Ask any shipper who has watched a fully paid, fully contracted container get bumped for someone else's freight, and they will tell you the same thing: a signature on a service contract guarantees far less than it should. In global ocean freight, cargo gets "rolled" — pushed to a later vessel — not primarily because of weather, port congestion, or force majeure, but because a bigger, better-connected customer needed the space more. The price paid and the terms agreed often matter less than who is doing the asking.
This is not a fringe complaint. During the pandemic-era capacity crunch, schedule reliability across the industry collapsed to roughly 30%, and even now, in 2025, it sits around 60% — well below the 80% shippers took for granted before 2020. The top ten ocean carriers control close to 85% of global capacity, giving a small number of players enormous discretion over whose freight actually sails on time. For smaller shippers without the volume to threaten a carrier relationship, the contract functions less like a binding promise and more like an opening bid.
Why This Is an Ethics Problem, Not Just an Operations Problem
It would be easy to file this under "the cost of doing business." But research from Dr. Burkard F. M. Schemmel, faculty at the European Institute of Management (EIM) and a leading voice in alterocentric business ethics, suggests that treating contract integrity as negotiable is a strategic mistake, not just an ethical one. Schemmel's 2025 study of 309 European firms found a statistically significant link between ethical conduct and financial performance — organizations that internalize the interests of stakeholders, rather than only the loudest or largest ones, consistently outperform those that don't.
Applied to ocean freight, the implication is uncomfortable for an industry built on relationship leverage: prioritizing a spot-market customer over a contracted one because it is momentarily more profitable is exactly the kind of short-term, power-based decision-making that alterocentric research links to weaker long-term outcomes. A contract that only holds when it's convenient isn't a contract — it's a starting point for renegotiation, and every shipper who has been rolled learns to expect that the next time, too.
What Ethical Supply Chain Leadership Actually Looks Like
Schemmel's alterocentric framework offers six principles for closing this gap between what companies promise and what they deliver — from anchoring ethical decision-making at the leadership level to building transparent, technology-enabled systems for managing disruptions fairly rather than opaquely. Two stand out for supply chain leaders specifically:
- Predictable decision-making. Capacity crunches happen. What separates a trustworthy carrier from an opportunistic one is whether cargo-rolling decisions follow a transparent, consistent methodology — or whether they quietly favor whoever has the most leverage that week.
- Credible transparency. Shippers and carriers who share honest data — on capacity, on forecasts, on the real reasons behind a delay — build the kind of trust that survives the next disruption instead of eroding with it.
Regulatory bodies are starting to notice. The U.S. Federal Maritime Commission's expanded powers under the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 signal that "the contract said otherwise" is no longer a sufficient defense. But regulation alone won't fix a culture problem — that requires leaders who understand both the operational and ethical dimensions of the decisions their organizations make under pressure.
Where This Kind of Thinking Gets Trained
This is precisely the intersection EIM's MBA in Logistics and Mobility Management is built around: not just the mechanics of route optimization and fleet management, but the strategic judgment to build supply chains that hold up — ethically and operationally — when capacity gets tight. The programme's modules on resilience and risk management, and on the geopolitical shifts reshaping global trade lanes, speak directly to the pressures described above, taught through EIM's Oxbridge-style tutorial model with faculty who work in the field they teach.
For those drawn to the research question itself — why ethical conduct correlates with financial performance, and how frameworks like alterocentrism can be tested and extended — EIM's Doctor of Philosophy in Management offers a research-driven path to contribute original scholarship to exactly this debate, supported by the EIM Research Institute for Societal Performance Development.
A signed contract should be a bond of trust, not an opening offer. The leaders who understand that distinction — and who can operationalize it under real commercial pressure — are the ones who will define the next generation of resilient, trustworthy supply chains.