The first dockworkers strike at major East and Gulf coast ports in almost half a century could soon mean shortages of bananas and pricier imported cherries at U.S. grocery stores. That’s because both fruits are among the more than 100 categories of food that depend on the now-shuttered operations, with the labor dispute also expected to delay auto shipments.
Just how much American consumers and the U.S. economy will be impacted by the strike’s immediate disruption of ports that handle about half of the country’s trade in cargo containers depends on the duration of the work stoppage, now in its first day.
“Each day that this goes on it creates a backlog of containers and ships,” American Farm Bureau Federation economist Daniel Munch told CBS MoneyWatch. “A 3-to-5-day strike will take two weeks to clear — if it goes into three-week territory, it will be early January before it gets cleared.”
