Longshoremen’s Fight Against Automation Confronts an AI Future

A strike by dockworkers across the U.S. threatens to close ports on the East and Gulf coasts and seriously impact thousands, if not millions, of business supply chains, causing retailers to brace for potential shortages of some products and disappointed customers. This kind of disruption is the goal of strikes, of course, but the longshoremen’s major demand, beyond higher wages, is quite startling. As the New York Post put it, the workers’ union is demanding a “total ban on automation,” and is holding the industry hostage for what analysis firm J.P. Morgan estimates as a $5 billion a day impact to the economy. Specifically, the International Longshoremen’s Association says 85,000 U.S. workers and “tens of thousands” more around the world are demanding a ban on all kinds of automation at cargo ports. That prohibition would apply to cranes, gates, and moving shipping containers around the busy, sometimes chaotic scenes at commercial dockyards, according to the Post. What this means is that when a giant container ship arrives at a dock, every one of those multi-ton shipping containers would be shackled to a crane’s cable, lifted off the ship, moved ashore, stacked, organized, and moved around by trucks and hoists, each with a human at the controls. This is dangerous, heavy-duty work, and in many cases it requires an expert driver: Forklifts and cranes are complicated machines, and in the case of cranes it’s often necessary to understand the physics of which type of load is being moved by the cable in order to safely lift it. The danger present in this industry is typified by dozens of articles each year documenting crane- or container-related accidents at ports around the world: Two weeks ago, industry news site the Maritime Executive reported on an incident in the Chinese port of Yantian where a crane collapsed onto a container ship, for example. In July, Taiwan News showed dramatic video of a container crane failure at the port of Kaohsiung. There are countless other examples. But herein lies the problem. Accidents at ports risk not only physically harming people, but mean potential economic hits through damaged cargo or expensive dockside machinery or shipboard equipment. Apart from accidents, mislabeling or misdirecting cargo at a port could also hit businesses’ revenue. Replacing fallible human workers could thus save port operators a lot of money. Tracking cargo as it moves from staging point to staging point and through customs clearance is a job that could be handled extraordinarily well by, say, AI-powered robot lifting vehicles. The task is perfectly suited to digital asset management, enabled by high-precision 5G and internet of things tech. Automated cranes, auditing equipment, and robot trucks can work 24/7, 365, and never ask for more pay or get injured. In a way, the longshoremen’s demand for job protection echoes much of what’s going on as AI use increases throughout the working world, There are strong echoes of 2023’s SAG-AFTRA actors strike, which centered on protecting real humans’ incomes against the threat of technological AI replicas. A recent video game performers’ strike had the same issue at its heart. The dock worker strike has more than a hint of the ongoing “Will AI steal my office job?” debate, and experts can’t seem to offer a definitive yes or no answer. The longshoremen’s union claims about the threat of automation may even remind history buffs of the Luddite movement in 19th-century England, where workers rioted against the automated textile machines that were replacing them. But this is the 21st century, and self-driving truck technology really does seem like the coming reality for some aspects of cargo transport. AI sophistication and complexity advances day by day, and robots in the form of AI-driven androids are expected to reach many factory floors over the course of the next several years. Meanwhile, research shows AI won’t necessarily steal office jobs, but simply offer the chance to boost workers efforts as they labor, and even offer totally new roles in a new industry, like a recent report about transportation jobs showed. Can manual workers really hold off against “automation” forever? BY KIT EATON @KITEATON