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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For our last segment today, we're going to turn to the ports around here, both the ports and supply chain and the pandemic, and the ports and supply chain and corruption. Let me open up the phones right away on the off chance that we have anybody who works at the Port of Newark, or any of the other ports in our listening area to call up and tell everybody what the heck is going on. Can shipping containers not get onto trucks? We hear about this regarding the West Coast ports a lot. What's happening at the ports around here?

Do we have any longshoreman in the audience today, anybody else who works at the ports who want to say what's going on? 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. We'd love to hear from you if you're out there. Now, here's the corruption piece. While all eyes have been on the Supreme Court abortion case, the Court also made news this past month for a case they decided not to take up regarding the ports of New York and New Jersey where millions of units of cargo, of course, get delivered each year.

The issue at play Governor Phil Murphy wants to withdraw from the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. That's a bi-state agency that polices organize crime and oversees fair hiring practices in both, in New Jersey and New York ports. Governor Murphy says, "The Commission has outlived its usefulness and slows down operations, which is especially unfortunate as supply chain issues continue to royal deliveries because of the pandemic and through the holiday season".

With no Supreme Court ruling, it seems like New Jersey will, in fact, withdraw, but could possibly face a lawsuit from the New York side of the Hudson. Are we at the start of a bi-state port war in New York and New Jersey, and what would that mean for deliveries and the global supply chain crunch?

Here to help us understand what this all means, as we see if anybody who works at any of our local ports is listening right now to call in, is Jennifer Smith, Reporter at The Wall Street Journal, covering logistics, supply chains, and distribution networks. Jennifer, thanks so much. Welcome to WNYC.

Jennifer Smith: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Again, listeners our phone number if you work around the ports or are connected to the ports 212-433 WNYC, 433-9692. What's this Waterfront Commission, and why was it put in place in 1953?

Jennifer Smith: To take a step back, the Port of New York and New Jersey is a bunch of terminals where big ships dock and cargo gets unloaded or imports get loaded on, and they go on their way. The reason it's called the Port of New York and New Jersey is you have terminals on both sides of the water. Although, over time, the balance of economic activity has shifted over to the New Jersey side as ships have gotten bigger. That's just setting the stage.

The Commission which anyone who was a fan of the movie On the Waterfront, may have seen. There's a long history of organized crime on the docks around New York Harbor. The Commission was founded by an act of Congress in 1953 at a time when the dockworkers union was really largely controlled by organized crime. The Commission, despite state compact, is supposed to root out corruption, make sure that jobs are going to who they should be, that there's not graft, all that sort of stuff to try and make these operations smoother for commerce, and also presumably more fair for the workers that are there.

That's the founding story. If you want me to go into it, there've been some twists and turns in the decades since then.

Brian Lehrer: Going to this piece, I see that the Longshoremen's Association Union also wants the Commission out even though you just said it's there, in part, to protect fair labor practices. New Jersey wants out, the Union wants out, New York apparently wants in, what are the real competing interests here, is anybody actually being soft on organized crime?

Jennifer Smith: That's a big question. One complicating factor is the back in 2009, New York's Inspector General issued this report alleging that there was corruption at the Commission itself. It's a rich history here. Commissioners and executive staff were purged and the Commission has reconstituted itself, moved on, and where it gets to loggerheads with the Union, the International Longshoremen's Association is over hiring.

Their relations haven't been good. Then they've had ups and downs. There was a big deterioration in 2016. The Commission is basically, in its newer form, as said, "Look, there's still racial inequities in hiring and you still have these figures that are showing up for no-show jobs", that kind of thing. The ILA says that this is overreach. Then the shipping association that represents the actual operators of the terminals, has supported New Jersey's push to withdraw.

They're saying that this is slowing down their ability to actually hire workers to move freight, and they don't want this to be slowed down. New Jersey is arguing that its state police should be fine to patrol the docks and what's happening here, particularly since the bulk of the economic activity is really happening on the New Jersey side, although there are some active ports on the New York side. It's not quite clear what New York thinks.

When we wrote about this earlier this year, a former representative on the Board of Commissioners from the New York side had said the state was likely to fight it and that the withdrawal will be bad for law enforcement, and that it could also set a precedent for New Jersey's seceding from other bi-state agencies, like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is about more than just the ports, it's about the airports. That is a big deal. It's unclear whether this is something that could open the door for a larger secession. These are some of the factors at play.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting a call from Port Newark in Elizabeth, another one from the Port in Bayonne. Here is Celso at Port Newark in Elizabeth. Celso, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in today.

Celso: Good afternoon. Thank you for getting my call. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: I'm doing great. What's going on at the port, I hear you're talking about the warehouses backed up, which results in the ports being backed up.

Celso: Yes. Basically, I work for the rail division. What we do is, generally speaking, we move about 12,000 feet of train a day prior to this bottleneck. What's been going on is that we are now-

Brian Lehrer: Meaning the ships come into the port and you unload stuff onto trains to ship them out to where they're going to be sold?

Celso: Exactly. We have CSX, which is the middleman that basically moves the freight from, let's say, the middle of the country down to us, and from us to the middle of the country.

Brian Lehrer: CSX is in that route, yes.

Celso: What's been happening here, CSX has been limiting their footage to us due to the restrictions from the warehousing. The warehousing are telling us, "Listen, we can't take freight for Chicago like we usually do, so you got to cut back on that." Likewise with every other destination that we handle here. There's a small misconception that everything is due to the ships by not being discharged fast enough and so forth.

Brian Lehrer: Are you able to understand what the backup at the warehouses would be? Because we do keep hearing that the problem is at the ports getting stuff through, the ships are sitting in the harbor, all that stuff, there's shortage of truck drivers. Why at the warehouses? One would think that the warehouses are just eager to get this stuff delivered to them. What is the problem at the warehouses if you know?

Celso: Some of that has to do with the chassis. Chassis are in very high demand out there, and obviously, drivers pulling those chassis. It's labor and its material, which is your chassis also not being available. Some of that is a ripple effect, because remember, as those ships are waiting to be discharged, unless that freight has somewhere to go, it's a ripple effect. Some of the audience, I hope understands that aspect, that it's not always the longshoremen or the warehousing that it's totally responsible for that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much, Celso. We really appreciate your call. Call us again. Let's go to Artie at the Global Port, I think it's called, in Bayonne. Artie, you're a truck driver I see, right?

Artie: I am a truck driver. Brian, it's a pleasure to finally talk to you. I'm a big fan of yours.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. What do you want to add to the supply chain explainer?

Artie: What I can tell you is from truckers' perspective, I'm in and out of the ports every day and I go through all four of these five ports, Bayonne and there's two in Elizabeth, and two in Newark. I'm in and out of most of them every day. My problem is the time to get in. Usually, there's ones that you're waiting maybe an hour and a half, two hours to get in, and then once you're in, you have this other line and you're waiting another maybe two hours. I'm in the port right now waiting for a container and I waited three hours. I've been here three hours for one container.

Now, what I see and when I deal with the people here is that they added these loans [unintelligible 00:11:14] They make money, they're protected by the Union. They really don't care about the drivers. They'll stop the machine. You'll be underweighting and if they decide to stop the machine and pull out their phones and doing whatever or take a call, they will, and they'll leave you standing.

God forbid if you beep the horn at them, "Forget about. They'll drive right past it." It's really pretty much the politics in the ports, the way they work, and the way they treat the drivers. That's the whole though. Now, you have people that security, they drive up and down in pick-offs on whatever, let's say when there's heavy traffic inside the ports, they should come out and start directing traffic.

The bottom line, Brian, this is a mess. It's a hell hole and there's nobody that takes action and say, "All right, okay, I'm this lane. It's time to get full. Let's get some people out there and then start breaking up the traffic".

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Thank you for your call. Thanks for the nice words. Please call us again. Jennifer Smith from The Wall Street Journal, those were two very interesting calls and the last one in the respect that the working people there at the point seem to be, to some degree, at odds with each other, the truck drivers and the longshoreman.

Jennifer Smith: That's right. I've heard similar stories from some other port drivers that haul cargo in and out of the port there. I think just to take a step back, the bottlenecks, the labor shortages across the supply chain the gentlemen who worked on the rail side road was talking about, you don't have enough workers at warehouses, warehouses are already full of goods. There's similar difficulties to what we've seen on the West Coast where there's been a lot of focus on the bottlenecks and dozens and dozens of box ships off the coast.

My understanding is that the situation here in the New York Harbor is not nearly as bad, but there has been some congestion and some backups at peak with similar increases in imports. All that's happening and it's similar on the West Coast, you also have different players blaming one another for the backups and the delays.

Brian Lehrer: We have just 30 seconds left in the show. How does the supply chain problem that we've all been hearing about and that these two call us we're calling about relate to the Waterfront Commission of New York and New Jersey, that New Jersey wants to get out of and the alleged corruption if it does?

Jennifer Smith: It relates to it in so far as if the problem was that there aren't enough longshoremen and that's what's causing the backups, New Jersey's argument would be, "Hey, we need to quickly hire more people. You, the Commission are getting in the way of doing that." If the problem is not just a lack of longshoremen but broader problems across the supply chain, it's less clear how that relates, but there is a lot of money and a lot of stake in the commerce. This is the busiest port on the East Coast. You see that.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer Smith, The Wall Street Journal correspondent, thank you for joining us today. Really interesting.

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