Two strikes are hurting the international container transport industry; the current headache is in India’s #2 port of Chennai, where truckers are on strike protesting new layers of scrutiny of export paperwork recently put in place by the Indian government. Such scrutiny slows time processing loads and cost the truckers potential loads. By refusing to take items to port, a backlog of containers is piling up at Chennai.
Neither the truckers nor the export authorities are backing down, so the strike could go on for a while and have some major impacts on container trucking in southeastern India and the firms that count on importing and exporting through Chennai.
A more traditional strike is brewing in Finland, where their stevedore union is protesting a lack of proper severance pay and the use of temporary workers; the port authorities are not acquiescing to demands and the stevedores are refusing to work any overtime and have penciled in a February 19th strike date. That would cut off Finland’s export industries from the rest of the world, including cell-phone leader Nokia.
Some of the lighter-weight Finnish freight, like cell-phones, might be shipped via air freight if needed, but there are few good alternatives to going by sea for most Finnish exports, so a prolonged strike could be very damaging to the Finnish economy. Thankfully, the gaps seem bridgeable, and pressure might be brought to bear to bring the two sides together before they blow up the Finnish economy in a financial game of chicken.
Sources: http://www.joc.com/node/416469
http://www.handyshippingguide.com/shipping...t-shipping_1244
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