Last week, the International Longshoreman Association decided to hold much of America’s supply chain hostage as it demanded massive pay raises for its well-paid members. Though the union ultimately agreed to go back to work last week with a tentative agreement to extend their current contract until January, the whole affair raises an important point: America must automate its ports and stop letting union Luddites control them.
What prompted the strike was mostly union opposition to automation.
The employers offered a 50% raise; the union asked for a 77% raise. They ended up settling on a 61.5% raise, lifting the top hourly pay from $39 an hour to $63 per hour.
According to CBS News, citing a 2020 report from the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, “about one-third of local longshoremen made $200,000 or more a year.”
Not bad. It’s understandable why the union would want to protect those jobs at all costs.
As Ted DeHaven notes at the Cato Institute, “The past is replete with examples of such opposition: weavers vs. power looms, railroad workers vs. automatic coupling systems, miners vs. continuous mining machines, automobile workers vs. automated assembly lines, telephone workers against automated switching systems, postal employees vs. automated mail sorting machines, and on and on.”
But what’s good for the union isn’t necessarily the best thing for the country.
Ahead of the strike, union bosses told members, “Let me be clear: we don’t want any form of semi-automation or full automation.” And, indeed, automation is hardly used in America’s ports.
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As Eric Boehm reports at Reason Magazine, “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.”
Indeed, as the World Bank reported last year, not a single American port cracks the top 50 of the world’s most efficient ports. Consumers and businesses alike all the pay the price for this.
Automation at the ports, like anything, isn’t a panacea. But it shouldn’t be obstructed simply because unions don’t want technology that can make the loading and unloading of ships faster and more efficient.
Here in the 21st century, we must not allow small special interest groups to thwart progress and innovation for their own benefit.
