Category Archives: Supply Chains

2021 is the year of the freight service embargo

Posted on August 19, 2021 by | 2 comments

It’s not possible to book shipments anymore with some LTL carriers. Their capacity is full, and they don’t care if they get new customers. OnTrak (which delivers my vitamin pills) and Fedex recently said they were refusing new customers. The claims are that they are out of capacity– not enough planes, trucks and drivers— to deliver everything. There are other less visible bottlenecks, also, such as a shortage of trucks for sale due to the semiconductor shortage. There’s been a sort of crisis in drivers for trucks for quite a while, exacerbated by the recent enforcement of rules to prevent people who fail drug tests from getting commercial driver’s licenses. We wonder why employers don’t pay drivers more, and take more care to create working conditions more favorable to drivers.

Still, common carriers have an obligation to carry the freight presented. It will be interesting to see how far this goes, and when regulators will start crawling through these carriers’ records to see if they are unfairly denying carriage.

Eric Kulisch, Air Cargo Editor Thursday, August 19, 2021

Viewpoint: 2021 is the year of the freight service embargo – FreightWaves

2 Comments

Posted in Logistics, Supply Chains, Trucking

Tagged , , , ,

Ever Given to miss Hamburg call on safety grounds

Posted on July 20, 2021 by | 2 comments

The saga of the Ever Given, stuck in the Suez Canal for days, goes on. It is sailing again with cargo, but can’t land everywhere, due to restrictions on its propulsion and speed. It is skipping Hamburg.

All this means that many shippers won’t get their cargo soon, despite having paid the general average fees for the disaster. And quite a few have not yet paid the fees.

Anyone who needs the cargo is out of luck till it is discharged and moved on through its supply chain.

I hope the shippers have found alternate ways to get replacement s to those who really needed it on time. But I doubt it.

Ever Given to miss Hamburg call on safety grounds

16 July 2021

Port Technology International Team Ports and Terminals, Shipping Lines

Ever Given to miss Hamburg call on safety grounds – Port Technology International

2 Comments

Posted in Logistics, Service Management, Shipping, Supply Chains

Tagged , , , , ,

Unintended consequences -UK customs and Brexit

Posted on June 13, 2021 by | 1 comment

Today’s news brings more info on unintended consequences of Brexit. I submit this could be fairly serious in thelong run, and make customs essentially unenforceable from EU to the UK.

Apparently it takes customs a long time to process the forms required to import from the EU. MNow EU shippers could use a broker to file the forms. The charge for that is small. But if the broker in the UK files the forms, they are also making themselves liable for nonpayment of the customs duty. Often this duty is quite large. And the UK customs (HMRC) cannot go after the EU cargo owner– the law isn’t in effect there. So who do they go after? The local UK brokerage.

Brokers in the UK simply cannot afford this risk, so they will quit brokering cargo from the UK. And the HMRC will have nowhere to go to collect duties.

I’m not sure what can be done to unwind this, either. Brexit will untimately break the agreements on duties that were in place, in favor of self-determination. So the UK will have to ‘self-determine’ how to collect duties. Do we go back to customs patrols and ship searches? You can bet there will be plenty of cheating by failure to file forms, on the part of EU cargo owners, perhaps even smuggling. The nightmares of the 19th century are before us.

Serious threat to UK customs duty revenue as backlog of declarations grows – The Loadstar

By Alex Whiteman, Brexit reporter 07/06/2021

Serious threat to UK customs duty revenue as backlog of declarations grows – The Loadstar

1 Comment

Posted in Logistics, Shipping, Supply Chains

Tagged , , , , ,