WJR: Kevin Ketels on consumer impact of potential rail strike
Kevin Ketels, assistant professor of teaching in global supply chain management at Wayne State University, discusses the impact of a potential rail strike after a major rail union rejected a labor deal. “There’s a massive amount of products that are transported via train – consumer goods, automobiles, fruits, vegetables…I think the most immediate impact we might see is in agriculture and within our food industry. You also have a lot of products that are used for manufacturing, so you’d see that impact longer term down the road. To think of how much stuff moves via freight, it would take about 99 million trucks traveling every day to make up what goes via train. So, it would be impossible. Our supply chains would be choked up, manufacturing would be choked up, there would be potential shortages of food…it would be a disaster…”
