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    U.A.W. Workers at Mack Truck Go on Strike

    The strike at the truck manufacturer by 4,000 members of the United Automobile Workers comes in the middle of the union’s strikes at three large U.S. car companies.Nearly 4,000 members of the United Automobile Workers union went on strike against Mack Trucks on Monday after rejecting a tentative contract that union’s leaders had worked out with the company.The union informed the truck maker on Sunday that members had opposed the contract by a 73 percent vote, and that a strike would begin at Mack’s factories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Florida.“The members have spoken, and as the highest authority in our union, they have the final word,” the U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain, wrote in a letter to Mack’s parent company, Volvo Trucks.The two sides have been negotiating for three months over a range of issues including wage increases, cost-of-living allowances, job security, pensions, prescription drug coverage and overtime. The proposed contract included raises of 19 percent over five years and a bonus of $3,500 for ratifying the agreement.Mack’s president, Stephen Roy, said in a statement that the company was “surprised and disappointed,” noting that the U.A.W. negotiators had called the tentative agreement a “record contract for the heavy truck industry.”Commercial truck sales have been recovering slowly from the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Volvo has forecast about a 10 percent increase in industrywide truck sales this year in North America. Mack has about a 6 percent share of the North American market.The Mack strike comes as the U.A.W. is conducting a strike at plants and distribution centers owned by the three automakers, General Motors, Ford Motor, and Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram vehicles.The auto strike began nearly a month ago at three plants and the U.A.W. has expanded it in a bid to increase the pressure on the manufacturers. About 25,000 of the 150,000 U.A.W. workers employed by the three automakers are on strike. The stoppage affects two plants owned by G.M., two owned by Ford, and one owned by Stellantis, as well as the 38 spare-parts warehouses owned by G.M. and Stellantis.The automakers have offered wage increases of more than 20 percent over four years. They have also agreed to shorten the time — to four years from eight — that it takes a new worker to rise up from the entry-level wage of about $17 an hour to the highest-level wage of $32 an hour.The union is pushing for greater wage increases, noting that raises over the last 15 years have not kept pace with inflation. It is also demanding the companies provide pensions for more workers, pay the cost of retiree health care, and convert temporary employees into permanent staff. More

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    Women Could Fill Truck Driver Jobs. Companies Won’t Let Them.

    Three women filed a discrimination complaint against a trucking company over its same-sex training policy, which they say prevented them from being hired.The trucking industry has complained for years that there is a dire shortage of workers willing to drive big rigs. But some women say many trucking companies have made it effectively impossible for them to get those jobs.Trucking companies often refuse to hire women if the businesses do not have women available to train them. And because fewer than 5 percent of truck drivers in the United States are women, there are few female trainers to go around.The same-sex training policies are common across the industry, truckers and legal experts say, even though a federal judge ruled in 2014 that it was unlawful for a trucking company to require that female job candidates be paired only with female trainers.Ashli Streeter of Killeen, Texas, said she had borrowed $7,000 to attend a truck driving school and earn her commercial driving license in hopes of landing a job that would pay more than the warehouse work she had done. But she said Stevens Transport, a Dallas-based company, had told her that she couldn’t be hired because the business had no women to train her. Other trucking companies turned her down for the same reason.“I got licensed, and I clearly could drive,” Ms. Streeter said. “It was disheartening.”Ms. Streeter and two other women filed a complaint against Stevens Transport with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Thursday, contending that the company’s same-sex training policy unfairly denied them driving jobs. The commission investigates allegations made against employers, and, if it determines a violation has occurred, it may bring its own lawsuit. The commission had brought the lawsuit that resulted in the 2014 federal court decision against similar policies at another trucking company, Prime.Critics of the industry said the persistence of same-sex training nearly a decade after that ruling, which did not set national legal precedent, was evidence that trucking companies had not done enough to hire women who could help solve their labor woes.“It’s frustrating to see that we have not evolved at all,” said Desiree Wood, a trucker who is the president and founder of Real Women in Trucking, a nonprofit.Ms. Wood’s group is joining the three women in their E.E.O.C. complaint against Stevens, which was filed by Peter Romer-Friedman, a labor lawyer in Washington, and the National Women’s Law Center.Companies that insist on using women to train female applicants generally do so because they want to avoid claims of sexual harassment. Trainers typically spend weeks alone with trainees on the road, where the two often have to sleep in the same cab.Critics of same-sex training acknowledge that sexual harassment is a problem, but they say trucking companies should address it with better vetting and anti-harassment programs. Employers could reduce the risk of harassment by paying for trainees to sleep in a hotel room, which some companies already do.Women made up 4.8 percent of the 1.37 million truck drivers in the United States in 2021, according to the most recent government statistics, up from 4 percent a decade earlier.Long-haul truck driving can be a demanding job. Drivers are away from home for days. Yet some women say they are attracted to it because it can pay around $50,000 a year, with experienced drivers making a lot more. Truck driving generally pays more than many other jobs that don’t require a college degree, including those in retail stores, warehouses or child care centers.Women made up 4.8 percent of truck drivers in 2021, according to the most recent government statistics.Mikayla Whitmore for The New York TimesThe infrastructure act of 2021 required the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to set up an advisory board to support women pursuing trucking careers and identify practices that keep women out of the profession.Robin Hutcheson, the administrator of the agency, said requiring same-sex training would appear to be a barrier to entry. “If that is happening, that would be something that we would want to take a look at,” she said in an interview.Ms. Streeter, a mother of three, said she had applied to Stevens because it hired people straight out of trucking school. She told Stevens representatives that she was willing to be trained by a man, but to no avail.Bruce Dean, general counsel at Stevens, denied the allegations in the suit. “The fundamental premise in the charge — that Stevens Transport Inc. only allows women trainers to train women trainees — is false,” he said in a statement, adding that the company “has had a cross-gender training program, where both men and women trainers train female trainees, for decades.”Some legal experts said that, although same-sex training was ruled unlawful in only one federal court, trucking companies would struggle to defend such policies before other judges. Under federal employment discrimination law, employers can seek special legal exemptions to treat women differently from men, but courts have granted them very rarely.“Basically, what the law says is that a company needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” said Deborah Brake, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in employment and gender law. “They need to be able to give women equal employment opportunities and prevent and remedy sexual harassment.”Ms. Streeter said she had made meager earnings from infrequent truck driving gigs while hoping to get a position at Stevens. Later this month, she will become a driver in the trucking fleet of a large retailer.Kim Howard, one of the other women who filed the E.E.O.C. complaint against Stevens, said she was attracted to truck driving by the prospect of a steady wage after working for decades as an actor in New York.“It was very much a blow,” she said of being rejected because of the training policy. “I honestly don’t know how I financially made it through.”Ms. Howard, who is now employed at another trucking company, said she had worked briefly at a company where she was trained by two men who treated her well. “It’s quite possible for a woman to be trained by a man, and a man to be a professional about what the job is,” she said.Other female drivers said they had been mistreated by male trainers who could be relentlessly dismissive and sometimes refused to teach them important skills, like reversing a truck with a large trailer attached.Rowan Kannard, a truck driver from Wisconsin who is not involved in the complaint against Stevens, said a male trainer had spent little time training her on a run to California in 2019.At a truck stop where she felt unsafe, Ms. Kannard said, the trainer demanded that she leave the cab — and then locked her out. She asked to stop the training and was flown back to Wisconsin. Yet she said she did not believe that same-sex training for women was necessary. “Some of these men that are training, they should probably go through a course.”Desiree Wood, the president of Real Women in Trucking, says the trucking industry has not evolved to hire and train more women.Mikayla Whitmore for The New York TimesMs. Wood, of Real Women in Trucking, said trucking companies’ training policies were misguided for another reason — there is no guarantee that a woman will treat another woman better than a male trainer. She said a female trainer had once hurled racist abuse at her and told her to drive dangerously.“I’m Mexican — she hated Mexicans and wanted to tell me all about it the whole time I was on the truck,” Ms. Wood said, “She screamed at me to speed in zones where it was not safe.”Still, some women support same-sex training policies.Ellen Voie, who founded the nonprofit Women in Trucking, said truck driving should be treated differently from other professions because trainers and trainees spent so much time together in close quarters.“I do not know of any other mode of transportation that confines men and women in an area that has sleeping quarters,” Ms. Voie said.Lawyers for Prime, the company that lost the E.E.O.C. suit in 2014 challenging its same-sex training policy, called Ms. Voie as an expert witness to defend the practice. In her testimony, she contended that women who were passed over by companies that didn’t have female trainers available could have found work at other trucking companies. She still believes that.But Ms. Voie added that trucking companies also needed to do more to improve training for women, including placing cameras in cabs to monitor bad behavior and paying for hotel rooms so trainers and trainees can sleep separately.Steve Rush, who recently sold his New Jersey trucking company, stopped using sleeper cabs over a decade ago, sending drivers to hotels. He said fewer of his drivers quit compared with the rest of the industry, as a result.“What woman in her right mind wants to go out and learn how to drive a truck and have to jump into the sleeper that some guy’s just crawled out of,” he said.Ben Casselman More

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    Yellow, the Freight-Trucking Company, Declares Bankruptcy

    A pandemic-era lifeline that the Trump administration predicted would turn a profit for the federal government failed to keep Yellow afloat.Three years after receiving a $700 million pandemic-era lifeline from the federal government, the struggling freight trucking company Yellow is filing for bankruptcy.After monthslong negotiations between Yellow’s management and the Teamsters union broke down, the company shut its operations late last month, and said on Sunday that it was seeking bankruptcy protection so it can wind down its business in an “orderly” way.“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” the company’s chief executive, Darren Hawkins, said in a statement. Yellow filed a so-called Chapter 11 petition in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware.The downfall of the 99-year-old company will lead to the loss of about 30,000 jobs and could have ripple effects across the nation’s supply chains. It also underscores the risks associated with government bailouts that are awarded during moments of economic panic.Yellow, which formerly went by the name YRC Worldwide, received the $700 million loan during the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was paralyzing the U.S. economy. The loan was awarded as part of the $2.2 trillion pandemic-relief legislation that Congress passed that year, and Yellow received it on the grounds that its business was critical to national security because it shipped supplies to military bases.Since then, Yellow changed its name and embarked on a restructuring plan to help revive its flagging business by consolidating its regional networks of trucking services under one brand. As of the end of March, Yellow’s outstanding debt was $1.5 billion, including about $730 million that it owes to the federal government. Yellow has paid approximately $66 million in interest on the loan, but it has repaid just $230 of the principal owed on the loan, which comes due next year.The fate of the loan is not yet clear. The federal government assumed a 30 percent equity stake in Yellow in exchange for the loan. It could end up assuming or trying to sell off much of the company’s fleet of trucks and terminals. Yellow aims to sell “all or substantially all” of its assets, according to court documents. Mr. Hawkins said the company intended to pay back the government loan “in full.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment after the filing.Yellow estimated that it has more than 100,000 creditors and more than $1 billion in liabilities, per court documents. Some of its largest unsecured creditors include Amazon, with a claim of more than $2 million, and Home Depot, which is owed nearly $1.7 million.Yellow is the third-largest small-freight-trucking company in a part of the industry known as “less than truckload” shipping. The industry has been under pressure over the last year from rising interest rates and higher fuel costs, which customers have been unwilling to accept.Those forces collided with an ugly labor fight this year between Yellow and the Teamsters union over wages and other benefits. Those talks collapsed last month and union officials soon after warned workers that the company was shutting down.After its bankruptcy filing, company officials placed much of the blame on the union, saying its members caused “irreparable harm” by halting its restructuring plan. Yellow employed about 23,000 union employees.“We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” Mr. Hawkins said. The Teamsters union “was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them,” he added.In late June, the company filed a lawsuit against the union, asserting it had caused more than $137 million in damages by blocking the restructuring plan.The Teamsters union said in a statement last week that Yellow “has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government.” The union did not immediately respond to a request for comment after Yellow’s bankruptcy filing.“I think that Yellow finds itself in a perfect storm, and they have not managed that perfect storm very well,” said David P. Leibowitz, a Chicago bankruptcy lawyer who represents several trucking companies.The bankruptcy could create temporary disruptions for companies that relied on Yellow and might prompt more consolidation in the industry. It could also lead to temporarily higher prices as businesses find new carriers for their freight.“Those inflationary prices will certainly hurt the shippers and hurt the consumer to a certain extent,” said Tom Nightingale, chief executive of AFS Logistics, who suggested that prices would likely normalize within a few months.In late July, Yellow began permanently laying off workers and ceased most of its operations in the United States and Canada, according to court documents. Yellow has retained a “core group” of about 1,650 employees to maintain limited operations and provide administrative work as it winds down. Yellow said it expected to pay about $3.4 million per week in employee wages to operate during bankruptcy, which “may decrease over time.” None of the remaining employees are union members, the company said.The company also sought the authority to pay an estimated $22 million in compensation and benefit costs for current and former employees, including roughly $8.7 million in unpaid wages as of the date of filing. Yellow had readily accessible funds of about $39 million when it filed for bankruptcy, which it said would be insufficient to cover its wind-down efforts, and it expected to receive special financing to help support the sale process and payment of wages.Jack Atkins, a transportation analyst at the financial services firm Stephens, said that Yellow’s troubles had been mounting for years. In the wake of the financial crisis, Yellow engaged in a spree of acquisitions that it failed to successfully integrate, Mr. Atkins said. The demands of repaying that debt made it difficult for Yellow to reinvest in the company, allowing rivals to become more profitable.“Yellow was struggling to keep its head above water and survive,” Mr. Atkins said. “It was harder and harder to be profitable enough to support the wage increases they needed.”The company’s financial problems fueled concerns about the Trump administration’s decision to rescue the firm.It lost more than $100 million in 2019 and was being sued by the Justice Department over claims that it defrauded the federal government during a seven-year period. Last year it agreed to pay $6.85 million to settle the lawsuit.Federal watchdogs and congressional oversight committees have scrutinized the company’s relationships with the Trump administration. President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Hawkins to serve on a coronavirus economic task force, and Yellow had financial backing from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm with close ties to Trump administration officials.Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis wrote in a report last year that top Trump administration officials had awarded Yellow the money over the objections of career officials at the Defense Department. The report noted that Yellow had been in close touch with Trump administration officials throughout the loan process and had discussed how the company employed Teamsters as its drivers.In December 2020, Steven T. Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary, defended the loan, arguing that had the company been shuttered, thousands of jobs would have been at risk and the military’s supply chain could have been disrupted. He predicted that the federal government would eventually turn a profit from the deal.“Yellow had longstanding financial problems before the pandemic, was not essential to national security and should never have received a $700 million taxpayer bailout from the Treasury Department,” Representative French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas and member of the Congressional Oversight Commission, said in a statement last week. “Years of poor financial management at Yellow has resulted in hard-working people losing their jobs.” More

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    Price of Diesel, Which Powers the Economy, Is Still Climbing

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one reason that the fuel is scarce. Another is a series of yearslong, intertwined events that cover the globe.HOUSTON — Gasoline prices have dropped as much as a dollar a gallon since early summer, easing a financial strain on many people. But the price of diesel, the fuel that moves trucks, trains, barges, tractors and construction equipment, has remained stubbornly high, helping to prop up the prices of many goods and services.On Wednesday, a gallon of diesel fuel in the United States cost $5.357 on average, according to AAA. That was down from a record of $5.816 in June but well above the $3.642 it cost a year ago. (A gallon of regular gasoline now averages $3.805.)The surge in diesel costs has not garnered the attention from politicians and the public that the jump in gasoline prices did, because most of the cars in the United States run on gas. But diesel prices are a critical source of pain for the economy because they affect the cost of practically every product.“The economic impact is insidious because everything moves across the country powered by diesel,” said Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service. “It’s an inflation accelerant, and the consumer ultimately has to pay for it.”Sherri Garner Brumbaugh, the president of Garner Trucking in Findlay, Ohio, said the weekly cost of fueling one of her heavy-duty trucks in September was $1,300, more than double the $600 she paid two years earlier. “A good portion gets passed onto my customers with a fuel surcharge,” she said.Both gasoline and diesel prices are tied to the price of oil, which is set on the global market. The price of each fuel immediately shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. But their paths have diverged sharply. Over the last year, the cost of diesel has ballooned by over 40 percent, compared with 11 percent for gasoline.Diesel prices are high because the fuel is scarce worldwide, including in the United States, which in recent years became a net exporter of oil and petroleum products. Oil analysts said there were simply not enough refineries to meet the demand for diesel, especially after Russia’s energy exports fell when the United States, Britain and some other countries stopped buying them.Diesel inventories are always a bit low in the spring and fall, during agricultural planting and harvesting seasons, but this fall supplies are at their lowest level since 1982, when the government began reporting data on the fuel.The tightest market is in the Northeast, where oil refineries have closed in recent years and where the diesel crunch is complicated by winter demand for heating oil. The two fuels are virtually the same but are taxed differently. An especially cold winter could make the situation worse by increasing the demand for heating oil.In Massachusetts, for example, diesel is selling for more than $5.90 a gallon (about $2.33 more than it did a year earlier). In Texas, it costs $4.73 a gallon.Trucks, trains, barges, tractors and construction equipment all use diesel, and its price affects the cost of practically every product.Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile Russia’s war in Ukraine sent diesel prices soaring, the current situation is partly the result of an interconnected, slow-building series of events that extends across the globe. Some analysts trace the roots of the U.S. diesel shortage to a fire at Philadelphia Energy Solutions in 2019, which forced the refinery to shut down, taking out one of the Northeast’s important diesel producers.But refineries have been closing elsewhere. Over the last several years, 5 percent of U.S. refinery capacity, and 6 percent of European refinery capacity, has been shut down. A few refineries closed or scaled back because of the collapse in energy demand in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Some older refineries were shut down because they were inefficient and their profits weren’t large enough for Wall Street investors. Other refineries were closed so that their owners could convert them to produce biofuels, which are made from plants, waste and other organic material.“Because we shut those refineries down, we don’t have enough capacity,” said Sarah Emerson, the president of ESAI Energy, a consulting firm.As much of the global economy recovered in 2021 and 2022, demand for diesel climbed quickly. But then, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration banned Russian oil and petroleum imports, which amounted to 700,000 barrels of diesel and other fuels a day, much of it intended for the Northeast.Diesel prices have also soared so much higher than the cost of gasoline in part because of a decision by the International Maritime Organization several years ago to require most oceangoing ships to replace their high-sulfur bunker fuel with less polluting fuels starting in 2020. That has slowly increased demand for diesel over the last two years.“A substantial amount of diesel is needed in the new bunker blends, and that is a hidden demand for diesel molecules,” said Richard Joswick, the head of global oil analysis for S&P Global Platts. He estimated that the global shipping fleet was now consuming half a million barrels of diesel a day, or roughly 2 percent of the world’s supplies.At the same time, while American refiners are now making tidy profits, 30 percent of their production is being exported. Latin America has become a particularly profitable market, as American diesel replaces fuel from Venezuela, where the state-controlled oil sector has been hobbled by corruption, mismanagement and U.S. sanctions. Some American diesel also goes to Europe.The impact of exports on domestic prices has led some analysts to speculate that the Biden administration could eventually restrict exports to boost supplies at home. But energy experts said that might not have the desired effect because diesel had become a globally traded commodity. Denying Latin America fuel could also backfire because many countries in the region sell crude oil to the United States.“We have a symbiotic relationship with Latin America on diesel and crude,” said Ms. Emerson of ESAI Energy. “We can disrupt that, but it doesn’t immediately fix the problem.”The global diesel shortage was also exacerbated by labor strikes at French refineries this fall. And utilities in Europe have been stockpiling diesel in case they cannot find enough natural gas to fuel their power plants.Russian diesel has continued to flow to Europe since the war began, but stricter sanctions that the European Union plans to impose on Russia in February could potentially cause havoc to the diesel business of traders, banks, insurance companies and shippers.Still, some energy experts said prices could soon begin to ease.Help may be on the way from an unlikely source: China. In recent months, China has been loosening export controls on diesel. Its exports rose from 200,000 barrels a day in August to 430,000 barrels a day in September, and the country has the capacity to sell even more, according to estimates by ESAI Energy.Nearly a third of Chinese diesel exports went to the Netherlands in recent months, taking some pressure off the European market. And oil refineries being built in Kuwait and China could come online as early as next year, further increasing supply.Demand for diesel and its price could also fall if much of the world slides into a recession next year, as some economists and policymakers are expecting.“A deep recession would certainly cut into diesel demand,” said Mr. Joswick of S&P Global Platts. “We don’t forecast a recession, but that is certainly a possibility.” More

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    ‘No Jobs Available’: The Feast or Famine Careers of America’s Port Drivers.

    Just before 4 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, the sky still black save for the reddish glow of the freeway, Marshawn Jackson rolls over in his bed at his home in Southern California and reaches for his iPhone.He clicks on an app used by truck drivers seeking assignments. The notification he absorbs is both familiar and disheartening: “No jobs available.”Mr. Jackson is paid per delivery. No work means no income. His day is already booked with two assignments, but the rest of his week is dead. Over the next 15 hours, he refreshes the app constantly, desperate to secure more jobs — an exercise in vigorous futility.He refreshes after he pulls his tractor-trailer into a nearby storage yard to pick up an empty shipping container, and again while he rolls down the freeway, toward the Port of Los Angeles — one hand on the wheel, one hand on his phone.He refreshes as he drops off the empty box, and a dozen more times while he waits for a crane to deposit another container on the chassis behind his rig, this one loaded with toys from factories in Asia. He refreshes while he fuels his truck.Each time, the same result.“You reach a point where you’re like, ‘Man, am I even making money?’” Mr. Jackson says. “Is it worth even getting up in the morning?”The sudden disappearance of work is an unexpected turn for Mr. Jackson, 37, and the rest of Southern California’s so-called dray operators — the drivers who transport shipping containers between the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the sprawl of warehouses filling out the Inland Empire to the east.For much of the pandemic, as the worst public health crisis in a century tore at daily life, these drivers were inundated with work, even while they contended with excruciating delays at the ports. Americans sequestered in their homes filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with exercise equipment, summoning record volumes of goods from factories in Asia. The flow overwhelmed the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the gateway for roughly two-fifths of the nation’s imports.As dozens of ships sat at anchor miles off the coast, awaiting their chance to unload, dray operators like Mr. Jackson idled for hours on land before they could enter port gates. They waited hours more to pick up their containers, and yet again before they could drop them off at warehouses.These days, the lines are mostly gone, and loading and unloading goes smoothly. But the same truck drivers who endured the worst of the Great Supply Chain Disruption are now suffering another affliction as the docks reverts to a semblance of normalcy. The frenzied chaos that dominated the first years of the pandemic has been replaced by an uneasy stillness — not enough work.Like many truck drivers, Mr. Jackson works long hours.Brandon Pavan for The New York TimesHe checks his phone many times during the day to try to secure more jobs for his two employees and himself.Brandon Pavan for The New York TimesIncoming shipments are diminishing at Southern California’s two largest ports. This is partly because American demand for kitchen appliances, video game consoles and lawn furniture is finally waning. It also reflects how major retailers are bypassing Southern California, instead shipping to East Coast destinations like Savannah, Ga., to avoid potential upheaval as West Coast dockworkers face off with port managers over a new contract.Mr. Jackson’s journey through a maze of traffic-choked freeways exemplifies the bewildering, often-perilous road confronting tens of millions of workers in a global economy still grappling with the volatile effects of the pandemic along with soaring inflation.As central banks raise interest rates to choke off demand for goods and services in an effort to lower consumer prices, they are reducing income for legions of workers who are paid per assignment. The situation is especially fraught for the nation’s 75,000 dray operators and other foot soldiers of the supply chain.Dockworkers, who wield equipment to load and unload containers at ports, are protected by fierce and disciplined unions that have succeeded in commanding some of the higher wages in blue collar American life. Dray operators work primarily as independent contractors, buying their own fuel and insurance.Their status leaves them subject to constant shifts in economic fortune. In good times, like last year, dray operators command whatever the market must pay to keep them rolling. In lean times, they are guaranteed nothing.As he navigates five lanes of traffic on the way to the port, Mr. Jackson dons headphones to conduct a series of phone calls.More on CaliforniaBullet Train to Nowhere: Construction of the California high-speed rail system, America’s most ambitious infrastructure project, has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare.A Piece of Black History Destroyed: Lincoln Heights — a historically Black community in a predominantly white, rural county in Northern California — endured for decades. Then came the Mill fire.Warehouse Moratorium: As warehouse construction balloons nationwide, residents in communities both rural and urban have pushed back. In California’s Inland Empire, the anger has turned to widespread action.He talks to his wife, sharing worries that they might not be able to close on their purchase of a newly built home. His income has fluctuated wildly in recent months. The mortgage company is demanding more documents, filling him with dread.He speaks with two men who drive a pair of trucks that he owns. He coordinates their schedules and helps them navigate unfamiliar shipping terminals. He frets that they may not bring in enough to cover the expenses on his other rigs.He passes billboards for beachfront homes in Baja, flights to Las Vegas, spa resorts. He wonders when he will be able to take his wife and 13-year-old daughter on a vacation.He contemplates the tenuous nature of American upward mobility, the forces tearing at the life he has constructed.“The way we’re living is hard times right now,” Mr. Jackson says. “You’ve still got to smile through it. You’ve still got to be positive. But, man, I’m dealing with a lot right now.”Container ships waited to enter the Port of Los Angeles during a large backlog last year.Erin Schaff/The New York Times‘Pray you can make it out.’Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Mr. Jackson says he embraced trucking as a form of liberation from a community he described as chronically short of good jobs and bedeviled by gang violence.“You get used to seeing things,” he says. “All you can do is pray you can make it out.”Growing up, he helped his grandmother with a hair care products business, packing boxes in a warehouse when he was only 10. But when the company failed in the aftermath of the long recession that began in 2007, Mr. Jackson sought a reliable way to support his partner and their then-infant daughter.A friend told him there were good jobs in long-haul trucking. He signed up for a training program arranged by Swift, a giant in the industry.He hopped the Greyhound to Phoenix for the three-week program, sharing a motel room full of scorpions with two other trainees. They practiced on aging rigs that lacked air conditioning despite summer heat reaching 117 degrees.He was soon earning $1,000 a week hauling trailers from a Dollar Store distribution center in Southern California to Phoenix and back.But as the routes grew longer, the strains on his family life intensified. He was hauling refrigerated trailers full of lettuce from the fields of central California to a distribution center in North Carolina. He was routinely away for two and three weeks at a stretch.When his daughter graduated from kindergarten in 2016, he pleaded with the company to schedule him to be home, just for that day. One dispatcher — a gruff, former Marine — mocked him.“This is what you signed up for,” he said.Mr. Jackson did not make it to the ceremony.“I felt like I was letting my whole family down,” he says. “It changed my whole outlook.”He drove back to California and turned in the keys on the truck he leased from the company. He used savings to buy a used rig and began picking up routes as an independent contractor, limiting his time away to no more than three days.Then he figured out how to sleep at home every night. He began working in and out of the port.He eventually bought the other trucks and took on the pair of drivers, paying them a share of the proceeds on the loads they deliver.“It was one of those things where you’ve got to take a risk,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I bet it all on myself? It was something I knew I could do.”He and his family moved into a rented apartment in the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, and then into a modest house they bought just off the freeway. They vacationed in Mexico and Hawaii.His daughter’s name, Bailey Jackson, is painted in white letters on the door of his rig. She is the reason he keeps rolling, he says. He takes her shopping — for clothes, for books.“That girl is always reading,” he says. “Some days, she’ll finish more than one book.”This year, he signed off on buying a four-bedroom home with space for a swimming pool in a quiet community carved into the desert in Riverside County.It was a five-minute drive from the yard where he parks his truck.It was a lifetime away from South Central Los Angeles.Dray operators like Mr. Jackson have to idle for hours on land before they can enter port gates.Brandon Pavan for The New York Times’We’ve got to survive.’Though the Inland Empire lies roughly 60 miles from the ports, its clusters of warehouses are an extension of the docks.Here, major retailers stash the bounty delivered from Asia via container ships. Distribution centers supply consumers across much of the American West.In the same way that massive slaughterhouses turned Chicago into a rail hub in the late 19th century, the Inland Empire has burgeoned into a dominant center of warehousing in the age of big box retail and e-commerce.At 5:43 a.m., the sun still a vague suggestion to the east, Mr. Jackson sits behind the wheel of his enormous blue Kenworth tractor. He guides it into a Shell station and climbs down to the pavement.Diesel is selling for $6.19 a gallon, an eye-popping number. He puts $100 in the tank, enough to get to Los Angeles to drop off the empty trailer he has picked up this morning from a warehouse for a home appliance company.Fifteen minutes later, as the sun glimmers through hazy skies, he is headed west on I-60.He wonders what the day will bring.A year ago, he could take his pick from scores of jobs at the Dray Alliance, the online platform where he secures assignments. Not anymore. Whenever a new job appears, he clicks immediately, knowing that dozens of other drivers are also keeping vigil on the site.The uncertainties of the trade are wearying. Three times in the past week, Mr. Jackson has wound up on so-called dry runs — journeys aborted because of a glitch. Sometimes, the paperwork is not in order. Other times, a pickup appointment has been made incorrectly. He heads home with a $100 fee from the shipper. It barely covers the cost of gas.Last year, when dozens of container ships were waiting their turns to unload, he sometimes sat parked in lines for as long as five hours to pick up and drop off, even as the Dray Alliance’s app steered him to jobs with the least congestion. He would grab his neck pillow and pass out in the front seat.Now, no app can redress a basic reduction in demand. Not only are jobs scarce, but compensation has fallen.Less than a year ago, Mr. Jackson was earning about $700 to haul a container from San Bernardino to the port of Los Angeles, a 70-mile journey that can take more than two hours when traffic is bad. This morning’s job brings $500, even though the price of fuel has increased.Trucks waiting to enter a terminal at the Port of Los Angeles in June.Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesStill, every job draws fierce interest, because drivers are stuck with bills.“They know we’ve got to keep working,” Mr. Jackson says. “That’s how they take advantage. We’ve got to survive.”At 7:20, a vivid sun gathering force, Mr. Jackson pulls into the container storage yard near the port, rumbling over bumpy pavement. He backs into a space between two other containers, steps out of the cab, and turns a crank handle to lower the landing gear on the chassis. Then he detaches the box.He quickly finds the empty container he is picking up. But he notices that the chassis below it is painted pale yellow — an indication that it is old. This could trigger an inspection.He drives to port, entering the gates of APM Terminals at 7:40. The terminal is controlled by Maersk, a Danish company that is one of the two largest container shipping operations on earth.The security guard waves him through. A few minutes later, a dockworker driving a top loader — a machine that lifts containers — motions for Mr. Jackson to pull up to an appointed space so he can pluck the box off the rig and add it to a stack.Mr. Jackson scans the app on his phone for his next destination: space E162, the letters painted white on the dock. He pulls in tight, his passenger-side mirror grazing the container to his right. A crane lifts a box off the stacks and deposits it onto his chassis. It lands with a thunderous boom.The morning is proceeding so smoothly that Mr. Jackson indulges visions of dropping the container, at a Mattel warehouse, with time enough to spare for a proper meal — his first of the day — before heading back to the port.But then a dockworker notices the old chassis. He diverts him to a special maintenance area. There, Mr. Jackson sits for more than an hour while a mechanic administers a repair.He pulls in to a truck stop in Long Beach, and adds another $400 worth of diesel to his tank.He walks across the lot, stepping between other tractor-trailers, on his way to the restroom — his first pit stop since dawn.One of his drivers calls to report that he has accepted an assignment from Dray Alliance to drop off an empty container at the port, and is now headed back to the Inland Empire, pulling nothing.Mr. Jackson is distressed. He had arranged for the driver to pick up a load at the port this evening. He should have waited to do both jobs on a single journey. Instead, he is burning gas on two round trips — at Mr. Jackson’s expense.“How does that cover the cost of me paying you?” Mr. Jackson asks. “The rates are down. It’s slow, bro’.”Mr. Jackson is an independent contractor who owns his truck and two others.Brandon Pavan for The New York Times‘I’m taking care of business.’At 11 in the morning, he is on the freeway again, headed back to the Inland Empire to drop off the container. He shovels a handful of popcorn into his mouth. Then he puts the bag on his console, and picks up his iPhone to refresh. No jobs.Fat clouds hang low over the Arrowhead Mountains as Mr. Jackson arrives at the Mattel warehouse just after noon. He drops the container, picks up an empty, and returns to the freeway, headed back to the port for the second half of his long day.Many truck drivers obsessively consume caffeine, perpetually fearful that they might otherwise descend into a dangerous state known as highway hypnosis.Mr. Jackson abstains. “I drink a lot of this,” he says, taking a swig from a bottle of Fiji water.To stay alert, he relies on the vibrations of his $6,000 sound system. He cranks up the dial on an old Isley Brothers classic, “Work to Do.” “I’m taking care of business, woman can’t you see. I’ve gotta make it for you, and gotta make it for me.”He rolls past a billboard for Fastevict.com, past tent cities full of homeless people, past self-storage units.He makes it to the port in time for a meal before his 3 p.m. pickup.He winds through the cracked streets of Long Beach, looking for a curb long enough to park a tractor-trailer. He finds a spot around the corner from the truck stop. He waits for an Uber Eats driver, who arrives bearing a Chipotle bowl — brown rice, chicken and avocado.He drops the container, picks up another, and parks again in Long Beach, taking a nap in the back in the cab while waiting for rush hour traffic to ease.At 6:30 in the evening, twilight settling over the parched land, he rolls toward home while again on the phone with his wife.The mortgage underwriter does not understand the division between Mr. Jackson’s personal finances and his business — a blurry line. The closing appears in danger. (He will eventually pull it off, though that will leave him staring at mortgage payments with diminished income.)Darkness fills his cab. Brake lights flicker ahead. He and his wife struggle to understand where their road leads.“People are like, ‘If you get through this point, you’ll be OK,’” Mr. Jackson says. “And I’m like, ‘How long is this point going to last?’”Major retailers are bypassing Southern California, instead shipping to East Coast destinations like Savannah, Ga., shown here, to avoid potential upheaval.Erin Schaff/The New York Times More

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    The Long Road to Driverless Trucks

    Self-driving eighteen-wheelers are now on highways in states like California and Texas. But there are still human “safety drivers” behind the wheel. What will it take to get them out?This article is part of our series on the Future of Transportation, which is exploring innovations and challenges that affect how we move about the world.In March, a self-driving eighteen-wheeler spent more than five straight days hauling goods between Dallas and Atlanta. Running around the clock, it traveled more than 6,300 miles, making four round trips and delivering eight loads of freight.The result of a partnership between Kodiak Robotics, a self-driving start-up, and U.S. Xpress, a traditional trucking company, this five-day drive demonstrated the enormous potential of autonomous trucks. A traditional truck, whose lone driver must stop and rest each day, would need more than 10 days to deliver the same freight.But the drive also showed that the technology is not yet ready to realize its potential. Each day, Kodiak rotated a new team of specialists into the cab of its truck, so that someone could take control of the vehicle if anything went wrong. These “safety drivers” grabbed the wheel multiple times.Tech start-ups like Kodiak have spent years building and testing self-driving trucks, and companies across the trucking industry are keen to reap the benefits. At a time when the global supply chain is struggling to deliver goods as efficiently as businesses and consumers now demand, autonomous trucks could alleviate bottlenecks and reduce costs.Now comes the most difficult stretch in this quest to automate freight delivery: getting these trucks on the road without anyone behind the wheel.Companies like Kodiak know the technology is a long way from the moment trucks can drive anywhere on their own. So they are looking for ways to deploy self-driving trucks solely on highways, whose long, uninterrupted stretches are easier to navigate than city streets teeming with stop-and-go traffic.“Highways are a more structured environment,” said Alex Rodrigues, chief executive of the self-driving-truck start-up Embark. “You know where every car is supposed to be going. They’re in lanes. They’re headed in the same direction.”Restricting these trucks to the highway also plays to their strengths. “The biggest problems for long-haul truckers are fatigue, distraction and boredom,” Mr. Rodrigues explained on a recent afternoon as one of his company’s trucks cruised down a highway in Northern California. “Robots don’t have a problem with any of that.”It’s a sound strategy, but even this will require years of additional development.Part of the challenge is technical. Though self-driving trucks can handle most of what happens on a highway — merging into traffic from an on-ramp, changing lanes, slowing for cars stopped on the shoulder — companies are still working to ensure they can respond to less common situations, like a sudden three-car pileup.As he continued down the highway, Mr. Rodrigues said his company has yet to perfect what he calls evasive maneuvers. “If there is an accident in the road right in front of the vehicle,” he explained, “it has to stop itself quickly.” For this and other reasons, most companies do not plan on removing safety drivers from their trucks until at least 2024. In many states, they will need explicit approval from regulators to do so.But deploying these trucks is also a logistical challenge — one that will require significant changes across the trucking industry.In shuttling goods between Dallas and Atlanta, Kodiak’s truck did not drive into either city. It drove to spots just off the highway where it could unload its cargo and refuel before making the return trip. Then traditional trucks picked up the cargo and drove “the last mile” or final leg of the delivery.In order to deploy autonomous trucks on a large scale, companies must first build a network of these “transfer hubs.” With an eye toward this future, Kodiak recently inked a partnership with Pilot, a company that operates traditional truck stops across the country. Today, these are places where truck drivers can shower and rest and grab a bite to eat. The hope is that they can also serve as transfer hubs for driverless trucks.“The industry can’t afford to build this kind of infrastructure from scratch,” said Kodiak’s chief executive, Don Burnette. “We have to find ways of working with the existing infrastructure.”They must also consider the impact on truck drivers: They aim to make long-haul drivers obsolete, but they will need more drivers for the short haul.Executives like Mr. Burnette and Mr. Rodrigues believe that drivers will happily move from one job to the other. The turnover rate among long-haul drivers is roughly 95 percent, meaning the average company replaces nearly its entire work force each year. It is a stressful, monotonous job that keeps people away from home for days on end. If they switch to city driving, they can work shorter hours and stay close to home.But a recent study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan questions whether the transition will be as smooth as many expect. Truck drivers are typically paid by the mile. A shift to shorter trips, the study says, could slash the number of miles traveled and reduce wages.Certainly, some drivers fear they cannot make as much money driving solely in cities. Others are loath to give up their time on the highway.“There are many drivers like me,” said Cannon Bryan, a 28-year-old long-haul trucker from Texas. “I wasn’t born in the city. I wasn’t raised in the city. I hate city driving. I enjoy picking up a load in Dallas and driving to Grand Rapids, Mich.”Building and deploying self-driving trucks is far from easy. And it is enormously expensive — on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. TuSimple, a self-driving truck company, has faced concerns that the technology is unsafe after federal regulators revealed that one of its trucks had been involved in an accident. Aurora, a self-driving technology company with a particularly impressive pedigree, is facing challenging market conditions and has floated the possibility of a sale to big names like Apple or Microsoft, according to a report from Bloomberg News.If these companies can indeed get drivers out of their vehicles, this raises new questions. How will driverless trucks handle roadside inspections? How will they set up the reflective triangles that warn other motorists when a truck has pulled to the shoulder? How will they deal with blown tires and repairs?Eventually, the industry will also embrace electric trucks powered by battery rather than fossil fuel, and this will raise still more questions for autonomous trucking. Where and how will the batteries get recharged? Won’t this prevent self-driving trucks from running 24 hours a day, as the industry has promised?“There are so many issues that in reality are far more complex than they might seem on paper,” said Steve Viscelli, an economic and political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in trucking. “Though the developers and their partners are putting a lot of effort into thinking this through, many of the questions about what needs to change cannot yet be answered. We are going to have to see what reality looks like.”Some solutions will be technical, others logistical. The start-up Embark plans to build a roaming work force of “guardians” who will locate trucks when things go wrong and call for repairs as needed.The good news for the labor market is that this technology will create jobs even as it removes them. And though experts say that more jobs will ultimately be lost than gained, this will not happen soon. Long-haul truckers will have years to prepare for a new life. Any rollout will be gradual.“Just when you think this technology is almost here,” said Tom Schmitt, the chief executive of Forward Air, a trucking company that just started a test with Kodiak’s self-driving trucks, “it is still five years away.” More

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    Truckers’ Protests Over Labor Law Block Access to Oakland’s Port

    For days, a convoy of truckers has blocked the roads that serve the Port of Oakland, crippling a major West Coast cargo hub already hampered by global supply chain disruptions.The protest is meant to send a message to Gov. Gavin Newsom: Keep the drivers clear of a California labor law that they say threatens their livelihood.The truckers, primarily independent owners and operators, are demonstrating in opposition to Assembly Bill 5, a law passed in 2019 that requires gig workers in several industries to be classified as employees with benefits, including minimum wage and overtime pay.Along with a coalition of trade groups, the truckers want Mr. Newsom to issue an executive order putting off the application of the 2019 law to their work and to bring labor and industry to the table to negotiate a path forward.A representative of Mr. Newsom said the state would “continue to partner with truckers and the ports to ensure the continued movement of goods to California’s residents and businesses, which is critical to all of us.”Smaller protests were organized last week at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.In a statement, Danny Wan, executive director of the Port of Oakland, said he understood the displays of frustration. But he warned against more delays surrounding the ports, a vital link in a supply chain already hemorrhaging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Covid-19 lockdowns in China.“Prolonged stoppage of port operations in California for any reason will damage all the businesses operating at the ports and cause California ports to further suffer market share losses to competing ports,” he said.When Mr. Newsom signed the measure into law, it received immediate rebukes from companies like Uber and Lyft, whose leaders argued that the law would change their businesses so severely that it might well destroy them.The state law codified a California Supreme Court ruling from 2018 that said, among other things, that people must be classified as employees if their work was a regular part of a company’s business.Both Uber and Lyft, along with DoorDash, quickly lobbied for a ballot measure that would allow gig economy companies to continue treating their drivers as independent contractors.California voters passed the measure, Proposition 22, in 2020, but last year a California Superior Court judge ruled that it was unconstitutional. Uber and Lyft quickly appealed and have been exempt from complying with Assembly Bill 5 while the court proceedings play out.But that wasn’t the case for the truckers. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge by California truckers, who under the new law are viewed as employees of the trucking companies they do business with.Nearly 70,000 California truck drivers work as independent owners and operators, ferrying goods from ports to distribution warehouses. Trucking companies and the protesting drivers argue — as Uber and Lyft did — that if Assembly Bill 5 is applied to them, the drivers will have less flexibility in when and how they work.Proponents of the law say the companies could simply take the drivers on as full- or part-time employees and continue to offer them flexible schedules.A majority of port truckers in California are independent operators and do not work for a single company. A smaller number of drivers are unionized and are represented primarily by the Teamsters.Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, a trade group for transportation companies serving West Coast ports, said the “frustration is that there is no pathway for folks to have independence.”“That frustration is boiling over into action,” Mr. Schrap said.Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former state lawmaker who was an architect of the labor bill, rejected the idea that applying the law to the trucking industry would be a disservice to drivers.“These truck companies have a business model that is misclassifying workers,” said Ms. Gonzalez Fletcher, who is about to take over as head of the California Labor Federation. “How they have been operating has been illegal.”The trucker protests come as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union is engaged in contract negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association, representing the shipping terminals at 29 ports from San Diego to Seattle.Farless Dailey III, president of Local 10 of the longshore union, said that for their own safety, his members were not trying to get through the truck blockade.“They don’t get paid when they don’t get in,” he said. “But we’re not going to put our members in harm’s way to pass through the line of truckers.”Officials at the port said the largest marine terminal had been closed since Monday because of the protests. Three other smaller terminals have operated, but with a limited capacity.Christopher S. Tang, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management, who studies supply chains, said the shutdowns at the Port of Oakland should not — for now — cause major issues for consumers.“The impact will not be significant in the short term,” he said. “Many retailers have stockpiled inventory.”On Thursday, German Ochoa, a trucker who lives in Oakland, arrived at the port, as he had every day this week.As horns from semitrucks blared in the background, Mr. Ochoa said by phone that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with other truckers. Some held poster boards that read, “Take down AB 5!!!” and “AB 5 Has Got to Go!,” he said.“This is taking away my independence,” Mr. Ochoa said. “It’s my right to be an independent driver.”Noam Scheiber More

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    As Dockworkers Near Contract’s End, Many Others Have a Stake

    LOS ANGELES — David Alvarado barreled south along the highway, staring through the windshield of his semi truck toward the towering cranes along the coastline.He had made the same 30-minute trek to the Port of Los Angeles twice that day; if things went well, he would make it twice more. Averaging four pickups and deliveries a day, Mr. Alvarado has learned, is what it takes to give his wife and three children a comfortable life.“This has been my life — it’s helped me support a family,” said Mr. Alvarado, who for 17 years has hauled cargo between warehouses across Southern California and the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a global hub that handles 40 percent of the nation’s seaborne imports.He weathered the blow to his paycheck early in the pandemic when he was idling for six hours a day, waiting for cargo to be loaded off ships and onto his truck. Now the ports are bustling again, but there is a new source of anxiety: the imminent expiration of the union contract for dockworkers along the West Coast.If negotiations fail to head off a slowdown, a strike or a lockout, he said, “it will crush me financially.”The outcome will be crucial not only for the union dockworkers and port operators, but also for the ecosystem of workers surrounding the ports like Mr. Alvarado, and for a global supply chain reeling from coronavirus lockdowns and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation’s surge to the highest rate in more than four decades is due, in part, to supply chain complications.The contract between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents 22,000 workers at 29 ports from San Diego to Seattle, and the Pacific Maritime Association, representing the shipping terminals, is set to expire on Friday. The union members primarily operate machinery like cranes and forklifts that move cargo containers on and off ships.In a statement this month, representatives of the two sides said that they didn’t expect a deal by the deadline but that they were dedicated to working toward an agreement.The negotiations have centered largely on whether to increase wages for the unionized workers, whose average salaries are in the low six figures, and expanding automation, such as using robots to move cargo containers, to speed up production, a priority for shipping companies.“It will crush me financially,” David Alvarado said of any work stoppage.Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesTrucks lined up to enter the Port of Los Angeles. Any slowdown, strike or lockout could further snarl the global supply chain.Stella Kalinina for The New York Times“Automation allows greater densification at existing port terminals, enabling greater cargo throughput and continued cargo growth over time,” Jim McKenna, the chief executive of the Pacific Maritime Association, said in a recent video statement on the negotiations.In an open letter posted on Facebook last month, the union president, Willie Adams, attacked moving toward automation, saying it would translate to lost jobs and prioritizes foreign profits over “what’s best for America.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob gains continue to maintain their impressive run, even as government policymakers took steps to cool the economy and ease inflation.May Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 390,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent ​​in the fifth month of 2022.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.Opportunities for Teenagers: Jobs for high school and college students are expected to be plentiful this summer, and a large market means better pay.“Automation,” Mr. Adams wrote, “poses a great national security risk as it places our ports at risk of being hacked as other automated ports have experienced.”As the negotiations, which began in early May, continue, record levels of cargo have arrived here.In May, the Port of Los Angeles had its third-busiest month ever, handling nearly one million shipping container units, largely stocked with imports from Asia. Twenty-one ships were waiting to dock outside the local ports this week, down from 109 in January, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.On a recent trip here, President Biden — who authorized a plan last year to keep the Port of Los Angeles open 24 hours a day — met with negotiators to urge a swift agreement. Leaders on both sides say Mr. Biden has worked behind the scenes on the matter, hoping to avoid delays.When a breakdown in talks resulted in an 11-day lockout in 2002, the U.S. economy lost an estimated $11 billion. President George W. Bush eventually intervened, and the lockout was lifted. In 2015, when negotiations went on for nine months, the Obama administration intervened after the standoff led to a work slowdown and congestion at West Coast ports.Mr. Biden’s early intervention could help stave off severe backlogs, said Geraldine Knatz, a professor of the practice of policy and engineering at the University of Southern California.“In the past, the federal government would swoop in at the end when negotiations were at a stalemate,” said Ms. Knatz, who was executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2014. “The relationship that developed between the ports and the Biden administration as a result of the supply chain crisis is something that did not exist before.”The contract between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association is set to expire this week. Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesEven so, contingency plans are in place, said Jonathan Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation. Some retailers began pushing up their timetables months ago, ordering supplies long before they needed them, he said, and using ports along the East and Gulf Coasts when feasible.In an interview, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said he didn’t believe the looming contract deadline would lead to any delays: All the parties involved, he said, know that it’s already an exceptionally busy time for the region.Retail imports account for 75 percent of all cargo coming into the ports, and with back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons nearing, Mr. Seroka said he did not expect cargo volumes to shrink to more typical levels until next year.“Everyone is working as hard as they can,” Mr. Seroka said.But for some retailers, the current limbo brings back painful memories.In early 2015, as delays arose during contract talks, Charlie Woo laid off more than 600 seasonal workers from his company, Megatoys.“It was rough back then,” Mr. Woo said on a recent morning from his 330,000-square-foot warehouse in Commerce, Calif., an industrial city in Los Angeles County not far from the ports.Mr. Woo started Megatoys in 1989 and now imports around 1,000 cargo containers from China every year. The 40-foot containers come filled with small toys like plastic Easter eggs and miniature rubber soccer balls and basketballs, which his employees package into baskets sold at grocery stores and bigger outlets like Walmart and Target.During the pandemic disruptions last fall, some of his shipments were stalled by nearly three months — delays that ultimately translated into a 5 percent drop in sales for his company, which Mr. Woo said brings in tens of millions of dollars annually.He’s bracing for another hard year.“I expect problems; I just don’t know how big the problem will be,” said Mr. Woo, who also owns a manufacturing plant near Shenzhen, China, and said he hoped more U.S. terminals moved toward more automation.“We must find innovative solutions to catch up with the ports in Asia,” Mr. Woo said.Charlie Woo started Megatoys in 1989 and now imports around 1,000 cargo containers from China every year. Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesShipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles. The current limbo brings back painful memories for some retailers.Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesOn a recent afternoon, Mr. Alvarado, the truck driver, reminisced about the early days of the career he’d been born into.During summer vacations as a little boy, he’d ride shotgun with his father, who has driven a semi truck for nearly four decades at the ports, and they’d listen to Dodger baseball games together.“This is all I ever wanted to be,” Mr. Alvarado, 38, said. Over the years, he has seen many childhood friends move away because they could not afford to live here.It hasn’t always been easy for him, either. Last fall, with more than 80 cargo carriers anchored off the coast here, in part because of the lingering pandemic and a surge of imports ahead of the holiday season, he sometimes waited for hours before he finally got a load, said Mr. Alvarado, who is among the roughly 21,000 truck drivers authorized to pick up cargo at the ports.For an independent contractor, time is money: Mr. Alvarado works 16 hours some weekdays and aims to pick up and drop off four loads each day. When he does that consistently, he said, he can make up to $4,000 a week, before expenses.During the worst of the pandemic delays, he was lucky to get two loads a day, and although things have improved in recent months, he now frets about fuel prices.“Inflation has been intense,” he said.Filling up with 220 gallons for the week now typically costs $1,200, double that of several months ago, Mr. Alvarado said.“It all starts to add up,” he said. “You wonder if you should think about doing something else.”As for the prospects in the labor talks, Mr. Alvarado said he was trying to remain optimistic. The union workers, he said, remind him of his own family: men and women from blue-collar upbringings, many of them Latino with deep family ties to the ports. A work stoppage would be painful for many of them, too.“It will hurt all Americans,” he said.As he drove past the ports, Mr. Alvarado turned his truck into a warehouse parking lot, where the multicolored containers lined the asphalt like a row of neatly arranged Lego blocks.It was his third load of the day, and for this round, he didn’t have to wait on the longshoremen to load the carrier onto his truck. Instead, he backed his semi up to a chassis, and the blue container snapped into place.He pulled up Google Maps on his iPhone and looked at the distance to the drop-off in Fontana, Calif.: 67 miles, an hour and half.It might, Mr. Alvarado said, end up being a four-load day after all. More