The Great Trade War : Home Front : A Day at L. A.’s Port: World Trade Writ Tiny : A small armada arrives with manufactures from Asia, while freighters take on U.S. scrap iron and coal for export.
It’s a typical Saturday at the Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s Pacific trade hub where the work of moving steel cargo containers never stops. Today, like almost any other day, a small armada of ships arrives with manufactured goods from Asia, while freighters take on made-in-America scrap iron and coal for export.
In fact, Saturday is one of the busiest days of the week at the busiest port in the nation, ranked the third largest in the world when its container volume is combined with that of the neighboring Port of Long Beach.
The activity at the Port of Los Angeles touches lives in just about every corner of the globe. Port operators claim that the trade handled here generates more than 200,000 jobs in Southern California and three times that many nationwide. Nearly every American consumer has at one time or another brought home a product that passed through these wharves on its way from Japan or China.
A chronicle of a day-in-the-life of this port reveals a microcosm of world trade.
Yet the scene in San Pedro Harbor looks deceptively quiet in the bright afternoon haze as the President Kennedy--a Gargantuan container vessel--glides gracefully through the breakwater at Angel’s Gate after a 10-day ocean crossing.
“Dead slow ahead,” says Capt. Ward Pearce, the port’s chief pilot, as the Kennedy threads its way into the inner harbor. “Steady as she goes.”
Minutes before, Pearce had boarded the ship by rope ladder from a pilot boat and--with a reporter in tow--ascended 11 decks by elevator to the bridge, taking charge of navigating through the narrow channels on the way to Berth No. 121.
Deep in concentration, the pilot directs the ship’s quartermaster to turn the rudder 20 degrees to the right, surveying the heavy traffic in sailboats and small craft out on the water.
“They’re supposed to get out of our way,” Pearce snarls, irritated that a pleasure boat has dared to cross the Kennedy’s formidable bow, even if it was at a safe distance.
“What he’s doing is showing how stupid he is,” he says. “When you get too close to a big ship, you get sucked in by the draft. They don’t realize how dangerous it is when they play chicken with us.”
To call the Kennedy a big ship is an understatement. It stretches the length of three football fields and towers 200 feet in the air. The bridge, near the rear of the vessel, overlooks a gray and rust-red expanse of 40-foot cargo containers, neatly arranged like toy blocks so far in the distance that the farthest ones look tiny.
When it was built by a West German shipyard five years ago, the Kennedy was the largest container ship in the world, a distinction it no longer holds. But it remains an impressive seafaring mule, powered by a 56,000-horsepower diesel engine and manned by a crew of 23, including two cadets in training. On this haul, it carries about 2,300 cargo containers weighing more than 30,000 long tons.
The Kennedy, which is one of five ships plying the Pacific on 35-day circuits for the American Presidents Line, has just sailed from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, to Los Angeles. Here it will lay over for three days of unloading and reloading before sailing up the coast to its home port of Oakland. From there it goes west again, to Yokohama, Kobe, Hong Kong and then back to Taiwan.
Capt. Lloyd Rath, the trim, bearded merchant mariner who has been master of the Kennedy since it went into service, says he can’t say exactly what fills all the containers in the hold and stacked on the decks of his ship. But he has a pretty good idea, based on years of examining the ship’s manifests.
“Mostly we’re talking about any kind of manufactured product, from home electronics, televisions and stereos, to textiles, lady’s coats, athletic shoes,” Rath says.
Underscoring Los Angeles’ strategic role as the nation’s gateway to Pacific trade, Rath observes that about two-thirds of the cargo on his ship is bound for the East Coast.
Within hours, it will be hoisted off the deck by huge hammer-head cranes and plunked on trucks for local distribution or a trip to the rail yard for transfer to long-distance trains.
“The stuff you’re looking at, by tomorrow it’s going to be on trains going over the mountains heading east,” he says.
On the outbound trip from Oakland, about 25% of a typical load would be containers of hazardous chemicals--ingredients for Asian industry, the captain says.
“We also take lots of refrigerated containers filled with food, a lot of squash goes to Japan for some reason,” Rath says. “We sometimes pick up fish at Dutch Harbor (Alaska)--salmon and crab for Japan.”
The Kennedy isn’t the only action in San Pedro Harbor.
Eight other ocean vessels call today at the Port of Los Angeles, all but one of them foreign flag carriers. Five of them are giant container ships arriving from Japan bearing an array of consumer goods from across Asia. Another ship disgorges from its hold a fleet of Nissan cars and trucks.
More ships arrive at Long Beach, the contiguous port behind the same breakwater that shares part of the man-made Terminal Island and competes ferociously for business from American and foreign shipping lines.
On the Los Angeles side, the China Pride is being loaded with coal at the Kaiser bulk facility. The cargo is eventually bound for power plants and factories in Japan. The Happy Buccaneer is loading a synchrolift--a huge piece of equipment for ship repair, which it will deliver to a shipyard in Singapore.
American shipyards, long in decline, aren’t buying that kind of machine these days. Todd Shipyard, once a hub of activity in this port, is closed now and its berths are used for unloading containers of imports.
From the bridge of the Kennedy, it looks as though a ship is going up in dry dock at Southwest Marine on the south side of the main channel.
But Pearce, the pilot, explains that this is actually an aircraft carrier being salvaged for scrap, its massive flat-top already sheared off, processed and exported. Workers are dismantling the ship deck by deck, and buoyancy has lifted its long narrow hull so that it no longer bears any resemblance to the Bon Homme Richard, the mighty warship it once was.
Nearby, the Hau Guang has come from China and is loading scrap metal for Singapore. The Stork is at anchorage in the outer harbor, waiting for the Hau Guang to finish loading so it can come in to pick up a load of scrap to take home to China.
The port is the core of a giant trade machine. The Los Angeles customs district--including the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the cargo terminals at LAX and the other airports in the region--accounted for nearly $122 billion in two-way trade last year. That was second only to the New York district’s $127 billion and more than 12% of the U.S. total.
But behind the dollar signs, the goods coming into and leaving the Port of Los Angeles make a telling statement about the changing structure of the U.S. economy, the shifting comparative advantage among the economies of the Pacific Rim and the lopsided trends in America’s international commerce.
If a day in the life of this port is a reasonably accurate snapshot, one sees a picture of America exporting raw materials, natural resources and grain and importing finished goods from the newly industrialized nations of East Asia.
Cynics call this reverse colonialism. Economists call it free trade.
Consider the 332,262 foreign motor vehicles that landed on the piers of Los Angeles’ port in fiscal 1992, the latest year for which such figures are available. Only 51,125 American-made vehicles were loaded on ships for the return voyage. Ships left port and sailed west with 886,000 tons of scrap that year.
Industries rise and fall--it’s part of the time-honored American tradition of laissez - faire economics.
But Capt. Rath, master of the President Kennedy, worries that his job too may soon be on the blocks. He fears that the U.S. shipping industry cannot compete with foreign flag carriers, which have considerably lower labor costs, if the Clinton Administration follows through on its apparent decision to rescind the federal subsidies for the domestic merchant marine carriers in 1997.
“From where I’m sitting, we’re at the crossroads,” Rath says. “This port here could become a place where a lot of Americans will be losing their jobs. American shipbuilding is already pretty much gone. And now American shipping is on the edge.”
