THE three-day dockers’ strike that paralyzed ports on the East Coast and Gulf has highlighted one of America’s most important jobs: loading and unloading the billions of products – from food to cars – that sustain the world. American economy.
Although the work stoppage is over for now, the labor dispute reflects how robots, artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies are changing the nature of operations in the nation’s supply chains and across other sectors.
“We’re really at a moment where we’re thinking about the future of work and what it looks like in America and around the world,” John Samuel, managing director at consulting firm AlixPartners, told CBS News. “So how do we combine the natural developments of technology with the right to human decency and human labor?”
The tentative agreement announced Friday between the International Longshoremen’s Association — which led last week’s strike — and the United States Maritime Alliance closes the wage gap, giving dockworkers a immediate increase of $4 per hour and a wage increase of $24 per hour over a six-year employment contract.
Still, the deal doesn’t address workers’ concerns about automation. Read on to learn more about what dockworkers do and how new technology is changing work.
From boxes, leases and packages to containers
In recent decades, longshoremen’s work has been transformed by technology, a major sticking point in the labor dispute that opposed union workers against shipping companies and port operators.
Dock workers handle cargo by loading and unloading cargo ships that arrive at the port. Until the late 1950s, this meant manually transporting cartons, bales and bundles of goods from incoming ships to the warehouse, before loading them onto trains for transport to their final destination.
Today, goods are stored in large, standardized containers – designed to be transported by ship, train or truck – which dockworkers handle with cranes and other equipment.
“It’s all about operating the lifting equipment needed to move containers. A lot of it is about transferring containers from ship to shore, and vice versa,” Kent Gourdin, professor and program director in logistics and transportation at the College of Charleston. , told CBS MoneyWatch. “They handle containers at the terminals where ships dock and keep track of which containers need to go where.”
These days, much of the job involves operating machinery, as well as tracking goods and keeping records. For example, dockworkers coordinate with trucking companies that come to the port to pick up containers and transport them to their next stop. Dockworkers are also responsible for secure cargo on ships. The containers are stacked on top of each other and it is the job of the dock workers to ensure that the containers are securely locked together.
Although operating heavy machinery is less physically taxing than carrying boxes, almost all dockworkers “are exposed to some degree to the elements and work in an environment where they are surrounded by heavy equipment,” Gourdin said.
“While back then it was a lot of work, today it’s mostly about running machines,” said Henry Sims Jr., fourth-generation longshoreman and president of Local 3000 from the ILA in New Orleans, to CBS MoneyWatch. “Now you have to be competent. You can’t hire someone off the street, because they wouldn’t be able to do it without killing someone, or without killing themselves.”
The United States is lagging behind on automation
The 10 largest U.S. ports all use some sort of automation technology to move goods, according to a March GAO report. These include automated gates, which allow trucks and containers to pass through cargo terminals with limited worker interaction; so-called port community systems, which are digital platforms that automatically streamline logistics and supply chain data; and technologies used in “Internet of Things” systems, such as RFID, GPS and cameras, to operate equipment and track containers.
Semi-automated terminals employ personnel to operate the machines that move containers from the loading dock – the area where a ship is docked – to the yard. The equipment used to stack containers on top of each other is fully automated.
But only three domestic ports: Long Beach Container Terminal in Long Beach, California; and TraPac and APM Terminal Pier 400 in Los Angeles are fully automated.
In fully automated ports, the horizontal and vertical movement of containers is managed by machines. Other technologies used in automated ports include AI-powered sensors, digital twins – or identical digital replicas of ports – and blockchain to automate the recording of transactions and track the location of containers.
Automated cargo-handling equipment, for example, eliminates the need for humans on site to operate a crane, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report on port automation.
“Ports in other parts of the world are much more advanced than in the United States, in part because unions block the adoption of technology and automation,” said Chris Tang, a port management expert. global supply chain, at CBS MoneyWatch.
“If you go to modern ports in China, you will hardly see any humans,” he said. “They use automated cranes, and when a ship arrives, a crane picks up the containers to stack them.”
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Despite the move toward automation, Sims Jr. said human workers remain essential to the industry.
“We move things more efficiently and productively than automation does. Machines are slower and when they break down, they can’t return to work until someone is on site to examine and repair them.”
Gourdin, the professor, supported this assertion.
“I think machines can do the job too, but people are faster. I’ve been to automated terminals and it’s just slower,” he said, while acknowledging that ports more fully automated in the United States may be inevitable.
“An extremely difficult problem”
Given the close coordination required between ships, trucking companies and their customers, artificial intelligence and data analytics can play an important role in transporting a container from point A to point B , say logistics experts.
“Dockworkers communicate with trucking companies to find cranes to use to pick up their containers when they arrive,” Tang explained. “But sometimes a trucker comes in and he needs a container that’s at the bottom of the pile. That’s a problem.”
This is where artificial intelligence and data analytics come into play. These technologies help dockworkers know when a given container will arrive and coordinate with trucking companies for pickup, thereby affecting how containers are stacked.
“It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve: synchronizing the arrival of the container and the truck. That’s where automation comes in,” Tang said.
Robert Atkinson, president of the Foundation for Information Technology and Innovation, said automation is well suited to the port system given the routine nature of the work.
“The ship comes in, they load all these containers, you take the container off and move it somewhere. Then you put it on an intermodal train or truck,” he said. “It’s always the same thing. It’s something that technology can do very well because there’s little variation.”
Atkinson favors a 50% reduction in the amount of human labor at U.S. ports over the next 10 years, while emphasizing that the remaining workers who survive would see their wages increase and consumers would save on costs. transport costs. Of course, this is exactly the kind of major downsizing that the dockworkers’ union intends to prevent.
“If you automate a port, that means you buy something from an online furniture store and it costs less,” he said. This leads to savings for middle-class Americans. »
