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California’s port traffic is beginning to look worse now, under the effects of President Donald Trump’s fickle tariff policy, than it did at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The vessel calls, or cancellations, that we’re seeing today (are) starting to exceed the number that we saw in COVID-19,” Mario Cordero, chief executive of the Port of Long Beach, said in an interview with CalMatters in early May.

At Port of Los Angeles, Executive Director Gene Seroka said during a media briefing last week that the port expected 80 ships to arrive in May, but 17 have been canceled. By comparison, last year through May there were a total of 12 cancellations. There are 10 cancellations for June already, he added.

Farther north, the Port of Oakland saw a 15% month-over-month drop in container activity in April, spokesperson Matt Davis said. It was the first significant decline this year, as tariffs went into effect.

The challenges presented by Trump’s tariffs are “not like COVID,” said Martha Miller, executive director of the California Association of Port Authorities, at a business roundtable last week. The unpredictability of Trump’s edicts means there won’t be a surge of cargo, she said; many businesses are waiting to act, including to order goods for import.

Late Wednesday, a federal trade court struck down most of Trump’s tariffs, ruling that he did not have the authority to impose them under the emergency authority his administration has cited. The court’s decision, in a lawsuit brought by 12 states led by Oregon and five businesses, brings fresh uncertainty, with the administration likely to appeal, though a spokesperson did not say when it would do so when contacted by CalMatters Thursday. California, which filed a similar but separate lawsuit against the administration over tariffs, had filed an amicus brief supporting Oregon’s suit.

Data for the state’s three biggest ports confirm that jobs are dwindling for longshore workers up and down the state. The numbers of gangs — teams of varied sizes that work to handle cargo — at each of the ports have declined in the past few weeks, and have dropped year over year. Besides the numbers of containers at the ports, gang numbers are another indicator of the amount of work available.

Gary Herrera is president of the International Longshore Workers Union Local 13, which represents port workers in both Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Part-time workers are not getting any hours right now, Herrera said during a media briefing with Long Beach officials. He told CalMatters that full-time workers — who get first dibs on jobs — may not be getting 40 hours a week, either. Herrera was also speaking on behalf of a couple of other locals; altogether they represent about 9,000 full-time and 6,000 part-time port workers.

As the tariff drama drags on, the impact will be felt by other workers along the supply chain, from truck drivers to the staff at warehouses to rail workers and those who work in retail. If and when people don’t have enough work or lose their jobs, their communities and local economies will suffer, port officials and workers say.

“We live and we work in our community,” Herrera said during a recent media briefing with Long Beach officials. “We spend in our community.”

Luisa Gratz is the president of International Longshore Workers Union Local 26, which represents most of the security on the docks in Los Angeles and Long Beach. The port security workers — who drive other longshore workers from parking lots to the ships, among other things — told CalMatters that her constituents are also struggling.

“When there’s no work for longshoremen, there’s very little work for us except gate monitoring,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking. It’s putting people out of work.”

Truckers are also feeling the squeeze from the tariffs.

Eric Tate is secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 848, which represents about 8,000 truck drivers in Southern California. He said truckers, especially part-timers who aren’t guaranteed any hours, are seeing less work, though he did say truckers saw a bit of a pickup in work after Trump temporarily reduced tariffs on China.

“We’re trying to gear up and quickly move stuff around,” he said in an interview with CalMatters. “We’re trying to save Christmas.”

He said the continued uncertainty means many truck drivers are barely working 40 hours a week. Some shipper drivers, who transport cargo off ships to ease congestion on ports, may be working one to two days a week, Tate said. “When there’s no ship, there’s no congestion,” he added.

But in the Bay Area, the Port of Oakland is seeing a possible pickup in activity in June — as of last week, the planned canceled ships for that month have been reduced from 12 to five, port spokesperson Davis said.

The decline in cargo traffic at the ports could change depending on how different industries and businesses respond to an agreement the Trump administration reached with China on May 12, which lowers the tax on imports from China from 145% to 30% for 90 days.

The Volatility Is a Problem

Besides a decline in imports from places such as China, the ports are handling fewer exports from the state’s agricultural industry, thanks to retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods. Stephanie Magnien Rockwell, chief of staff at the Port of Los Angeles, said in mid-May that California farmers are taking a hit.

“One of our greatest exports are soybeans to China,” she said at a hearing held by State Treasurer Fiona Ma about tariffs. “(But) Brazil, in the month of March, exported more soybeans to China than they have in their entire history.”

The U.S. trade war with China has an outsize effect on California ports: Chinese goods have accounted for 40% of the imports at the Port of Los Angeles, 63% at the Port of Long Beach and 45% at the Port of Oakland.

Despite the temporary deal with China, the lack of clarity is a problem — and tariffs remain high, officials, business owners and others say. Continued changes in the costs of goods make it hard for businesses to plan. And only certain size businesses may be able to afford to take a leap and order goods from overseas now.

“We can’t generalize here, because of those 125,000 importing companies (whose) goods come through the Port of Los Angeles,” Seroka said to CalMatters. “But safe to say, if there was a little bit of a shortage on stock, or if some felt that the 30% average tariff might go higher, sure, people jump back in.”

But the uncertainty persists, Seroka said. Case in point: On May 23, Trump complained about not being able to reach a deal with Europe on tariffs and threatened a 50% tariff on European goods — which he said over the weekend would be delayed to July 9. He also threatened a 25% tariff on iPhones unless Apple begins to make the devices in the United States.

A Big Deal

Long-term, the stakes are high and wide-ranging. Port of Long Beach CEO Cordero said a 10% decline in cargo could mean a 10% decline in jobs. “If you use a round figure of a million jobs stemming from the port operations, that’s a 100,000 job reduction,” he told CalMatters.

His port supports jobs worth tens of billions of dollars in income in the five surrounding counties, according to a report recently released by the port. The report estimates that in 2023, port activity contributed $84.4 billion in local, state and federal taxes. Those were taxes paid by individuals and businesses, said Kimberly Ritter-Martinez, the port’s manager of economics and funding, during the Long Beach media briefing.

“When workers and business owners earn income from working at the port or as one of our suppliers, they spend those dollars on groceries, entertainment, travel… and all of that activity supports the broader economy,” she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.