A ship captain waits for weeks to unload his cargo in Los Angeles. A crane operator in Savannah, Ga., sits above a port jammed with boxes. A trucker in Alabama is handing off cargo in parking lots.

Supply-chain problems have been a defining feature of the global economy in 2021. For millions of workers, the global gridlock has redefined their jobs.

Dock...

A ship captain waits for weeks to unload his cargo in Los Angeles. A crane operator in Savannah, Ga., sits above a port jammed with boxes. A trucker in Alabama is handing off cargo in parking lots.

Supply-chain problems have been a defining feature of the global economy in 2021. For millions of workers, the global gridlock has redefined their jobs.

Dock workers, railroad hands, truck drivers and warehouse staff have worked during the Covid pandemic to handle a surge of U.S. imports, as businesses restock and retailers prepare for the critical holiday shopping season. They have witnessed firsthand—and tried to smooth out—the snarls that have delayed shipments of everything from pickup trucks to holiday toys.

Here is a look at the people working at each link in the global supply chain that moves cargo from a distant factory to your home.

Waiting at sea

Madalin Butoi waited for more than a month. The captain of the Hyundai Prestige, a boxship with 5,000 containers, was anchored outside the Port of Los Angeles earlier this month after traversing the Pacific Ocean.

Cargo has been delayed this year by Covid-19 outbreaks that have disrupted Asian ports and manufacturing sites. At the same time, vessels are trying to bring more containers to meet strong demand from consumers in the West. That has created a backlog at the port where dozens of boxships are waiting offshore for weeks before they can unload. Before the pandemic, it was unusual for any ships to have to wait more than a couple of days.

Madalin Butoi, captain of the Hyundai Prestige, a container carrier, at the Port of Los Angeles earlier this month.

Photo: Capital-Executive Ship Management Corp.

“I’ve had some delays before in South America, but nothing like this, especially at a U.S. port,” he said from his bridge, with a view of Los Angeles in the distance. The 43-year-old native of Romania has been a captain since 2017 and an officer on merchant vessels for nearly two decades.

The ship, operated by Greece’s Capital Product Partners L.P. , is moving general cargo like clothes, electronics and toys ahead of the year end-holiday season along with food like beef, fish, and vegetables in refrigerated containers.

To pass the time, he said his crew of 19 from Romania and the Philippines kept busy catching up with maintenance work and spent their free time playing basketball and table tennis. “There is generally good weather, so we are catching up with repair work that we usually can’t do at sea,” he said.

Mr. Butoi’s top priority was to keep the Covid-19 virus off the ship. With only a third of the crew vaccinated, visits on the vessel by agents or customs officers were kept to a minimum. “We are trying to get Covid shots at every port we call, but it’s not easy to arrange,” he said.

The Hyundai Prestige, shown here at the port of Singapore, can hold about 5,000 containers.

Photo: Capital Product Partners L.P.

Mr. Butoi said there are too many small ships waiting to enter Los Angeles. The vessels usually coming in from Asia can move around 14,500 containers, three times the capacity of his own ship. “Now there are many small ships like ours, or even smaller, which is a testament to the big demand to bring in cargo,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much tonnage waiting to unload.”

In mid November, the captain got word that he could berth and unload. He and his crew have been at sea for five months. “My 10-year old daughter is used to having daddy away from home,” Mr. Butoi said. “I hope to be home in January, in time for her birthday.”

‘The docks have been full’

Justin Spencer has a bird’s-eye view of the supply chain congestion from the cab of his crane at the Port of Savannah. “The docks have been full for the past month or two,” Mr. Spencer said. “Every berth is taken up.“

Justin Spencer inside his crane cabin at the Port of Savannah, Ga.

Photo: Kelli Boyd for the Wall Street Journal

Shippers turned to ports like Savannah, Ga., this year as an alternative to Southern California, where dozens of ships like the Hyundai Prestige backed up off the coast. The deluge of boxes at Savannah, the nation’s fourth largest gateway for seaborne imports, filled marine terminals and caused dozens of ships to back up there, too.

Mr. Spencer, 30, started working on the docks from high school, digging fertilizer and salt out of bulk cargo ships before learning to operate a crane.

He arrived at Savannah four years ago as the port began welcoming larger container ships thanks to the newly-widened Panama Canal. The largest ship to call at the port is able to carry the equivalent of up to 16,000 containers, where it can spend 24 hours being unloaded and reloaded for its next stop.

From his perch 150 feet in the air, a joystick in each hand, Mr. Spencer guides the crane’s cab out over the deck of the ship and peers down through a glass bottom onto containers stacked eight or nine high. He maneuvers a steel bar, known as a spreader, over the top of a container and locks onto the box.

A single container can weigh up to 70,000 pounds. Mr. Spencer lifts the box off the ship and lowers it onto a truck waiting on the dock. He repeats it over and over again moving an average of about 35 boxes an hour.

Savannah handled the equivalent of 2.3 million loaded import containers between January and October this year, an increase of 21% compared with the same period in 2019.

A view from Justin Spencer’s crane cabin.

Photo: Kelli Boyd for the Wall Street Journal

The crush of imports has swamped American supply chains and overwhelmed domestic transportation networks as businesses rush to restock pandemic-depleted inventories. Shipping lines, port workers, truckers, warehouse operators, railways and retailers blame each other for the imbalances and delays. All of these industries are struggling with a shortage of labor.

Mr. Spencer said he works roughly the same number of days as before the pandemic and his crane can only move so many boxes an hour. But he is surrounded by evidence of the import boom during his drive to the docks. “They are constantly expanding the yards for more containers,” he said. “Trucks have been lined up at the gates.”

His workday stretches for 12 hours, which usually includes two stints of 2½ hours alone in the cab. He likes the solitude. “There’s a certain amount of peace to it,” he said.

‘Saturated’ rail yards

Jennifer West zooms around BNSF Railway Co.’s yard in Chicago in a small trucklike vehicle known as a hostler, pulling containers stuffed with merchandise onto and off of trains.

The Corwith Intermodal Facility, stretching across nearly 400 acres, is one of the largest rail yards in the country. It is a key step in the movement of cargo from West Coast ports, where freight trains are unloaded and the containers are stored until they are moved onto trucks. Truckers also bring shipping containers to Corwith to be loaded onto trains.

Lately, the facility has become more congested, interrupting the flow of her day. Outside truck drivers sometimes drop off containers that crowd the aisles, making it difficult for Ms. West, an equipment operator, to access the container she needs to bring to the outbound train she is building with her crew of five.

“I like when the yard is liquid and I can move and keep my groove going,” said Ms. West, 66. “When it becomes saturated, it’s not as easy to do my job.”

Equipment operator Jennifer West at the BNSF Railway yard in Chicago.

Photo: BNSF Railway

Intermodal yards like Corwith are becoming clogged across the U.S. as goods move inbound from ports. Railroad companies like BNSF are filling up the space they have and some are opening spillover yards where extra containers accumulate until they are picked up.

Ms. West, who is often referred to as “Mama” or “Ms. Jen” by co-workers, is an Army Reserve veteran who started working at Corwith seven years ago.

She usually starts her shifts at 11 a.m. or 3 p.m. She primarily unloads containers from railcars and, using a computerized system, finds a spot to park it until it gets picked up. Or, the process reverses and she hunts down a container in the yard, attaches it to her vehicle and brings it to a railcar.

The crowding of the yard adds delays to her day, as she may have to navigate around extra containers parked in aisles where they shouldn’t be. “It has become challenging,” she said.

After 12 hours of work, she drives 30 minutes to her home to rest before her next shift. “It’s the way of our life,” she said. “We do what we can to get the trains out on time.”

‘Commercial gridlock’

Truck driver Mike Mattingly has hauled everything from milk to plastic pellets. The supply-chain snarls this year are the worst he’s seen in more than three decades as a long-distance trucker.

“The term I’ve used is commercial gridlock,” said Mr. Mattingly, 60, who owns his own big rig. He has been busy delivering custom cabinets for Kith Kitchens LLC of Haleyville, Ala., to contractors, home builders and kitchen- and bath-supply dealerships.

The home-improvement boom that began during lockdown is still stoking demand for Kith’s products, even as shortages of raw materials and labor are slowing the movement of freight. It can take as long as three months from when a customer places an order to when the finished cabinets are ready to ship, compared with the pre-Covid lead time of three to four weeks.

Truck driver Mike Mattingly at a truck stop in Carlisle, Penn.

Photo: Mike Mattingly

Demand is such that Mr. Mattingly sometimes meets up with builders or moving companies that handle the last leg of the delivery in a parking lot or near a highway offramp, shifting the cabinets from his truck to theirs by the side of the road.

His trucking business has increased steadily since the start of the pandemic, Mr. Mattingly said, and rising rates have boosted his income. He gets paid around a third more per mile now to haul a load from Alabama to Florida, for example, than he did before the pandemic. But the bottlenecks are making his work more difficult.

“Everybody is in short supply but when it’s shipped, the trucker is put in the middle,” he said. “The dispatchers, the shippers and receivers, their work ceases at 5 o’clock, and we’re expected to go 24/7.”

Lately, he’s had to slow down.

In August Mr. Mattingly had a heart attack, his third. He is on the road four or five days a week, but now he takes weekends off. He also takes one week every month to rest at home in Bear Creek, Ala., where he and his wife live in a trailer and care for a rotating group of kittens from the barn cats that roam nearby.

Recently Mr. Mattingly has been keeping closer to home on his routes, concerned about the rising cost of diesel fuel and extended repair times in the event his 2016 Freightliner breaks down. Any delays could cut into his earnings, especially during the busy peak season leading into the holidays.

“What has me worried the most with supply chain shortages is parts,” Mr. Mattingly said. “I’m a one-guy, one-truck operation. Depending on how long it’s down, it could put me on the poor farm.”

He took time off around Thanksgiving for doctor and veterinary appointments, he said. “But as soon as I can, I’m going to haul everything I can between now and Christmas.”

‘Putting out fires’

Lori Griffin’s job as receiving manager at Sweetwater Sound Inc., an online retailer of music instruments, is usually as regular as a metronome. This year has been anything but normal.

Lori Griffin is the receiving manager for Sweetwater Sound, at the company’s distribution center in Fort Wayne, Ind.

Photo: Sweetwater

The supply chain problems have meant irregular arrivals of trailers and containers brimming with guitars, drums, amplifiers and other musical wares. Some days, no freight containers from Asia arrive at the company’s Fort Wayne, Ind., distribution center. Then, on another day, two containers may arrive on top of each other, leading to a scramble to get the goods unloaded, sorted and stacked in the building.

“It’s very unpredictable these days,” Ms. Griffin, who has worked for the company for 13 years. “We take what we can get.”

The 58-year-old said that in prior years inbound freight would have been mostly wrapped up by early November. But now, the company is still getting containers that should have arrived weeks ago, and she plans to continue to receive shipments up until Christmas. That means she must manage new imports at the same time her facility is shipping holiday orders out to customers.

Ms. Griffin leaves home around 4:20 a.m. and arrives at the warehouse before 5 a.m., where she oversees a group of forklift drivers, sorters and other hourly workers. Often, she’ll chip in moving items off the trucks arriving at the more than 500,000-square-foot warehouse.

Thousands of guitars line racks in Sweetwater's Distribution Center.

Photo: Sweetwater

Parts of her day still have a routine. One or two trucks usually show up when she arrives. Later, three trucks from FedEx and one from UPS arrive, each with up to 2,000 boxes to unload.

The unpredictable arrival of other trailers causes the most problems. The receiving area is staffed based on expected work, but when trailers don’t show up, she finds tasks to keep employees busy. “You can only sweep a floor so many times,” Ms. Griffin said.

When a trailer arrives unplanned, she may have to borrow some workers who would be packing purchases bound for homes. “I’m just putting out fires all over the place,” she said, with a month to go before the peak season ends.

‘The finish line’

Dave Erazo sees the end of the road for many goods reaching homes. The 32-year-old manages inbound operations at a FedEx Ground station in Sunnyside, Queens, N.Y., overseeing workers that sort packages entering the facility and load them onto delivery trucks headed to homes.

Dave Erazo speaks with an employee at a FedEx facility in Queens, N.Y.

Photo: GABBY JONES for The Wall Street Journal

Many of these goods are online orders that were made in factories far away, shipped on cargo boats, and have changed hands several times before being packed in an e-commerce box. Once the goods have reached a FedEx hub, many of the snarls have been sorted out.

“Peak season is a test of all the processes you’re putting in place,” said Mr. Erazo, who has worked at FedEx for 11 years.

As companies begin to staff up for the holiday season, they face one of the tightest labor markets in decades. To attract employees, some companies like UPS are offering sign-on bonuses and additional benefits as well as creative incentives. Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Labor shortages this year at other FedEx sorting facilities have meant that hundreds of thousands of packages have been rerouted daily to intermediary locations that have enough workers to process them before they reach stations such as the Sunnyside facility. FedEx is hiring 90,000 workers ahead of the holidays in anticipation of more than 10% increase in shipping volume compared with last year. The company said that additional hiring, added capacity and more measures being taken have reduced the number of packages being rerouted lately.

Mr. Erazo comes in after midnight to prepare for the overnight sort, when a stream of trailers, either from other FedEx locations or retailers like Walmart Inc., arrive with their loads. He and other managers go over volume projections for the day and map out the day.

Packages are loaded onto trucks at the FedEx facility.

Photo: GABBY JONES for The Wall Street Journal

About 300 or more workers staff the shift. They unload the packages onto conveyors, where the boxes are scanned and zoomed around to one of six locations. Loaders put them on hundreds of trucks that fan out in the area, delivering packages.

The center gets around 40,000 packages a day, but that can rise up to 70,000 or more during the busiest days. The operation wraps up around 7 a.m. He goes home afterward to get six or seven hours of sleep to recharge.

“We’re basically the finish line,” Mr. Erazo said. “When it gets on the vehicle, that’s when it gets delivered.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How are supply-chain issues affecting you? Join the conversation below.