Just after dawn, Rotterdam felt different. The lashers — the crews who climb up and lock stacks of boxes in place — agreed to pause their strike for five days while wage talks restart. Cranes are moving again. But it’s not a light switch. The city’s giant container terminals are still working through missed berth windows, ships that slipped out of sequence, and a yard that’s fuller than planners like to admit.

Operators have thrown on night shifts and triage rules: reefers first, dangerous goods, auto parts, then everything else. Truckers report gate times still longer than normal, and forwarders are warning customers about possible roll-overs for export boxes that arrive too close to cutoff. One dispatcher put it bluntly: “It’s not chaos; it’s a clean slowdown — and that spreads everywhere.”

What shippers should do (today):

• Advance export cutoffs by a few hours where you can.

• Route time-critical flows via Antwerp or Bremerhaven until yard density drops.

• Ask carriers for temporary tolerance on demurrage/no-show penalties while the backlog clears.

If talks go sideways, expect the congestion to reappear fast — along with temporary congestion surcharges and a handful of blank sailings to re-sync Asia–Europe loops. For now, the message is simple: Rotterdam is breathing again, but not yet at full lung capacity.

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