Transportation Roundup: Intermodal transport industry eyeing potential strike, SSGA watching changing sailing dates

By Gary Williams, SSGA director of transportation and regulatory affairs

We are watching…Canada. The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) Union is voting during a period beginning April 8-May 1 on a potential strike date of May 22. The union members involved count 6,000 on the Canadian National (CN), and 2,500 on the Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC). The collective agreement with CN and CPKC expired on Dec. 31, 2023.

Talks between the sides are continuing with a federal conciliator who can broker a deal up until May 1, when a 21-day cooling off period begins before any strike could occur. The union would then have to issue a 72-hour strike notice to the two Canadian railroads. According to CN’s website, on April 11 the railroad proposed an improved offering to the Union, focusing on wages, job security and guaranteed earnings.

Shippers in Canada are relating to SSGA that the CN has a very positive tone on being able to avoid a strike. Canadian Pacific has been more cautious. CPKC directly serves several grain elevators in North Dakota and Minnesota, which usually moves through Canada and is handed off at Kingsgate to reach U.S. export facilities. It also handles intermodal volumes to Vancouver, BC to/from inland ramps in Minneapolis, Chicago and Milwaukee.

We will continue to monitor the situation and assess potential impacts to intermodal and covered hopper grain movement.

SSGA also has its eye on changing sailing dates and the impact on members.

Our Competitive Shipping action team is spending some time collecting information and analyzing typical cases of steam ship lines (SSL) changing voyage dates abruptly even after containers have started pulling on a booking, moving the Earliest Return Date (ERD) out in the future and disallowing further containers to be pulled. While they will receive the loaded containers in, not being able to continue pulling and loading results is disrupting the trucking that has been secured, can create cash flow impacts on producers, slow or stop processing lines at the conditioning plant, result in split bookings which customers may not accept due to fixed costs and fees being spread out over fewer containers. Customers may not always be able to accept double bookings in the same week due to a lack of free time at the destination yard and limited warehouse space. Additionally, a number of other logistical issues, trade-offs and costs often occur.

Overall, not being able to smooth out these delays and disruptions create higher costs in our businesses, loss efficiencies and a number of costs not seen by the SSL.

We understand that delays in voyage arrival/sailing dates are often unavoidable, but our hope is to discuss and propose solutions that could help smooth out the disruption to mitigate the effects after we can delineate the impacts and costs that occur. Certainly, we continue to have reputable cost as the U.S. prides itself on having the highest reliability in the world – an important component that makes U.S. identity preserved field crops desired as the number one choice!

We encourage all members to let action team chair Tina Lyons or myself know your own cases, and help us quantify the outcomes when these late changing dates are experienced.