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Human obstruction must end before automation can be fully introduced to the American waterfront

The last redoubt of the Luddite, the enemy of labour-saving automation, is on the waterfront where dockers from Montreal to Melbourne have resisted technological change more effectively than in any other industry.

Where else can one hear arguments, or for what passes for arguments, to buttress resistance to automation, like the grandstanding from the US west coast International Warehouse and Longshore Union: “Robots do not pay taxes. Robots do not shop in our communities. Robots do not vote!”

Certainly such things are not said, much less heeded, in other industrial sectors where new technology has been introduced unimpeded. If it is more efficient, safer, more environmentally friendly and if the general public is to benefit, then technology is introduced. Displaced workers can complain, of course, but they are not entitled to the last word as they appear to have on the waterfronts of North America if not the world.

But in the face of docker union threats, public officials fold. Shouting, whistling and jeering, more than 1,200 union members and political agitators stood before Los Angeles Harbour Commissioners, who then caved in to the pressure and voted to postpone a construction permit for a new automated system.

 “The decision before the board may have far-reaching impacts on the pace of automation at our port and could define how the port will compete and sustain jobs into the foreseeable future,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who called for a 28-day delay on a permit to allow Maersk to run self-driving yard trucks to move containers within the precincts of its own Port of Los Angeles Terminal.

What the mayor wanted was delay, a “new task force to explore automation and its impacts on the future of the Port of Los Angeles and others across the state” reported the Los Angeles Times.

Port professionals had recommended approving the permit application submitted by Maersk's global port operator, APM Terminals, which seeks to install infrastructure to support automated vehicles, along with scaffolding for containers and an upgraded wi-fi system.

The approving port official added that economic impact is not part of the permit process, which falls under the port’s coastal land-use plan. The permit “is in compliance with the port’s master plan and the California Coastal Act” said port executive director Eugene Seroka.

Agreeing, Maersk attorney Peter Jabbour said at the hearing that “there is no legal basis” for the union’s opposition to granting the permit. The company proposes only “minor infrastructure changes to the terminal, with no adverse environmental impacts. Objections to automation are not part of the coastal development process.”

But Democrat Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn urged the board to block the automation plan. “I support reduced pollution, but we do not need to automate to achieve it.”

Then ending with the most outlandish suggestion yet, she said: “Ports are prime targets for terrorism. Our dockworkers are the first line of defence. There’s nothing like a pair of human eyes and ears.”

Fellow Democrat, LA city councilor Joe Buscaino alluded pointedly to the fact that the city council has the power to overturn any harbour commission decision.

 “We should work together, so this doesn’t have to come to the city council, but I will exercise that option if needed,” he said. “We need a green and efficient port while preserving jobs.”

Slowly but surely power of the dockers' unions have been whittled down worldwide, but port authorities are not nearly as hard on them as they are on truckers, frequently forcing independents off the road by soaring environmental compliance costs and restricting access to public ports by insisting they have the newest vehicles.

It is true they have pushed back docker union powers in the wider world. There have been strides made in Melbourne and Rotterdam, for example. The Victoria International Container Terminal (VICT) in Melbourne now boasts of being the world’s first fully automated international container handling facility. Located north of Port Phillip Bay at the mouth of the Yarra River in the Port of Melbourne’s Webb Dock East, the 35-hectare terminal has an annual capacity of one million plus TEU and an additional 400,000 TEU on full build out.

And container cranes at Rotterdam's Maasvlakte 2 in are unmanned and fully automated. Robots, with a height of more than 125 metres. These are the world’s most automated terminals, operating largely autonomously, and with remote operators. This terminal has a capacity of 2.35 million TEU.

However, it must be faced that these advances do not represent the entire ports of Melbourne and Rotterdam only of individual facilities within these ports. While maritime automation itself has made advances where we can have crane operators where ever one might wish to place a computer terminal, far away from the actual ship loading dock. Yet these substantial advances have been crowding in the wings for decades - but kept from centre stage by longshore unions.

One might ask why has such effective obstruction has been successful for so long. This is not the only industrial sector where powerful organised labour also opposed the introduction of technology. Despite resolute opposition, automation has galloped along changing the face of working conditions in energy, agriculture, textiles to name only a few fields.

One often cited reason is that there is on the waterfront a single union that controls a single market. It also faces a multiplicity of relatively weak employers as ready to put down rival companies as they are to put down the union. True, this is less so today than it was even five years ago, given the growth of shipping alliances and the rash of mergers and acquisitions which have left the shipping world with fewer flavours than ever before.

But it is more than that. Single sector-wide unions facing competing employers have existed and dominated extended trades, in which the union held sway over workers more loyal to their union than to the companies that employ them. Newspaper typographical and pressmen's unions come to mind as indeed did such conditions that once prevailed among garment workers and truckers to a greater extent than they do today.

What makes the longshore industry unique is its hold on the totality of international trade, its control over a choke point of most everything a country exports and imports. One can, and one has, moved garment work offshore in the face of union recalcitrance. And, however powerful newspaper unions once were, alternate presses start up using the very technology the unions were fighting and independent truckers can provide services unionised truckers refuse to provide.

The dockers union stranglehold exists because the unions have control over all maritime ports. They, rather than the employers, certainly until recent inroads through government regulation via New York's Waterfront Commission, provided the jobs to those who are union partisans. In New York, it even helped to be Irish, as evidenced by the fact that the ILA successfully negotiated to have St Patrick's Day an official union holiday.

One can fairly ask whether it is reasonable that semi- and unskilled labour should be earnings more than an FBI Agent, a public prosecutor or hospital doctor - in somes cases considerably more - by virtue of the stranglehold on every coastal port in Canada and the US. And if the answer is No, one might then ask whether it is tolerable that such a group should be allowed to impede technology that would lower costs of trade and make the poor of the world richer by allowing outsiders in to do the work cheaper and better than it is being done today.

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Does North American longshore labour cost more than it is worth? What are the ways to bring the costs down so dockers are paid the same as those in other industries with equivalent skill sets?

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U.S. Trade Specialists