of 3 day long dock workers strike The failure of Eastern and Gulf Coast ports has put a spotlight on one of America’s most important jobs: loading and unloading billions of products that keep the U.S. economy humming, from food to cars. is guessing.
Although the work stoppage is over for now, the labor dispute reflects how robots, artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies are changing the country’s supply chain and the nature of operations in other industries.
John Samuel, managing director of consulting firm AlixPartners, told CBS News: “We’re at the very moment we’re thinking about the future of work and what that’s going to look like in America and around the world. There is,” he said. “So how can we combine the natural evolution of technology with human decency and the human right to work?”
A tentative agreement announced Friday between the International Longshoremen’s Association, which led last week’s strike, and the American Maritime Alliance will bridge the wage gap and give longshoremen higher wages. Immediate $4 hourly raise and a $24 hourly raise over a six-year labor contract.
However, the agreement does not resolve workers’ concerns about automation. Learn what longshoremen do and how new technology is changing their jobs.
From boxes, bales, bundles to containers
In recent decades, coastal labor has been transformed by technology, which has become an important impasse in labor disputes. Workers belonging to labor unions fight For shipping companies and port operators.
Longshoremen handle cargo by loading and unloading cargo onto cargo ships that arrive at ports. Until the late 1950s, this meant manually transporting boxes, bails, and bundles of goods from incoming ships to warehouses before being loaded onto trains for transport to their final destinations.
Currently, cargo is stored in large, standardized containers designed to be transported by ship, rail, or truck, and handled by longshoremen using cranes and other equipment.
“It’s all about operating the lifting equipment needed to move the container, and a lot of it is moving the container from ship to shore and vice versa,” said Charleston College Professor and Global Logistics and Transportation Program. said Kent Godin, Director of. he told CBS MoneyWatch. “They handle containers at the terminals where ships dock and keep track of which containers need to go where.”
These days, many jobs include operating machinery, as well as tracking cargo and keeping records. For example, longshoremen work with trucking companies that come to the port to pick up containers and transport them to the next stop. Port workers also have a responsibility Securing cargo on board. Containers are stacked on top of each other and it is the longshoremen’s job to make sure they are latched together.
Although operating heavy equipment is less physically demanding than hauling cargo, nearly all longshoremen “work in an environment with some degree of exposure to the elements and surrounded by heavy equipment,” Guldan said.
“It used to be labor-intensive, but now it’s mostly about operating machines,” said Henry Sims Jr., president of the ILA local 3,000-member organization in New Orleans and a fourth-generation longshoreman. told CBS MoneyWatch. “Come on, you have to be skilled. You can’t hire people off the street because you can’t do the job unless you kill someone or kill yourself.”
The US is lagging behind in automation.
A March report from the Government Accountability Office found that all 10 major U.S. ports use some form of automation technology to move cargo. These include automated gates that allow trucks and containers to move through cargo terminals with limited employee intervention. So-called port community system. A digital platform that automatically streamlines logistics and supply chain data. Technologies used in “Internet of Things” systems such as RFID, GPS, and cameras to operate equipment and track containers.
In semi-automatic terminals, personnel are employed to operate the machines that move containers from the cargo berth (the area where ships are berthed) to the yard. The container stacking equipment is fully automated.
However, only three domestic ports are fully automated: Long Beach Container Terminal in Long Beach, California, and TraPac and APM Terminal Pier 400 in Los Angeles.
In fully automated ports, both horizontal and vertical movement of containers is handled by machines. Other technologies being used in automated ports include AI-powered sensors, so-called digital twins (or identical digital replicas of the port), and blockchain to automate the recording of transactions and track the location of containers. there is.
According to a GAO report on port automation, automated cargo handling equipment has eliminated the need for humans to operate cranes on site.
“Ports in other parts of the world are much more advanced than the U.S., and one of the reasons for that is that unions are increasingly focused on technology and automation,” Chris Tan, a global supply chain management expert, told CBS MoneyWatch. This is because they are preventing the introduction of
“If you go to China’s modern ports, you hardly see any humans,” he says. “They use automatic cranes, and when the ship comes into port, the crane picks up the containers and stacks them.”
Cost Photo/NurPhoto (via Getty Images)
Despite the shift to automation, human workers remain essential to the industry, Sims Jr. said.
“We move things more efficiently and productively than automation. Machines are slow, and when they break down, you can’t get back to work until we send someone out there to look at it and fix it.”
Professor Guldan also supported that claim.
“I think a machine could do the same job, but a human would be faster,” he said, acknowledging that more fully automated ports in the U.S. may be inevitable. “I’ve done that before, but it’s just too slow.”
“It’s a very difficult problem.”
Given the close collaboration required between ships, trucking companies and their customers, artificial intelligence and data analytics could play a major role in getting containers from point A to point B. logistics experts say.
“Docks workers will contact the trucking company to find a crane to use to retrieve the container when it arrives,” Tan explained. “But sometimes a trucker shows up and needs a container at the bottom of the pile. That’s a problem.”
This is where artificial intelligence and data analysis come into play. These technologies help dockworkers track when specific containers arrive, coordinate pick-ups with trucking companies, and influence how containers are loaded.
“Synchronizing the timing of container and truck arrival is a very difficult problem to solve, and this is where automation comes into play,” Tan said.
Robert Atkinson, chairman of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said automation was well-suited for port systems given the routine nature of the work.
“When the ship arrives, all the containers are loaded. We remove the containers and move them somewhere else. Then we load them onto intermodal trains and trucks,” he said. “It’s the same thing over and over again. It’s something that technology can do very well because there’s very little change.”
Atkinson said he favors cutting the workforce at U.S. ports by 50% over the next 10 years, but noted that the remaining workers who survive will see higher wages and consumers will save on shipping costs. I am doing it. Of course, this is just the massive layoff that the longshoremen’s unions are trying to prevent.
“If you automate the port, you’re buying something from an online furniture store, which makes it cheaper,” he says. That leads to savings for the American middle class. ”