Five years ago, Leatherman Terminal was supposed to be the future of the Port of Charleston. Starting August 1, it’s going idle instead.
The State Ports Authority announced this week it’s temporarily pausing operations at the North Charleston facility, and the reasoning is blunt: shipping volumes are down globally, and running three container terminals at once no longer pencils out.
Here’s what makes it sting. Leatherman opened in 2021 with capacity for 700,000 containers a year, a real bet on Charleston’s growth as a shipping hub. It’s never gotten close. Today it handles less than 5% of the port’s core cargo business, the smallest share of any terminal here. Call it what it is: Charleston’s newest terminal is also its least-used.
Five ships typically call at Leatherman in a given week. When the pause takes effect, those ships shift over to North Charleston Terminal and Wando Welch, the port’s older, cheaper-to-run facilities that were handling the bulk of the work anyway.
Cost is the deciding factor. Leatherman operates under a labor agreement with ILA Local 1422 that runs more expensive than the port’s other terminals. With global volumes soft, SC Ports leadership decided the math didn’t work for keeping all three terminals staffed and running. CEO Micah Mallace delivered the news to employees on June 25, and the wind-down starts in July.
SC Ports is calling this temporary, not permanent. But there’s a real question underneath the press release: what happens to the workers who staff Leatherman once the ships stop coming, and how long does “temporary” actually last for a $1.2 billion facility that struggled from the day it opened?
For a city that’s spent the last decade selling itself as a logistics and shipping powerhouse, watching its newest, most expensive terminal go quiet is the kind of story worth watching closely, not because it’s dramatic today, but because of what it signals about where the growth actually is.
This is a summary of an article published in the Post & Courier. Click here if you’d like to read that article.
