Local 1233, President William Dudley
Comments On The Economy
No member of our Local needs to be told that work is slow at the Port, this is obvious to everyone who works in our industry. What many ILA Local 1233 members may not know is that this is a worldwide phenomenon. With the economy in a downward spiral (recession/depression), hundreds of thousands of workers are losing their jobs month after month.
All told, about 3.6 million jobs have been lost. As I have stated before, while the port is one of the last places to experience economic collapse, the crisis is here now. Approximately 300 container ships are idle worldwide. On the west coast, cars fill acres and acres of yard space, in some cases for more than two years. On our own piers, not only is work not growing at the rate to which we've become accustomed, it is actually shrinking and terminal operators are cannibalizing each others lines as they under-bid one another.
Two examples of this can be seen in the United Kingdom (which imports more goods from N.J. than almost any other country) and China (which exports the highest dollar value through our ports). The U.K. is declaring a recession while China has seen economic growth slow from 11.9 percent the 3rd quarter in 2007 to 9 percent in 2008. Experts are predicting that China's standard yearly export grow of 20 percent will slow to zero. Some of this is merely the cyclical January-February Chinese New Years slowdown, but there will be no microwave "quick-fix" this time. There will be some tough and difficult decisions affecting our industry and our livelihoods, but as your president I will do everything in my power to minimize the impact of this crisis on all of us.
Perhaps our best hope for the future is our new U.S. President, Barack Obama. As long as the Republican minority in Congress does not interfere too much by stalling his Cabinet nominees, I believe we will see work returning to our industry within a few months, and the overall situation returning to normal within two or three years. If members of Congress continue their accusations of "wealth redistribution" at every Administration proposal it might take longer. Let's remember that both taxes and tax-cuts are historically "redistribution of wealth." The issue at hand is whether those dollars are handed out to the super-rich who don't need them, or to the middle-class who are crushed in dept.
