Labour, Safety, Sustainability and the Licence to Operate

A supply chain runs on permission as well as on assets: from workers who agree to work under a contract, regulators who let trucks, trains and ships operate, juries who decide what a crash costs, communities that tolerate warehouses and ports, and customers and investors who want emissions counted. That permission is the licence to operate, and in 2022–26 it was renegotiated almost everywhere. US unions won some of their largest contracts in decades: the UPS–Teamsters agreement (ratified 22 Aug 2023, running to 31 Jul 2028), the East and Gulf Coast dockworkers' master contract after the 1–3 Oct 2024 ILA strike (ratified 25 Feb 2025, ~99% in favour, running 1 Oct 2024–30 Sep 2030, with a reported ~62% wage increase, $39 to $63 an hour at the top rate, and automation protections) and the West Coast ILWU agreement of 2023. Congress imposed a rail labour agreement in Dec 2022 to avert a national strike. Yellow closed on 30 Jul 2023 after a dispute with the same Teamsters union that had just signed with UPS. Safety failures cost railroads, shipowners and truckers their licence or their balance sheets: Norfolk Southern's East Palestine derailment (3 Feb 2023); the Dali's collision with Baltimore's Key Bridge (26 Mar 2024; six road workers killed; Maryland's $2.25bn settlement with the ship's owner and manager in Apr 2026, reported); and "nuclear" truck-crash verdicts. On decarbonisation, the EU's emissions trading system covers shipping from 2024 (100% of covered 2026 emissions), FuelEU Maritime started on 1 Jan 2025, and the IMO's global Net-Zero Framework was not adopted: an extraordinary session voted on 17 Oct 2025 (57–49, 21 abstentions, reported) to adjourn adoption for a year after US opposition, with a resumed session reported for early Dec 2026. In US trucking, California lost its federal path for zero-emission truck mandates in 2025. This section covers unions and labour relations, warehouse work and injury scrutiny, the driver-shortage debate, safety regulators and litigation, decarbonisation rules and Scope 3 reporting, and how licence-to-operate risk shows up in a company's numbers.