SCDigest editorial staff

The News: The Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, passed by Congress in 2002 and expected to be enabled near the end of this year, will require much tighter documentation and legal residency status for drivers picking up freight from the nation’s ports.

The Impact: With drayage movement of goods from the ports to distribution centers or rail yards already slow and deteriorating strongly over the years, many fear TWIC will reduce the already strained driver pool by double digit percentages, hitting the many illegals believed to be driving trucks from the ports currently.

The Story: Congress included the TWIC provisions in the Maritime Transportation Act of 2002, a measure which aimed to bolster a number of elements related to port security. Though not believed to be targeting illegal immigrants per se, the requirements for proof of legal status/citizenship and issuance of new, mandatory security cards for access to port facilities will mean illegal drivers will have to drop out of the pool – and most experts believe they make up a sizable percentage of drivers in many markets.

The requirements also apply to workers at the port facilities themselves, but most believe the impact on these largely unionized workers will be small. The effect on the roughly 110,000 drayage drivers, however, is likely to be significant. A Wall Street Journal story quotes estimates that as many as 20-50% of these drivers are illegal nationally, and maybe even higher in ports close to Mexico such as Long Beach and Houston.

Part of the problem is the way drivers are paid and the increasingly suffocating congestion making these drayage trips. Drivers are typically paid per trip, not per hour. The congestion in areas like Long Beach and even Chicago from the port at the rail yards has dramatically reduced the number of trips a driver can make per day, sometimes to just a very few even though the total distance may be a relatively short amount of miles.

This has reduced take-home pay for drayage drivers, and combined with the mental challenge of waiting in line all day, has caused thousands of traditional drivers to drop out of the pool. They have been substantially replaced by Hispanics, an unknown of which are illegal, but the percentage is believed to be high.

As TWIC likely forces these drivers out of the pool, the driver crunch may get severe. We actually heard a consultant predict this at the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) annual logistics conference in 2005 even without TWIC, saying that as improvements in the flow of containers at the ports were realized, it would create inevitable even worse bottlenecks in drayage.

The impact could be particularly severe in the apparel industry, which is so heavily reliant on imports, a huge percentage of which go through Long Beach/Los Angeles. An official at the Export Textile Advisory Commission at the U.S. department of trade is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying this could ‘seriously disrupt the economy,” and that consumers could be strongly impacted in just 30 days from shortages of products.