10-Day Lockout Did Substantial Damage

Re “Ports Get Back to Business,” Oct. 10: The report from a trucker at the docks that he hadn’t “made a penny for 10 days” pales in comparison with my family’s loss due to this strike. We have an orange grove in Ojai. The crop was picked just days before the walkout, so we have the expenses of growing the fruit, picking and packing it. It is not delivered, so we are not paid for a year’s labor and expense. Not just 10 days but a year with no return!

Gwen Erickson

Ojai

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Let me see if I can add up these numbers. The workers were locked out by the shippers because of a work slowdown that made it cheaper to let a couple of hundred ships wait to be unloaded over a 10-day period (and brought on a financial disaster for this country, businesses and who knows who else).

Now, everyone says that it will take six to eight weeks just to clear out the backlog of containers. Wouldn’t it have been better to have had some “slow” work (never mind safety or those who have died) than to have the disaster that the complete shutdown has brought?

Steven N. Copley

Harbor City

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Has it occurred to any of our globalization-happy American executives and politicians that if we hadn’t exported so much of our light-industry and textile business we wouldn’t be looking at losing a billion dollars a day during port lockouts?

Richard McEnroe

North Hollywood