A deep dive into the shipping industry
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Illustration: Peter and Maria Hoey
 
Dear reader,
Vince Valeriano is 23 years old. He’s Filipino and he works as a seafarer on giant container ships, some of them as big as the Empire State Building. Today, he calls the MSBC Maria his home, and he hasn’t set foot on dry land in the past 15 months.

For the next story in our series, How We Broke the Supply Chain, award-winning journalist Amir Khafagy talked to Vince and others who work in the ocean shipping industry, a key driver of the supply chain mess. Ocean shipping companies have segmented themselves into three alliances that ship the vast majority of cargo worldwide. And they have raised their prices as much as tenfold during the supply chain crisis, taking advantage of desperate importers to boost their profits to record levels.

None of those excess profits go to people like Vince. The unregulated, unsustainable ocean shipping industry is a major reason why we’ve seen such supply chain chaos.

You can read Amir Khafagy’s powerful, important story here.
You can read our entire special issue on how outsourcing, monopolization, deregulation, financialization, and just-in-time logistics broke our supply chains at
prospect.org/supplychain
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David Dayen, Executive Editor
The American Prospect
 
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