“America’s ports have fallen behind. Not a single one ranks in the top 50 worldwide.
A big reason is that dock unions stop innovation.
This fall, the International Longshoremen’s Association shut down East and Gulf coast ports, striking for a raise and a ban on automation. They got the raise.
Now union president Harold Daggett says longshoremen will strike again in January if they don’t get that ban on automation.
His statement in my new video makes it clear that he knows how badly his strike would damage other Americans.
“Guys who sell cars can’t sell cars, because the cars ain’t coming in off the ships. They get laid off,” says Daggett. “Construction workers get laid off because materials aren’t coming in. The steel’s not coming in. The lumber’s not coming in. They lose their job.”
Obviously, labor leaders aren’t necessarily “pro-worker,” says Mercatus Center economist Liya Palagashvili.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t care if these other jobs are destroyed as long as we get what we want.'”
Daggett is unusually clueless. He doesn’t understand that a ban on automation will also hurt his members.
As Palagashvili puts it, “They’ll save some jobs today, but they’ll destroy a lot more jobs in the future.”
That’s because today’s shippers have options. Daggett’s union only controls East and Gulf coast ports. Shippers can deliver their products to ports that accept automation.
“We’re going to see less activity in ‘Stone Age’ ports,” says Palagashvili.
“Stone Age?”
“They want to ban automated opening and closing of port doors,” she points out, requiring workers to pull heavy doors themselves.”
…
“”Some port jobs will definitely be lost,” she says, “but that’s not a bad thing. Look at it historically; we had hundreds of thousands of blacksmiths and candlemakers and watchmakers.”
Obviously, those and other jobs were destroyed by new technology. But unemployment didn’t surge. New jobs emerged—jobs people at the time didn’t imagine: programmers, mechanics, electricians, medical technicians.
That’s capitalism’s “creative destruction.” It constantly creates new jobs. That makes most everyone richer.”
https://reason.com/2024/12/04/union-workers-are-fighting-to-keep-u-s-ports-more-dangerous-and-less-efficient/
“whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank’s most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which “reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction,” the World Bank notes.”
…
“The problem is that American ports need more automation just to catch up with what’s considered normal in the rest of the world. For example, automated cranes in use at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands since the 1990s are 80 percent faster than the human-operated cranes used at the port in Oakland, California, according to an estimate by one trade publication.
It’s worth noting that the lack of automation, and the resulting inefficiencies, at American ports was a major factor in the supply chain issues that popped up during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
…
“Additionally, the tradeoff between automation and jobs is not a zero-sum game. A study published in 2022 found that the partial automation of the Port of Los Angeles had resulted in “significant gains in throughput, productivity, and efficiency, resulting in more hours than ever for workers.” As with other forms of automation, some job losses are inevitable, but efficiency gains benefit dockworkers too—and the truckers, manufacturers, and others in the supply chain who are waiting for goods to be loaded or unloaded.
Indeed, if maximizing the number of union jobs at ports was the highest value to society, Daggett and the ILA might want to change their demands. Why not demand a ban on cranes, forklifts, and tractor-trailers too? It would take a lot more workers to unload a freighter if everything had to be lifted by hand, after all.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/04/automate-the-ports/
“Government favoritism in the form of subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions allocates resources (labor and capital) differently than the way resources are allocated by consumers spending their own money. Ordinarily, businesses—spending their investors’ money—compete for these consumer dollars. Industrial policy rests on the assumption that such market outcomes don’t adequately support higher causes such as national security. If that’s true, it’s all the justification industrial policy needs. Nothing needs to be said about jobs.”
…
“As Noah Smith reminded his readers in a recent blog post, “Most of the actual production work will be done by robots, because we are a rich country with very high labor costs and lots of abundant capital and technology. Automated manufacturing is what we specialize in, not labor-intensive manufacturing.””
…
“Be wary of those who push industrial policy as a means of job creation. It’s a short-sighted approach that distracts us from the more important question, which is whether hindering the market allocation of resources is truly justified for national security or other valid reasons.”
“For existing operators, they find that automation had real costs. Operators in a city that transitioned to mechanical switching were substantially less likely to have any job 10 years later than operators in cities that were slower to automate; those that did find work tended to find worse, lower-paying jobs.
But Feigenbaum and Gross also examine the results for young white women coming of age during automation, who just a few years earlier would’ve been ideal candidates for telephone operator jobs. Remarkably, they find little or no negative effects at all: they were just as likely to find work as they would have been before, and job openings in fields like secretarial work and restaurants increased even as telephone operation was automated away. Some of those jobs (like restaurant work) paid less, but others were competitive with telephone operation.
This is just one case, and economists have a long way to go in understanding how automation affects workers — a question that is more important than ever with the rapid progress in AI. But telephone operation appears like a mostly heartening example. Even though a job that once employed 2 percent of all working women was automated away, new workers entering the labor market were not significantly worse off.”
“A lack of robots is one of the single biggest problems among the many logistical issues currently tangling America’s supply chains.
At most major ports around the world, the cranes that unload shipping containers from boats to trucks are largely automated. That means they can operate around the clock at lower cost and—extra importantly right now—have zero risk of catching COVID-19. One recent study found that cranes at the mostly automated port in Rotterdam, Netherlands, are roughly 80 percent more efficient than cranes at the Port of Oakland, California, where humans still man the controls. In other words, it takes nearly twice as long to unload the same ship in Oakland as it would in Rotterdam.
One of the major hurdles to automation is the expense. It can cost as much as $500 million to install new, fully automated terminals at existing ports, according to the Journal of Commerce, a trade publication. Even if it might make sense to do that in the long run, short-term considerations keep American ports operating at their current, less efficient status quo.
Conveniently, Congress has just passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill—one that includes $17 billion for port infrastructure. Of that $17 billion, about $2.6 billion is specifically earmarked for defraying the cost of upgrading equipment at America’s ports, nominally to reduce air pollution.
If you were a member of Congress looking to spend a bunch of money to immediately and meaningfully upgrade American infrastructure in a way that would help solve the current supply chain logjams, automating ports should be at or near the top of the list. It’s quite literally a no-brainer.
The bad news, however, is buried on page 308 of the 1,600-plus page bill: “The term ‘zero-emission port equipment or technology’ means human-operated equipment or human-maintained technology.”
Yes, the subsidies doled out as part of President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure deal are expressly forbidden from being used to automate operations at American ports. Instead, taxpayers will spend billions to upgrade existing cranes with lower-emissions alternatives that won’t actually work any faster or cheaper. It’s a major missed opportunity.
Why? Biden’s close ties to labor unions probably have something to do with it. Along with the cost, unions are the biggest reason why American ports don’t have more robots. When an automated terminal was introduced at the Port of Los Angeles a few years ago, the politically powerful longshoreman’s union that represents dockworkers threw a fit.
But the automated terminals were a hit with truck drivers who work at the port. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2019 that drivers, who are paid by the delivery, were thrilled to have more reliable loading schedules, instead of having to wait around for hours to pick up a container. One truck driver told the paper that automation meant no longer having to “wait hours and hours in long lines” because the dockworkers decided to “leave early to go to lunch and come back late.””
…
“Automated ports in places like Norfolk, Virginia, meanwhile, are handling record volumes with no backlogs, according to the Journal of Commerce. “With the automation, you can rework your yard to say, ‘Okay, while I was expecting to be loading Ship A first, I’m now loading Ship B first,′ and can keep import flow fluid,” Stephen Edwards, CEO and executive director of the Port of Virginia, told the Journal in September.
Ports should invest in automation regardless of whether Congress is subsidizing that transition, of course. But if lawmakers are going to approve huge amounts of new spending to upgrade American infrastructure, it’s fair to wonder why one of the most useful upgrades is expressly forbidden. It looks like Congress and the White House are more interested in cowing to unions than helping fix America’s supply chain problems.”
“often spend so much time talking about the potential for robots to take our jobs that we fail to look at how they are already changing them — sometimes for the better, but sometimes not. New technologies can give corporations tools for monitoring, managing, and motivating their workforces, sometimes in ways that are harmful. The technology itself might not be innately nefarious, but it makes it easier for companies to maintain tight control on workers and squeeze and exploit them to maximize profits.
“The basic incentives of the system have always been there: employers wanting to maximize the value they get out of their workers while minimizing the cost of labor, the incentive to want to control and monitor and surveil their workers,” said Brian Chen, staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “And if technology allows them to do that more cheaply or more efficiently, well then of course they’re going to use technology to do that.”
Tracking software for remote workers, which saw a bump in sales at the start of the pandemic, can follow every second of a person’s workday in front of the computer. Delivery companies can use motion sensors to track their drivers’ every move, measure extra seconds, and ding drivers for falling short.
Automation hasn’t replaced all the workers in warehouses, but it has made work more intense, even dangerous, and changed how tightly workers are managed. Gig workers can find themselves at the whims of an app’s black-box algorithm that lets workers flood the app to compete with each other at a frantic pace for pay so low that how lucrative any given trip or job is can depend on the tip, leaving workers reliant on the generosity of an anonymous stranger. Worse, gig work means they’re doing their jobs without many typical labor protections.
In these circumstances, the robots aren’t taking jobs, they’re making jobs worse. Companies are automating away autonomy and putting profit-maximizing strategies on digital overdrive, turning work into a space with fewer carrots and more sticks.”