Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes Page B

defects but as “accidents,” a choice of language that suggests being stuck down by someone carelessly misdirecting two tons of speeding metal is somehow equivalent to being struck down by a bolt of lightning. But they are not the same. One is largely preventable, while the other, not so much.
    There is another difference: the odds of lightning killing a U.S. citizen in the course of his or her lifetime is 1 out of 136,011. The odds of that same person dying in a car crash: 1 out of 112.

Chapter 6
    PIZZA, PORTS, AND VALENTINES
    T he ports are a mess—and I can’t get work,” the longshoreman turned Lyft driver complains. He has picked me up outside the conference on green ports of the future, but my driver is more concerned with the dysfunctional ports of the present. He pats the wheel of his black sedan. “So this is paying the bills for now, Lyft and Uber. A lot of the guys are doing it. Course, it’s nowhere near the money we make moving cans.”
    Moving cans. That’s what the longshoremen call their work loading and unloading shipping containers from cargo vessels. They move those cans back and forth to vast dockside yards—the terminals—to await loading on trucks or trains. Then other crews move fresh cargo back onto the ships. Stacks of empty containers accumulate in a kind of no-man’s-land at the port, with many of them shipping back to Asia empty. Ships arrive filled with imports, but far fewer goods travel back in the other direction.
    The container ships usually make a quick turnaround, because time literally is money in this business, a billion dollars of it in goods moving every day through the conjoined port complex of Los Angeles and Long Beach—the quickest and best shippingoption in the U.S., according to its promotors. But in February 2015 the wait can be weeks instead of two or three days, so bad is the congestion and overload at the ports—delays in delivery that are grinding the door-to-door machinery into low gear nationwide.
    Today twenty-seven cargo ships are languishing in backup anchorages, a flotilla of vessels bigger than half the navies in the world. Some of them have been waiting as long as ten days to get in. The congestion has multiple causes: too few trucks, bottlenecked roads, bridges in need of modernization, and, most of all, bigger ships with bigger loads arriving at the same old docks. But the most acute and controversial cause of congestion at the moment, and the one drawing the most attention and public ire on February 13, is a nine-month labor dispute.
    A major sticking point in settling a new contract between the longshoremen’s union and the shipping companies is the obscure but pivotal system of arbitration, which affects all aspects of work on the docks, from safety rules to wage disagreements to the protocol for taking restroom breaks. That’s all it takes to cripple a hub of global commerce, and Tom, 1 a second-generation longshoreman from a family of dockworkers, is among the thousands out of work as a result. It’s not a strike—not even an official job action, he explains as we drive toward home—but rather a policy of following every work rule to the letter, as if every driver on the road suddenly stuck to the speed limit. The shipping lines call it a work stoppage and they’re furious, but the union claims rules are rules. The union, the shipping lines, and the terminal operators are all contributing to the impasse: there is blame aplenty for every side of this struggle that has hobbled all twenty-seven West Coast commercial ports. Together those ports handle almost 13 percent of America’s gross domestic product and create 9 million jobs. But it’s Tom and his fellow workers with little seniority, thewomen and men in their twenties, who are out of those high-paying dock jobs while the titans battle. So he drives for the rideshare companies, picking up fares instead of containers for