Where’s Pete? Dockworkers Slow Down Major West Coast Ports

Breitbart News reports that Secretary of Transportation diversity hire Pete Buttigieg is traveling the country, giving speeches celebrating federal spending in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill while another major slowdown is hampering cargo at West Coast ports.

This time, the cause is not a backup of cargo ships, but a labor dispute between the International Longshore Workers Union and the Pacific Maritime Association.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week:

A new wave of job actions halted cargo operations across major West Coast ports, with dockworkers effectively shutting down the Port of Oakland for a time and hampering handling at some of the country’s busiest trade gateways in an escalating confrontation with employers over long-running contract talks.
…

Shipping industry officials said dockworkers failed to show up for work and slowed operations at the ports starting Thursday evening and continuing into Friday morning.

“We are moving at half of the velocity that we normally operate with,” an official at one cargo-handling terminal at Los Angeles-Long Beach said Friday. Some terminals in Southern California opened Friday morning and then stopped accepting trucks a few hours later as traffic built up because of the slowed operations.

Buttigieg, whose department administers the infrastructure funds, was away during the cargo crisis of 2021, taking two months’ unannounced paternity leave. He was on vacation in Portugal in 2022 during a potential rail workers’ strike that would have crippled the U.S. economy.

Now he’s AWOL again because he has his on a future presidency instead of doing the job he has today.