actually they're hard to get a hold of,
Speaker 3: and don't aren't that easy from a media perspective. But that's,
Speaker 3: you know, no excuse to stop trying. Is there a
Speaker 3: Steelman argument you could come up with for this system
Speaker 3: that we have in place, which is relatively light on
Speaker 3: automation and relatively heavy on a handful of powerful, solidly
Speaker 3: well paid blue collar jobs of.
Speaker 4: The ports, Joe, It's hard for me to make that transition, okay,
Speaker 4: because I find some of these arguments completely absurd. And
Speaker 4: so if we're talking about full automation and getting rid
Speaker 4: of absolutely all of the jobs, then I think you
Speaker 4: have a valid argument. Like I think as a log
Speaker 4: choreman having human labor, I could understand, you know, talking
Speaker 4: about eliminating these jobs. These are obviously high quality jobs,
Speaker 4: are high paid. I can understand and empathize where it's
Speaker 4: coming from. But a lot of the automation that's actually
Speaker 4: been talked about is stuff that is really not Humans
Speaker 4: don't add a ton of value in these types of
Speaker 4: structures anyways. Are these types of events anyway? So one
Speaker 4: example of this is RFID technology. When the trucks come
Speaker 4: in and out of the ports. These drayage trucks come in.
Speaker 4: You have toll passes that we all experience. You know,
Speaker 4: when I walked in the building this morning, I used
Speaker 4: a key, I use an RTIF I D badge to
Speaker 4: get in the building. What's great about that is you
Speaker 4: get all this data. Well, there are humans today that
Speaker 4: actually do the check in process. And frankly, humans are
Speaker 4: we all know this is that humans are prone to
Speaker 4: a lot of you know, we're not the most optable solution.
Speaker 4: Computers can do a much better job in these types
Speaker 4: of situations where you're dealing with consistency. So it's hard
Speaker 4: for me to make the case that some levels of
Speaker 4: automation should not be promoted. And that's really what I think.
Speaker 4: The long shoremen have said, we're absolutely not going to
Speaker 4: allow automation, and that's sort of the public official stance.
Speaker 4: Over time, they do soften some of those positions. If
Speaker 4: you look at historically, they will allow for some levels
Speaker 4: of automation. But this is a is an ongoing issue.
Speaker 4: I mean, we saw it during the Hollywood strikes. Is
Speaker 4: that you know, actors and actresses were really concerned about
Speaker 4: AI replacing them entirely and creating these automated you know,
Speaker 4: the animated movies that looked very real with you know,
Speaker 4: the likeness of a real human actor. So I think
Speaker 4: this is going to be an ongoing problem, an ongoing
Speaker 4: dispute between labor is always going to be fearful of
Speaker 4: automation of any level because to them, it's a slippery slope, right.
Speaker 4: They're concerned that if they allow, you know, or if
Speaker 4: I do technology to check you in and check you
Speaker 4: out of the port, that that means that we're just
Speaker 4: one step closer to full automation. And that just isn't
Speaker 4: the case. I mean, Rotterdam I get the chance to
Speaker 4: visit a while ago, and there's ports in Asia as
Speaker 4: well that are.
Speaker 1: You know, rot down running.
Speaker 4: But if you look at the place where those there
Speaker 4: are still humans running the machines. They just happen to
Speaker 4: be doing it remotely. And there's an argument that the
Speaker 4: port runs far more efficient in terms of time and out.
Speaker 4: There's a lot less delays. You don't these machine aren't
Speaker 4: getting sick. But also safety is a really big factor
Speaker 4: in this. I mean, think about moving big boxes of
Speaker 4: twenty thousand pounds across cranes. There's a lot of potential
Speaker 4: for safety issues, and so I have a hard time
Speaker 4: sort of empathizing with this argument. I understand the labor
Speaker 4: cost situation, and I was empathetic to the railroad some
Speaker 4: of the rules around health days and sick days. It's
Speaker 4: kind of empathetic to their cause. I have a problem
Speaker 4: or a real sort of issue Joe making the case
Speaker 4: that some levels of automation shouldn't happen.
Speaker 1: So this episode is coming out on September twenty seventh,
Speaker 1: and the deadline for negotiation is the end of the month,
Speaker 1: so just a few days left. What should we be
Speaker 1: watching in terms of gauging not just the outcome of
Speaker 1: this whole situation, but also the immediate impacts. Are there
Speaker 1: one or two things that you're looking at on a
Speaker 1: daily or even hourly basis at this point, you know.
Speaker 4: It's so hard Tracy having studied enough. I mean, one
Speaker 4: thing about my industry is we're always sort of in
Speaker 4: the front lines of labor issues because they do disrupt. So,
Speaker 4: you know, the freight industry is an interesting industry because
Speaker 4: when things work, nobody thinks about it. Supply chains often
Speaker 4: are like the utility companies like what the power is working.
Speaker 4: You don't think about your local utility company, but when
Speaker 4: things are out, you all of a sudden think about it.
Speaker 4: And I think a lot about labor issues is a
Speaker 4: lot like I think about a big weather system. You know,
Speaker 4: I'm this hurricane that's that's coming.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the line of site is right to Chattanicka, Tennessee.
Speaker 4: And we're all preparing locally for like what happens if
Speaker 4: we don't have power? Should we get groceries? And all
Speaker 4: the things that you deal with the family of a
Speaker 4: family of five. So we're like, we're thinking about this stuff.
Speaker 4: My wife and I are, but I'm not. There's nothing
Speaker 4: to do until that happens. And I think this is
Speaker 4: the same thing with the labor issues. We know it's coming,
Speaker 4: we know the storm is upon us, we can see
Speaker 4: the path of it. It doesn't appear that either side
Speaker 4: is budgeing. It doesn't appear that the White House is
Speaker 4: going to intervene. So we know this has happened, there'sn't
Speaker 4: a lot to do until it actually happens. And so
Speaker 4: I would say, much like you see a hurricane, is
Speaker 4: you know it's coming, you can prepare. But frankly, if
Speaker 4: you're running a supply chain and you haven't been making
Speaker 4: preparations for the potential of a disruption for months, you're
Speaker 4: really kind of left out. I mean, there isn't a
Speaker 4: whole lot you could do at this point. If your
Speaker 4: cargo is in a box headed to Newark, New Jersey. Sorry,
Speaker 4: it's in the box, and it's going to be up
Speaker 4: to labor to decide whether they want to play ball
Speaker 4: or not.
Speaker 1: Wait, I have one more very important question. Should we
Speaker 1: be stocking up on bananas?
Speaker 4: I don't think this is going to go on very long. Frankly,
Speaker 4: if you want my read on it is if you
Speaker 4: look at these whether we're talking about the ups strike,
Speaker 4: the railroad strike in Canada, the port strikes on the
Speaker 4: West Coast, or the threat supports the labor issues in
Speaker 4: the West Coast, these things tend to resolve themselves within
Speaker 4: a matter of days. The worst case scenario was to
Speaker 4: go on for once, and that just doesn't seem very likely.
Speaker 4: From where I said, is that the sides will cave
Speaker 4: when a there's a lot of money on the line,
Speaker 4: but there also can get a lot of pressure. I mean, look,
Speaker 4: I think Labor has a real hard problem here as well,
Speaker 4: because if Donald Trump wins the election, then they lost
Speaker 4: arguably the most labor friendly administration in decades, and so
Speaker 4: this is the time where they have the most leverage.
Speaker 4: But if it goes into a situation where they lose
Speaker 4: that leverage, they're not going to get that back. And
Speaker 4: so it's gonna be a really interesting thing to watch
Speaker 4: because the election does matter a lot here because how
Speaker 4: labor is dealt with at the federal level is going
Speaker 4: to be heavily depended upon which administration's in office.
Speaker 3: Hopefully we won't be talking to you in six months
Speaker 3: if a strike is still going on, but I'm sure
Speaker 3: there'll be something else that can catch up with you.
Speaker 4: I want my jacket at some point, I think, so.
Speaker 2: Do you have a mug yet?
Speaker 4: But Steve Martin, do you have an Oudlocks mugs?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: I need one, all right, you should.
Speaker 1: We should ship it direct from the manufacturer support of newer.
Speaker 4: Please don't send it over a container. Look, I will say,
Speaker 4: one thing I would watch for Tracy is air freight.
Speaker 4: Like what we will see is air freight prices. Spot
Speaker 4: prices will go in saying if we do see a
Speaker 4: long term labor issue here. This looks like it's going
Speaker 4: to go on for weeks or even days. I think
Speaker 4: air Freight will be a really interesting thing to watch.
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