Last Sunday, Tanimura & Antle Inc., one of the nation's largest vegetable growers, shipped 20 truckloads of broccoli to the Port of Oakland to be exported to Japan and Taiwan.
But that broccoli is still sitting there, and Charles Schreiber, director of international sales for the Salinas-based company, is alarmed that the shipment, worth US$320,000, will spoil if the West Coast ports do not reopen soon.
"You feel helpless," Schreiber said. "We have 20 containers sitting there, and every day the product gets older and we can't do a thing about it. That's a hard pill to swallow."
Worse yet, he said, is that his company, which normally exports half its produce, has many acres of broccoli and celery still to harvest, and no one knows what to do with all that fast-ripening produce. Some broccoli, he said, may be left in the field to rot.
From California's endless vegetable fields, to Washington state's bountiful apple orchards to factories in the Midwest to apparel companies in New York City, a similar refrain is being heard -- the weeklong shutdown of 29 seaports is starting to bite, and bite hard.
The joint General Motors-Toyota auto assembly plant in Fremont, Calif., with 5,100 workers, has shut because of a lack of parts, and auto executives say that one or two more plant closings may follow next week. Railroads have stopped shipping Midwestern grain to the West Coast because of a backup of freight cars, and toy and apparel retailers are panicking that they may not get the hottest items in time for the holiday season.
With worries mounting daily, leaders of 55 industry associations met with White House officials on Friday to describe the shutdown's escalating damage and to urge President Bush to use emergency powers to reopen the 29 ports and order the coast's 10,500 longshoremen back to work.
The ports handle half the nation's imports and exports, and while many executives and economists said a brief shutdown would have little effect, they predicted that the damage would become serious if the ports stayed closed for more than a week.
"I am surprised that more people don't see this as a national emergency, both economic and security," said David Littmann, chief economist at Comerica Bank in Detroit. "If the port shutdown were to last three to four weeks, it would essentially destroy the growth that the economy is enjoying. The damage starts at a billion dollars a day, but when you get to layoffs of truckers and the shutdown of the Toyota-GM plant in California and the cost increases that will turn consumers off, the damage accumulates and becomes exponential."
The economic damage is stirring a fierce political debate that has for now been overshadowed in Washington by the debate over Iraq. Business lobbyists and their Republican allies support an 80-day cooling off period, while organized labor and many Democrats oppose it.
In San Francisco on Friday, the port operators and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union began a second day of talks with the top federal mediator. Port officials said progress was slow, but they said they hoped that the ports might be reopened this weekend.
After saying last Friday that they were temporarily closing the ports for 36 hours, the port operators announced an indefinite shutdown on Sunday and locked out the longshoremen, saying they were engaged in a job slowdown. Union officials said the workers were merely observing safety precautions.
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