This Los Angeles Port Is among the First Casualties of Trump’s Trade War

The Washington Post

12:16 JST, May 12, 2025

LOS ANGELES – On a sunny spring morning, when the Port of Los Angeles should be a blur of activity, more than half of the container ship berths here sit empty. The steel booms on dozens of towering ship-to-shore cranes point idly to the sky.

These are the front lines of President Donald Trump’s trade war.

The number of shipping containers that arrived at the nation’s top container port last week was roughly one-third lower than during the same period last year – a sharper decline than during the depths of the Great Recession. More than one-fifth of the giant ships that were scheduled to call in Los Angeles this month have already canceled, and that number is expected to rise.

Trump’s 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods – and Beijing’s triple-digit retaliation – are bringing a swift halt to the trans-Pacific flow of electronics, clothing, furniture, industrial parts and everything else that the world’s two largest economies exchange.

“I can’t imagine our government spending another 30 days in the current environment. I don’t think it’s sustainable. I don’t think the consumer is going to be able to put up with it. I’m not sure there’s going to be enough on the shelves for people to buy in another 60 or 90 days,” said Joseph Gregorio Jr., chief operating officer of the Pacific Companies, a provider of trucking, storage and cargo-handling services.

As U.S. and Chinese negotiators met in Switzerland over the weekend for talks aimed at cooling trade tensions, dockworkers were working fewer hours. Truckers who haul containers full of goods to and from the port have begun handing their keys to the bank rather than making payments on surplus vehicles.

After rising in April by about 5.5 percent, L.A.’s container imports this month are expected to plunge by 25 percent. The abrupt adjustment playing out here offers a glimpse of the costs involved in moving from a global trading system that the president says routinely cheated Americans to the “Golden Age” he promises.

“Trump’s vision of a more self-sufficient economy imagines much less importing and much more manufacturing,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “If all of this does play out, it has pronounced geographical implications: ‘Bluer’ coastal areas receive more of the pain, and ‘redder’ areas benefit from factory building.”

If Trump persists in trying to remake the U.S. economy into a bastion of self-sufficiency, port communities will see growth prospects dented here and in places such as Seattle; Houston; Savannah, Georgia; Baltimore; and New York. One out of 9 jobs in a five-county Southern California region is tied to the flow of cargo, according to Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. That’s more than 1 million people, including freight forwarders, brokers, warehouse workers, truck drivers and dockworkers.

Brandi Good is the third generation of her family to work on the docks. As vice president of Local 13 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the 20-year veteran sees the cargo slowdown rippling through the ranks.

“We are feeling the impact. It’s already happening,” she said.

First to see their hours cut are the “casuals,” on-call workers who do not have guaranteed schedules. Under the union contract, full-time dockworkers are guaranteed some pay even when there is no work. But some now are working fewer shifts or lower-paying jobs than they normally perform.

On Friday, there was enough work for only 33 longshore “gangs,” down from 50 in mid-April. (Gang sizes vary but generally include about 12 workers.)

Sal DiCostanzo, the union’s port liaison, with 18 years on the docks, said workers hope to stay busy during the current slowdown performing equipment maintenance. But the uncertainty is taking a toll.

“The quieter it gets, the higher the anxiety will be. And we honestly don’t know when this will end,” he said.

Trump so far has shown little sympathy for those affected by the port slowdown. Last week, he called it “a good thing, not a bad thing,” since it means less of the “unfair” trade with China that he says has hollowed out American manufacturing.

At least for now, Trump’s tariffs are acting like a tourniquet on the flow of goods from Chinese factories to American customers. For the first time since China joined the global trading system in 2001, Americans are not buying large quantities of inexpensive made-in-China merchandise.

Chinese export factories still hum. But increasingly, their products go to customers in Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa rather than in the United States. Total Chinese exports in April rose by 8 percent compared with one year ago, while shipments to the U.S. fell 21 percent.

Without an early trade war armistice, the economic casualties here will mount. The president suggested Friday that he might lower taxes on Chinese imports to a still-punishing 80 percent, but that is still too high for major importers to resume normal orders.

Despite a recent rush to bring imported goods into the U.S. before tariffs took hold, retailers’ inventories, relative to their sales, are lower now than on the eve of the pandemic. That suggests stores could run short of some products within weeks.

One importer of sophisticated audio equipment has ordered its Chinese supplier to halt shipments in hopes that Trump will cancel the 145 percent levies. Tariffs on the goods that have accumulated at the Chinese factory would top $1 million, a crippling burden for the small business, according to its chief executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter, saying he feared retaliation by the Trump administration.

The company has already raised its retail prices and shrunk its profit margin. The executive said he supports Trump’s goal of bringing manufacturing work back to the United States. But it’s impossible to quickly shift production to a country like India or Vietnam.

“This is the type of thing that takes years to do and the supply chain has to be created first before forcing companies to replace their current offshore supply chains,” he said.

Even if Trump negotiates away the highest trade-killing taxes, many analysts and executives expect his 10 percent universal tariff will be permanent. The Chinese goods that make up nearly half of the merchandise arriving in L.A. are likely to face higher levies, though no one can predict with any confidence just how high.

“Global trade slows, so do economies. And 70 percent of this economy is based on you and me buying. That will slow as well,” said Seroka, the port director.

All four of Gregorio’s business lines – trucking, equipment leasing, maintenance, and cargo storage and stevedoring – are down by roughly 30 percent, he said. The Long Beach, California, company, started by his father, Joe Sr., in 1990, has weathered numerous economic downturns and supply chain disruptions.

But this episode, forged by government policy, is different.

“This is not something we were expecting. We’re in a tough spot right now,” Gregorio said.

A few miles from the port, there is evidence at Waterfront Logistics of the stasis spreading through the supply chain. Unused trailer chassis are stacked high in the yard not far from several hundred shipping containers full of merchandise, which a major retailer is paying to store here rather than clear it through customs and incur exorbitant import taxes.

Inside his command post, Weston LaBar, the company’s chief strategy officer, gestures toward a wall-mounted monitor displaying a continually updated tally of the number of shipping containers on his 85-acre site: 1,564.

“That tells me we’re slow,” he said.

Normally, there would be around 3,000 metal boxes in the yard, with constant new arrivals and departures. Waterfront is a third-party logistics company that operates a trucking fleet, warehouse and transloading facility.

LaBar in recent weeks has diversified his customer base, increasing his chances of emerging from the current slump unscathed. His 600,000-square-foot warehouse holds massive coils of steel, pallets of Chinese solar panels and bottled water, and fewer consumer goods. He is frustrated by the difficulty of forecasting where the trade war is headed.

“When you don’t know if it’s going to be a two-week thing, a two-month thing, a six-month thing, a year-long thing, a forever thing, it’s a little bit more difficult because we’re kind of the tail. The dog is the port,” he said.

For some freight businesses, Trump’s flurry of import taxes has aggravated an already difficult environment. Competition among trucking firms that service the ports has become especially cutthroat.

Rates in many cases are almost unchanged from a decade ago. A number of smaller trucking companies recently filed for bankruptcy, according to FreightWaves, an industry publication. The stock values of major trucking companies including J.B. Hunt and Schneider National have lost more than 20 percent this year.

At TGS Logistics, a trucking firm based in Fresno, California, Robert Loya, the chief operating officer, has laid off 20 drivers and six office workers in the past three months. Unless cargo volumes rebound soon, he fears he will need to let more people go.

To conserve cash, TGS abandoned the purchase of more than two dozen $250,000 trucks and is considering outsourcing some back-office jobs to nations such as Colombia, as many of its competitors already have done.

“Right now we’re hurting. It could be a three-to-six-month hurt. And hopefully then in the long run, yes, the intended goal comes to fruition,” Loya said. “But in the meantime, we have to figure out how to survive.”