Gene Seroka has been executive director of the Port of Los Angeles since 2014. The seaport moves more cargo containers than any other in the nation. It has handled as many as 10 million containers in a year. Minus holidays, that works out to about 29,000 a day. Any one of them could hold 48,000 bananas or 24,000 tin cans or maybe 12,000 shoe boxes. Part of Seroka’s job is to explain what those numbers mean and why they are important to a Southern California audience consisting mostly of landlubbers.
“Every four cargo containers that we move creates one job,” Seroka said. “The more containers we move, the more jobs we create.” Many of those jobs are local. Regionally, an estimated 175,000 Southern California workers — employed at the harbors themselves as well as in related businesses such as trucking and warehouse storage — move freight valued at $469 billion a year, port data show.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.