Port leaders are raising caution the decline in business at their facilities could affect those whose employment relies on the flow of goods.

Officials at the Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, said the facility is operating at about 80% as factories in China slowly come back online, and the U.S. economy struggles amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Newly released figures from some of the nation’s major ports show cargo volumes are slumping as they struggle to recover from the U.S.-China trade war and now the steep downturn in factory output from China in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak.

The shipping industry will remain volatile for most of 2020 as the coronavirus outbreak in China upends the global supply chain, said the head of the largest U.S. container port.

In his annual State of the Port address Jan. 16, Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka cautioned that using tariffs to punish rival trading partners may be “the new normal.”

Ships visiting Southern California’s bustling ports are poised to become the region’s largest source of smog-causing pollutants in coming years, one reason state regulators want to reduce emissions from thousands more of them.

Some truck drivers at the Los Angeles docks are scrapping over leaner cargoes thanks to the trade war.

U.S. ports and their private sector partners have ramped up their investments in infrastructure improvements, which ultimately should help trucking companies get their drivers in and out of these complexes faster and more efficiently, industry experts said.

President Donald Trump’s long-running trade battle with China is putting nearly 1.47 million U.S. jobs at risk, according to a new study commissioned by the Port of Los Angeles and written by global consulting firm BST Associates.

The arrival of robots at the Port of Los Angeles is exposing a stark economic divide between two sets of Southern California workers.