Unintended Consequences
While offshoring made sense to some firms before containerization, its rise significantly cut down on shipping costs and made transporting finished goods over long distances economical. “The shipping container allowed us to take advantage of cheap labor overseas and move a lot of manufacturing offshore,” said Martin Danyluk, assistant professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. “And that comes at an incredible cost for workers domestically but also for communities.”
Factories no longer needed to be near suppliers and markets, paving the way for mass migration away from manufacturing hubs in Rust Belt cities such as Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, and Buffalo. In New York City, containerization was a major factor in the collapse of its industrial base between 1967 and 1975, pushing the city into a fiscal crisis. Organized labor was also severely wounded from outsourcing. In 2020, only 10.8 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to unions, down from 20 percent in 1983.
Containerization has also had a detrimental impact on the environment. Nearly all cargo ships use low-grade ship bunker diesel combustion engines to power themselves. Some of the biggest tankers can carry approximately 4.5 million gallons of fuel. Ships emit a plethora of toxic substances such as CO2, nitrous oxides, and sulfur oxides, which are known to cause acid rain. The pollution one ship emits produces the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars; emissions from just 15 ships would be the equivalent of all of the cars in the world. A study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that pollution from cargo ships has led to 60,000 deaths per year and costs up to $330 billion in annual health costs from lung and heart diseases.
Port-adjacent communities in Southern California are habitually covered in a blanket of smog emitted from ships and trucks idling in and around the ports. Yale researchers found that a 1 percent increase in vessel tonnage in port “increases pollution concentrations for major air pollutants by 0.3–0.4% within a 25-mile radius of the 27 largest ports in the United States.” Black communities are disproportionately located near ports, and Black people are more likely to be hospitalized for port-related illness.
“The communities that are being harmed by shipping activity are not evenly distributed,” said Danyluk. “It tends to be low-income communities of color … People who are already being marginalized and exploited for whatever the reason are disproportionately impacted by this activity.”