Supply Chain Issues and Failure to Recover

Supply Chain Issues and Failure to Recover

Written by: Lauren Mistele

Over the course of the last few months, it has been presented to the economy that supply chain issues are still very prevalent in our everyday lives and still fail to recover from when they began to struggle. As import rates continue to rise due to online purchases increasing, shipping continues to become more and more backed up without enough labor to fix the issue. After the Covid-19 pandemic started, supply chain issues began to rise at extremely high rates and we still fail to recover from this issue due to multiple factors. Supply chain still struggles due to the unemployment rates, lag in technology improvement, and resulting in longer delivery times as the main impact daily consumers notice/undergo.

First off, the labor shortage is greatly affecting the supply chain and halting the steps towards progressing back to where the economy used to be performing at. After the pandemic began, cyclical unemployment grew at an exponential rate due to the quickening failure of the state the economy was unfortunately in. As the economy slowly began to recover from the pandemic, many of the workers that were originally let go during this time have still failed to return to work, and now fit into the category of discouraged workers. With this gap presented for the labor force, the supply chain is greatly affected in the sense that there are not enough employed people to load and unload the exports/imports from the shipping containers. Along with unloading the goods, there are not enough drivers to transport these goods before they can even be unloaded. This labor shortage poses a very prevalent problem that our economy has to deal with in order to improve supply chain efficiency to boost the productivity of shipping as it was before the pandemic. 

In addition to the labor shortage being an issue for the supply chain, the lag in technology improvement leads to the lack of shipping being improved and delivery times becoming faster than they ever have been before. Connecting back to shipping issues, improvements are not able to be made within technology and certain goods as the parts to improve these goods are taking longer to be received or not received at all. The shortage in computer chip shipments has halted much of the technology improvement that is being attempted to occur. Also, with a decrease in the people in the labor force, there are more jobs available than people to fill the positions which occurs in a halt in productivity within areas of improvement. Overall, supply chain is not able to be boosted due to the halt in technology improvements which leads to the longer and constant delivery rates consumers are experiencing. 

As you can see in this graph, it is clear that delivery times are at the highest rates they have been since 2010 due to supply chain turmoil and the failure to recover from the issues presented from the pandemic

Although many economists and consumers believe that supply chains will be fixed as time goes on and as improvements are made, more action needs to be taken than just waiting for this issue to be solved based upon time. An increase in the labor force must occur to fill the positions that need to be accounted for in order to allow shipping to keep up with the high demand it is receiving and give the economy what it needs to make life better for all individuals pre-pandemic once again. 

Works Cited

“2022 Supply Chain Issues: Our Predictions on What to Expect.” AdRoll, 1 Apr. 2022, https://www.adroll.com/blog/2022-supply-chain-issues-our-predictions-on-what-to-expect. 

Goodman, Peter S. “A Normal Supply Chain? It's 'Unlikely' in 2022.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/business/supply-chain-disruption.html#:~:text=Normal%20Supply%20Chain%3F-,It's%20'Unlikely'%20in%202022.,year%2C%20and%20perhaps%20even%20longer. 

“How the Labor Shortage Is Impacting the Supply Chain: Would Immigration Reform Help?” The National Law Review, https://www.natlawreview.com/article/how-labor-shortage-impacting-supply-chain-would-immigration-reform-help.