Bend business squeezed by shipping woes
On Tuesday, Hanjin, a major shipping company, announced it is going to pull out of the Port of Portland, a move that has a huge impact on many Central Oregon businesses already hit by a West Coast port work slowdown.
Ruffwear, a dog-gear maker in Bend, has empty shelves where boxes of inventory are supposed to be, showing how much inventory they’re lacking, as a result of Hanjin’s decision and the ongoing labor dispute that sent a Portland-bound ship north to Seattle to unload instead..
“We were expecting this aisle to be full, but as you can see, we have a lot of holes,” Young Joen, director of product commercialization at Ruffwear, said Thursday. “We have essentially looked at projections of what it would look like if we would not receive any shipments for the next two week or beyond. The numbers are very, very troubling.”
Hanjin leaving Portland is a major blow to the port. In a statement, Port of Portland Executive Director Bill Wyatt writes,”Hanjin has been a vitally important and longtime carrier in our market, and this will be a tough loss for our region.”
Hanjin’s decision comes as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and ICTSI, the company that hires union workers to offload container ships, are in a labor dispute, affecting ports in recent months along the West Coast.
On Monday, workers did not show up to work, although a Hanjin ship was waiting to be unloaded.
Some officials at ICTSI are blaming the union for causing the disaster, but union officials said it is not on them.
In a statement, Jennifer Sargent, a spokeswoman for ILWU, said, “Hanjin’s stated departure from Portland rests solely on ICTSI’s inherent refusal and failure to nurture customer relations.”
It is a dispute that’s costing Central Oregon businesses such as Ruffwear, which gets all of its shipments through Hanjin.
“That means we have to either rail it down or truck it down from Seattle,” Joen said. “Trucking it, it literally increases my domestic shipping cost to almost double.”
