Port strike could hit consumers’ auto parts and bananas: Expert

Roughly 45,000 workers at ports across the East and Gulf coast are set to strike next week if the International Longshoremen’s Union can’t come to a deal by September 30th. Michigan State University supply chain management professor Jason Miller joins Catalysts host Seana Smith and Madison Mills to discuss the impact a prolonged strike could have on US supply chains and the economy at large. Miller tells Yahoo Finance “The degree of impact really is going to be a function of how long a potential strike takes place. If we’re looking at 24 to 48 hours, it wouldn’t be that disruptive on the big scale of things…On the other hand, you start getting into a week or more, you’re going to have an extensive pileup and you can think about this as each additional day at that point, it’s exponentially longer to unwind the situation.” Miller expects there to be a strike at this point as the two sides aren’t talking. He adds, “My base case would be we would get a couple of days in, and I find it difficult to believe that the Biden administration will not invoke the Taft-Hartley Act and essentially have a commission form, deliver a report and at that point, there’ll be an 80 day cooling off period. We would expect some slowdowns over that period, because the workers may not be working quite as fast, but it’s very difficult for me to see how this plays out. Let’s say a two-week extended strike, given the amount of disruption that would take place.” He notes, “from an inflationary standpoint, I’m not very worried about that. When you look right now at the piece of the CPI, that’s still the biggest driver of year-over-year inflation. It’s that shelter component, and we know that’s coming down…where we do start to see more of an impact though, is in certain industrial sectors. So on the export side, by far the most affected commodity is plastic resins…on the import side, the most affected sector that I see is the auto space. Just given the key role that auto parts play as an import.” “Roughly 10% of consumer spending of all types comes from imports, that’s based on data from the San Francisco Fed, and that’s imports of all types. So even including crude oil that obviously isn’t affected because it’s coming primarily from Canada. I’m not really worried about this from an inflation standpoint. I’m more worried about it from a sort of cascading disruption standpoint. If we’re looking at a multi-week disruption taking place.” Miller expects the most noticeable impact of the strike for consumers would be on auto parts and bananas. “We’ve imported so far this year over 2 million metric tons of bananas. And most of those about, you know, two-thirds to 75% come in through the East and Gulf Coast ports because this is what we call a low-value density item. It’s something that you need to get it close to the final market with the most efficient transportation mode possible…if there’s a multi-week strike, it could be hard to get the quantities that folks are used to just because it’s a perishable product, and so from the everyday consumer standpoint, that’s probably the one you feel the most.
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