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New York (CNN) – Dock workers on strike on the US East Coast are culturally and geographically a world apart from the Hollywood actors and screenwriters who staged a four-month strike last year. But their protests share a common core principle: they don’t want robots to take their jobs away.
It’s a struggle that we can expect to develop much more as advanced automation and artificial intelligence are introduced into virtually every workplace.
Here’s what happens: The coastal port strike is getting a lot of attention for its potential disruption to the economy, which is precisely the point. Port work can be exhausting, and the people who work at the ports are vital to getting all the things we want to buy into the shops. No stevedores there are no bananas (or whatever) which means no profit for the companies that produce and ship them.
The strike, which began in the early hours of Tuesday, revolves around two main issues: wages and automation. Around the ports you can see workers with banners reading “robots don’t pay taxes” and “automation hurts families”.
They are fighting a trend that port operating companies largely want to see accelerated: more cranes and driverless trucks hauling goods from container ships, with fewer humans around demanding compensation.
Of course, the economic aspects of automation are not so simple. While research shows that automation has obvious benefits, such as lower operating costs and fewer human errors, port automation alone does not significantly improve performance, according to a 2018 McKinsey report.
Automated ports “are generally less productive than their conventional counterparts,” and the return on their significant capital investments falls short of the industry norm, according to industry leaders surveyed by McKinsey. (The report notes, however, that “careful planning and management” can overcome these challenges).
However, automation is clearly a trend, and US shipping executives seem to look with envy at the modern ports of China, Singapore and Europe.
“The rest of the world looks down on us because we’re fighting automation,” Dennis Daggett, executive vice president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, said outside the port of New York and New Jersey on Tuesday morning. “Remember that this industry, this union has always adapted to innovation. But we will never adapt to robots taking our jobs.”
The longshoremen’s concern is legitimate.
Automation will not end the need for human labor, but it will significantly reduce the number of people needed on the payroll, as has happened in many industries, including auto manufacturing and mining. According to a report from the Economic Roundtableautomation eliminated 572 full-time positions at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles in 2020 and 2021.
The longshoremen’s union is demanding a $5-an-hour wage increase in each of the six years of the upcoming contract and definitive language that the ports will not introduce automation or semi-automation.
The displacement of automation is a familiar trope in the history of manual labor, and became a central point of friction in last year’s Hollywood strikes, when actors and writers sought to protect their creative work. to be duplicated by artificial intelligence (AI).
Anxiety about automation, however, is quickly spreading to office work, where managers are embracing AI in hopes of replacing human labor or amplifying output.
Over the summer, a survey of large American companies revealed that more than 60% plans to use AI over the next year to automate tasks previously performed by employees.
Sameera Fazili, former deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, says that workers are not saying “no” to automation, but they want to have a say in how it is integrated into the workplace. And that anxiety is part of what’s driving the growing interest in union organizing.
“All this is happening in an environment where the CEOs and shareholders lose nothing: they can continue to receive compensation … all the risk is assumed by the other workers and the company,” Fazili told me. “And I think it’s interesting that people are saying ‘no’ more and trying to try collective bargaining and organizing workers as a way to have that voice.”
In summary: The robots are coming for all of us, which is why it is especially important to observe the outcome of the port strike. How Heather Long wrote on Tuesday, columnist of The Washington Post, the strike is one of the first battles of well-paid workers against advanced automation. There will be many more to come.”
