12 ms·

As L.A. ports automate, some workers are cheering on the robots

92 points by notlukesky 7y ago

flurdy 7y ago
TL;DR: Truckers are all for automation at the port, as it makes their job better as there will be fewer queues and delays in loading their cargo. Their job security is not affected and they can deliver quicker. Port workers are against automation, as it replaces their job descriptions. Many of the port workers are also unionised and have more influence over the politicians and port authority. Truckers and immigrant port workers are not unionised and less effective at being heard. -- Luddites will always resist technological improvements that reduce their job security. Everyone else will be for it as it improves their interaction with whatever that job delivers.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Just about everyone (not just Luddites) will tend to resist technology changes that reduce their job security. Automation is certainly not always a net improvement for users of the technology though. For example, self-service can certainly be good--ATMs, provisioning servers, even scanning one or two quick items in the store. But self-service for non-barcoded, awkwardly shaped, or just for large quantities is mostly a regression relative to a cashier as are all the automated phone systems that mostly try to keep you from actually reaching a person.
  - jws 7y ago
    Just about everyone (not just Luddites) will tend to resist technology changes that reduce their job security. The Luddites specifically opposed the textile technology because it threatened their jobs. Characterizing someone as a Luddite because they oppose a technology which threatens their job seems entirely appropriate even if they haven't sworn an oath to the society. I'm not aware of a good word for people who oppose or resist technological changes in general. "technophobe" is inherently pejorative. Some writers are trying to use "Neo-Luddism", but adding modifiers to identifying names to make them identify something else does not lead to clarity.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Self serve will improve to the point where scanning each item won't be required.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Assuming everything is tagged for the scanning system which, for example, fresh produce often isn't. (Some chains get around this by packaging the fresh produce so it doesn't need to be individually weighed. Of course this generates additional packaging waste.) But, yes, in general I expect self-serve checkout will get better/easier over time.
      - wolco 7y ago
        Upscale stores all package the freshest looking biggest produce and sell as a package for slightly more. Meat is similiar. Could be implemented right now in some places.
        ghaff 7y ago
        Whole Foods is pretty much unpackaged today for produce and much of the meat and fish.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  > Luddites will always resist technological improvements availability and administration of "jobs" is a constant battleground; I doubt it brings much to the discussion to reduce an entire portion of the situation to name calling. Perhaps people who want to build automation see a "bright future", while people with no interest in building automation, and real-lives like family and housing, do not see it that way
- mch82 7y ago
  Can you think of any reasons it might NOT be true that “everyone else is better off when people lose jobs to automation“?
  - derp_dee_derp 7y ago
    If enough people lose their jobs at once, they may organize, turn violent, and overthrow the government. You may think im being hyperbolic, but this is a very real situation if the longshoremen, truck drivers, and loaders all lose their jobs to automation with a few years of each other. This is especially true in LA as those jobs make up a significant percentage of employment in that area.
    - mch82 7y ago
      I think the risk of the scenario you describe is low, but it could happen and it has in the past. Other reasons also come to mind. When someone is out of work tax revenues decrease and a variety of social costs can increase. Infrastructure costs and welfare expenditures are immediately impacted. The unemployed person is still using public roads & services, but no longer paying taxes to fund them. If the displaced employee gets hurt, then emergency services costs increase. If they turn to crime, court and jail costs go up. And that’s a cursory list of impacts. So there are many ways society pays a price for automation.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Important detail: the port workers are paid hourly, while the truckers are paid by the load. These radically different financial incentives drive a deep wedge between them.
  - rriepe 7y ago
    Great point. Imagine sitting in line waiting on someone while they're getting paid and you aren't.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  > Everyone else will be for it as it improves their interaction with whatever that job delivers. That's awfully optimistic.
Axsuul 7y ago
Note that Shanghai and Rotterdam's ports are already leagues ahead in terms of automation.
- gumby 7y ago
  On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation. This is why you see such a high level of automation in Europe, Australia etc: cost of labor is higher. I think the US has made the wrong tradeoff, but this factor has gone back decades.
  - SPascareli 7y ago
    > On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation. Are you saying that ports in China have high wages AND high union rates compared to US? Because even if that was true, it didn't stopped them automating the ports.
    - gumby 7y ago
      Good point I was talking about OECD countries, basically. China has a different problem, though related. Of course unions are illegal there ("not needed -- the communist party represents the workers"). But they have a large pool of uneducated very low cost labor they are trying to keep out of the cities (e.g. via Hukou system), trouble with controls on things like "shrinkage" (containers help a lot here) and yes, relatively high wages for the workers who are in the port cities (working in factories and white collar jobs).
- vanniv 7y ago
  LA Longshoremen have been fighting automation for my entire lifetime. Every five years, there's a rash of stories about it, and then Longshoremen eventually get even bigger guaranteed-pay-regardless-of-work deals, and the next token amount of automation happens.
pokstad 7y ago
It’s hard to root for the ILWU. I grew up in San Pedro, where many of the long shoremen live (near the port of L.A.). Once you’ve known these people for a while, you start to understand that the problem is not only a strong union but also a stubborn and incompetent people. The workers there are known for working doubles while on meth/speed. There are horror stories of crane operators high while operating machinery. Every so often a worker is flattened by a container. Outside of work, the longies act like royalty in San Pedro. I grew up with their self entitled kids who would refuse to study in high school because they knew their parents would get them into the union. They drive around in jumbo SUVs like maniacs around town. The longshoremen are still living off the karma of bloody Thursday, but one day that karma will wear off and the port will be modernized.
- klipt 7y ago
  > they knew their parents would get them into the union Ironic that union membership would become just another form of heritable wealth.
  - shams93 7y ago
    It has in Hollywood especially things like key grip jobs are passed down generation to generation. Having none of this in LA I spent half my working life homeless with a master's degree in Socal the economy is all about what you inherit not what you do the system has treated me Lowe than a dog my entire life despite my skills and education I'm simply someone you hit with cars and leave for dead
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      Yeah, I’m fine with questioning heritable wealth, but it should be across the board. We shouldn’t chop up the middle class’ heritable tokens while letting the upper class keep theirs. That just makes things worse.
      - Nasrudith 7y ago
        Not all heritability is identical nor are their side effects. A literal caste system is worse than generational wealth transfer. While one may gave an advantage to their off spring the previous effectively restricts others and is way unhealthier for society. Just treating it like factions where just whose team is good for isn't a very healthy approach.
hinkley 7y ago
From the complaints of the trucker they interviewed, it sounds like Maersk has a management problem. Crane operators have long breaks because the work is taxing. But having an operator on break shouldn’t mean the crane stops. Two hour breaks are basically split shifts. So five operators for four cranes should cover you. If the don’t all work identical split shifts. Robots are a pretty passive aggressive way to get rid of bad management.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Trying to fix people problems with technology is pervasive unfortunately.
  - bdamm 7y ago
    It’s also sometimes the only way, with certain people problems.
- noobermin 7y ago
  Other way around, robots are a way to get around the consequences of bad management while the managers keep their jobs. Was middle management slashed too when the robots were rolled out?
  - notatoad 7y ago
    Middle managers don't typically keep their jobs for long once all their direct reports are gone.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    No, they were already slashed back in the early 90s as systems computerized.
- tehjoker 7y ago
  It's also a good way to ensure that wealth becomes concentrated in upper management. I'm all for automation provided it's done in a way that workers would actually want and ensures they continue to get a (growing) piece of the pie.
eggy 7y ago
“Large corporations pit worker against worker,” said Joe Gasperov, president of ILWU Local 63, which represents the clerks. “I feel sorry for the truckers. They’re exploited. They’re paid by the load, not the hour, so they assume all the risk of terminal delays. And some companies care more about saving a buck than servicing the trucks.” Let's not pay by what you produce (number of loads), but by how much time you take, and drivers will not care about the delays, and the ILWU will not care about delays, and you will have a more efficient, egalitarian system? Yeah, right. Then you will get ILWU types driving trucks and taking their time is all you will have in the end.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  There is a structural problem though, where the truckers don't have the leverage to minimize their downtime. It could be that truckers that arrive on time for a pickup get a payment from the port when they experience an excessive delay. Incentive for the port to perform, harm reduction for the trucker, etc, but they don't have it in place because they can get truckers without it.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Salaries work pretty well in most places.
  - eggy 7y ago
    Yes, as I responded above where typically you are in an office or report to someone regularly. Sales people make some of the highest salaries on a low salary with commissions for the sales they produce.
- noobermin 7y ago
  Should developers be paid by the lines of code they produce?
  - Thriptic 7y ago
    Should developers keep their job if they fail to deliver every sprint and miss deadlines? At the end of the day we are all judged by output; it just so happens that output is more easily measured in trucking (ie the status is binary) than in development.
asaph 7y ago
Surprisingly, there is no mention in the article of how the truckers feel about the threat of automation to their own jobs.
- markus_zhang 7y ago
  It will be there when auto-driving trucks come out in the near future. I think the trucks will get automated first, and then maybe city transit, especially subways, then it will spread from there. Any work that doesn't require a huge amount of human intelligence or human interaction will be automated maybe sooner than we think.
  - HorizonXP 7y ago
    But trucking does require a decent amount of human intelligence and interaction, for now. (My dad is a trucker. He’s 50+, it won’t matter to him if his job gets automated.) About the only place that self-driving trucks can do decently is long-haul highway travel, and that’s probably the place where it’s most needed. Any type of intra-city travel, and low-speed maneuvering requires a lot of I/O and responding to a wide variety of conditions. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying that the work involved in automating that may not be worth the effort compared to paying a trucker.
    - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
      Wow, your dad is in an unusually good financial situation if at the age of 50 it "won't matter to him if his job gets automated".
      - kccqzy 7y ago
        Truckers earn a lot. Especially owner-operators. Much more than you might assume. If he had been a trucker for most of his life, I would assume he probably had enough savings for early retirement.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
atentaten 7y ago
It's interesting to see that one group (truckers) are welcoming automation since it will boost their take home pay and the another group (longshoremen) are resistant because automation reduces their job security. I wonder if the truckers know that in the foreseeable future the activity of hauling containers in and out of port will be automated as well.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Most assume it's too hard to automate any time soon. But most people driving to work assume we are nowhere near automating that either.
markus_zhang 7y ago
Automation will come sooner or later for many, if not most of the jobs that we have. Better to get prepared. From my POV, a lot of those jobs out there can already be 100% automated with human watch, we simply keep them for employment.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  It's useful to look back in history: the automation of most of the work in agriculture over the last 10,000 years turned out to be mostly great in hindsight... but it was a lot slower than the pace of change today.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    There also wasn't necessarily displacement. Much of the agricultural automation that occurred in the 19th century was a response to labor shortages as people moved to industrial centers for jobs that were more attractive than farm labor.
    - crdoconnor 7y ago
      In the UK people didn't move because the jobs were more attractive. They moved because the enclosure movement stripped them of land and they had nowhere else to go. They hated working in factories. There are pamphlets by early industrialists who advocated this as a way of dealing with labor shortages in their factories and the natural idleness of peasants.
  - konschubert 7y ago
    I don’t think the industrial revolution was slower.
jmpman 7y ago
My one experience with the port directly - I dropped off a car for a friend shipping the vehicle overseas. A complete logistics nightmare, and when it arrived in Europe, the plates had been stolen. Which port is to blame? Impossible to say, but the European port would have less use for stolen US plates.
tehjoker 7y ago
Very cool that management can get an anti-union piece in the mainstream media. The bulk of the article is about sowing division within the working class, and then there's some reasonable points by the union below the fold about how the reason the truckers are salty is in part because they are getting screwed by their management in a way that places them in opposition to the dockworkers by being paid per load instead of hourly.
- thesausageking 7y ago
  Or maybe using laws to prevent technology from making the port more efficient has downsides that affect not just management and shipping companies, but working class people as well.
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    How would keeping things exactly the same hurt working class people? Making the port more efficient helps business and consumers, but not workers who are continuously ground into the dirt, commanded, and deprived of basic necessities. These workers have a decent job because they have banded together to challenge management through their union. Unfortunately, making things efficient on management's terms means that workers are fired rather than sharing in the fruits of a more efficient company. Only democratic ownership of the companies by the working class can change this equation. Then improved efficiency would be enacted on the workers' terms and would actually improve the lives of ordinary people.
- maximente 7y ago
  sad to see this grey. there's a clear angle on all sorts of issues, to include class and immigration status: > On one side are well-paid union members, many of them third- and fourth-generation dockworkers. On the other is a nonunion, largely immigrant and Spanish-speaking workforce of independent contractors, who lack the hourly pay, overtime guarantees, pensions, healthcare insurance and job security that ILWU workers enjoy. geez, it's almost as if there's a racial and cultural divide at play here... The Bearded One would be sad, i think. if what i keep reading about trucking being the most popular job in many states per capita, then these workers don't understand the power they hold via striking. unfortunately they're probably not willing to do so, being "content" with slightly less horrible conditions than whatever/wherever they're coming from. seriously, labor should be on the same side. those who helped capital get to the point that will allow them to automate will not be thanked or "grandfathered in". it's disappointing that truckers seem unwilling or unable to stand up for their enormous power. if 10% of trucks stopped running in the US, and 1% were found to have parked on various onramps/highways in the US, i have a feeling you'd have a major win for truck drivers and labor generally.
dmix 7y ago
> On one side are well-paid union members, many of them third- and fourth-generation dockworkers. Which highlights one of the dirtier parts of the history of union jobs: the rampant nepotism and exclusionary culture it develops in local communities. Valuing who you know in a community over your merits as a worker. It had a long history of being used to keep black workers out of white jobs: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 and the note about workers taking "2hr lunch breaks" is unsurprising in such a culture.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

92 points by notlukesky 7y ago

TL;DR: Truckers are all for automation at the port, as it makes their job better as there will be fewer queues and delays in loading their cargo. Their job security is not affected and they can deliver quicker. Port workers are against automation, as it replaces their job descriptions. Many of the port workers are also unionised and have more influence over the politicians and port authority. Truckers and immigrant port workers are not unionised and less effective at being heard. -- Luddites will always resist technological improvements that reduce their job security. Everyone else will be for it as it improves their interaction with whatever that job delivers.

ghaff 7y ago
Just about everyone (not just Luddites) will tend to resist technology changes that reduce their job security. Automation is certainly not always a net improvement for users of the technology though. For example, self-service can certainly be good--ATMs, provisioning servers, even scanning one or two quick items in the store. But self-service for non-barcoded, awkwardly shaped, or just for large quantities is mostly a regression relative to a cashier as are all the automated phone systems that mostly try to keep you from actually reaching a person.
- jws 7y ago
  Just about everyone (not just Luddites) will tend to resist technology changes that reduce their job security. The Luddites specifically opposed the textile technology because it threatened their jobs. Characterizing someone as a Luddite because they oppose a technology which threatens their job seems entirely appropriate even if they haven't sworn an oath to the society. I'm not aware of a good word for people who oppose or resist technological changes in general. "technophobe" is inherently pejorative. Some writers are trying to use "Neo-Luddism", but adding modifiers to identifying names to make them identify something else does not lead to clarity.
- wolco 7y ago
  Self serve will improve to the point where scanning each item won't be required.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Assuming everything is tagged for the scanning system which, for example, fresh produce often isn't. (Some chains get around this by packaging the fresh produce so it doesn't need to be individually weighed. Of course this generates additional packaging waste.) But, yes, in general I expect self-serve checkout will get better/easier over time.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Upscale stores all package the freshest looking biggest produce and sell as a package for slightly more. Meat is similiar. Could be implemented right now in some places.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        Whole Foods is pretty much unpackaged today for produce and much of the meat and fish.
mistrial9 7y ago
> Luddites will always resist technological improvements availability and administration of "jobs" is a constant battleground; I doubt it brings much to the discussion to reduce an entire portion of the situation to name calling. Perhaps people who want to build automation see a "bright future", while people with no interest in building automation, and real-lives like family and housing, do not see it that way
mch82 7y ago
Can you think of any reasons it might NOT be true that “everyone else is better off when people lose jobs to automation“?
- derp_dee_derp 7y ago
  If enough people lose their jobs at once, they may organize, turn violent, and overthrow the government. You may think im being hyperbolic, but this is a very real situation if the longshoremen, truck drivers, and loaders all lose their jobs to automation with a few years of each other. This is especially true in LA as those jobs make up a significant percentage of employment in that area.
  - mch82 7y ago
    I think the risk of the scenario you describe is low, but it could happen and it has in the past. Other reasons also come to mind. When someone is out of work tax revenues decrease and a variety of social costs can increase. Infrastructure costs and welfare expenditures are immediately impacted. The unemployed person is still using public roads & services, but no longer paying taxes to fund them. If the displaced employee gets hurt, then emergency services costs increase. If they turn to crime, court and jail costs go up. And that’s a cursory list of impacts. So there are many ways society pays a price for automation.
egypturnash 7y ago
Important detail: the port workers are paid hourly, while the truckers are paid by the load. These radically different financial incentives drive a deep wedge between them.
- rriepe 7y ago
  Great point. Imagine sitting in line waiting on someone while they're getting paid and you aren't.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
> Everyone else will be for it as it improves their interaction with whatever that job delivers. That's awfully optimistic.

Axsuul 7y ago

Note that Shanghai and Rotterdam's ports are already leagues ahead in terms of automation.

gumby 7y ago
On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation. This is why you see such a high level of automation in Europe, Australia etc: cost of labor is higher. I think the US has made the wrong tradeoff, but this factor has gone back decades.
- SPascareli 7y ago
  > On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation. Are you saying that ports in China have high wages AND high union rates compared to US? Because even if that was true, it didn't stopped them automating the ports.
  - gumby 7y ago
    Good point I was talking about OECD countries, basically. China has a different problem, though related. Of course unions are illegal there ("not needed -- the communist party represents the workers"). But they have a large pool of uneducated very low cost labor they are trying to keep out of the cities (e.g. via Hukou system), trouble with controls on things like "shrinkage" (containers help a lot here) and yes, relatively high wages for the workers who are in the port cities (working in factories and white collar jobs).
vanniv 7y ago
LA Longshoremen have been fighting automation for my entire lifetime. Every five years, there's a rash of stories about it, and then Longshoremen eventually get even bigger guaranteed-pay-regardless-of-work deals, and the next token amount of automation happens.

pokstad 7y ago

It’s hard to root for the ILWU. I grew up in San Pedro, where many of the long shoremen live (near the port of L.A.). Once you’ve known these people for a while, you start to understand that the problem is not only a strong union but also a stubborn and incompetent people. The workers there are known for working doubles while on meth/speed. There are horror stories of crane operators high while operating machinery. Every so often a worker is flattened by a container. Outside of work, the longies act like royalty in San Pedro. I grew up with their self entitled kids who would refuse to study in high school because they knew their parents would get them into the union. They drive around in jumbo SUVs like maniacs around town. The longshoremen are still living off the karma of bloody Thursday, but one day that karma will wear off and the port will be modernized.

klipt 7y ago
> they knew their parents would get them into the union Ironic that union membership would become just another form of heritable wealth.
- shams93 7y ago
  It has in Hollywood especially things like key grip jobs are passed down generation to generation. Having none of this in LA I spent half my working life homeless with a master's degree in Socal the economy is all about what you inherit not what you do the system has treated me Lowe than a dog my entire life despite my skills and education I'm simply someone you hit with cars and leave for dead
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Yeah, I’m fine with questioning heritable wealth, but it should be across the board. We shouldn’t chop up the middle class’ heritable tokens while letting the upper class keep theirs. That just makes things worse.
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Not all heritability is identical nor are their side effects. A literal caste system is worse than generational wealth transfer. While one may gave an advantage to their off spring the previous effectively restricts others and is way unhealthier for society. Just treating it like factions where just whose team is good for isn't a very healthy approach.

hinkley 7y ago

From the complaints of the trucker they interviewed, it sounds like Maersk has a management problem. Crane operators have long breaks because the work is taxing. But having an operator on break shouldn’t mean the crane stops. Two hour breaks are basically split shifts. So five operators for four cranes should cover you. If the don’t all work identical split shifts. Robots are a pretty passive aggressive way to get rid of bad management.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Trying to fix people problems with technology is pervasive unfortunately.
- bdamm 7y ago
  It’s also sometimes the only way, with certain people problems.
noobermin 7y ago
Other way around, robots are a way to get around the consequences of bad management while the managers keep their jobs. Was middle management slashed too when the robots were rolled out?
- notatoad 7y ago
  Middle managers don't typically keep their jobs for long once all their direct reports are gone.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  No, they were already slashed back in the early 90s as systems computerized.
tehjoker 7y ago
It's also a good way to ensure that wealth becomes concentrated in upper management. I'm all for automation provided it's done in a way that workers would actually want and ensures they continue to get a (growing) piece of the pie.

eggy 7y ago

“Large corporations pit worker against worker,” said Joe Gasperov, president of ILWU Local 63, which represents the clerks. “I feel sorry for the truckers. They’re exploited. They’re paid by the load, not the hour, so they assume all the risk of terminal delays. And some companies care more about saving a buck than servicing the trucks.” Let's not pay by what you produce (number of loads), but by how much time you take, and drivers will not care about the delays, and the ILWU will not care about delays, and you will have a more efficient, egalitarian system? Yeah, right. Then you will get ILWU types driving trucks and taking their time is all you will have in the end.

maxerickson 7y ago
There is a structural problem though, where the truckers don't have the leverage to minimize their downtime. It could be that truckers that arrive on time for a pickup get a payment from the port when they experience an excessive delay. Incentive for the port to perform, harm reduction for the trucker, etc, but they don't have it in place because they can get truckers without it.
jayd16 7y ago
Salaries work pretty well in most places.
- eggy 7y ago
  Yes, as I responded above where typically you are in an office or report to someone regularly. Sales people make some of the highest salaries on a low salary with commissions for the sales they produce.
noobermin 7y ago
Should developers be paid by the lines of code they produce?
- Thriptic 7y ago
  Should developers keep their job if they fail to deliver every sprint and miss deadlines? At the end of the day we are all judged by output; it just so happens that output is more easily measured in trucking (ie the status is binary) than in development.

asaph 7y ago

Surprisingly, there is no mention in the article of how the truckers feel about the threat of automation to their own jobs.

markus_zhang 7y ago
It will be there when auto-driving trucks come out in the near future. I think the trucks will get automated first, and then maybe city transit, especially subways, then it will spread from there. Any work that doesn't require a huge amount of human intelligence or human interaction will be automated maybe sooner than we think.
- HorizonXP 7y ago
  But trucking does require a decent amount of human intelligence and interaction, for now. (My dad is a trucker. He’s 50+, it won’t matter to him if his job gets automated.) About the only place that self-driving trucks can do decently is long-haul highway travel, and that’s probably the place where it’s most needed. Any type of intra-city travel, and low-speed maneuvering requires a lot of I/O and responding to a wide variety of conditions. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying that the work involved in automating that may not be worth the effort compared to paying a trucker.
  - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
    Wow, your dad is in an unusually good financial situation if at the age of 50 it "won't matter to him if his job gets automated".
    - kccqzy 7y ago
      Truckers earn a lot. Especially owner-operators. Much more than you might assume. If he had been a trucker for most of his life, I would assume he probably had enough savings for early retirement.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago

atentaten 7y ago

It's interesting to see that one group (truckers) are welcoming automation since it will boost their take home pay and the another group (longshoremen) are resistant because automation reduces their job security. I wonder if the truckers know that in the foreseeable future the activity of hauling containers in and out of port will be automated as well.

ilaksh 7y ago
Most assume it's too hard to automate any time soon. But most people driving to work assume we are nowhere near automating that either.

markus_zhang 7y ago

Automation will come sooner or later for many, if not most of the jobs that we have. Better to get prepared. From my POV, a lot of those jobs out there can already be 100% automated with human watch, we simply keep them for employment.

greglindahl 7y ago
It's useful to look back in history: the automation of most of the work in agriculture over the last 10,000 years turned out to be mostly great in hindsight... but it was a lot slower than the pace of change today.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  There also wasn't necessarily displacement. Much of the agricultural automation that occurred in the 19th century was a response to labor shortages as people moved to industrial centers for jobs that were more attractive than farm labor.
  - crdoconnor 7y ago
    In the UK people didn't move because the jobs were more attractive. They moved because the enclosure movement stripped them of land and they had nowhere else to go. They hated working in factories. There are pamphlets by early industrialists who advocated this as a way of dealing with labor shortages in their factories and the natural idleness of peasants.
- konschubert 7y ago
  I don’t think the industrial revolution was slower.

jmpman 7y ago

My one experience with the port directly - I dropped off a car for a friend shipping the vehicle overseas. A complete logistics nightmare, and when it arrived in Europe, the plates had been stolen. Which port is to blame? Impossible to say, but the European port would have less use for stolen US plates.

tehjoker 7y ago

Very cool that management can get an anti-union piece in the mainstream media. The bulk of the article is about sowing division within the working class, and then there's some reasonable points by the union below the fold about how the reason the truckers are salty is in part because they are getting screwed by their management in a way that places them in opposition to the dockworkers by being paid per load instead of hourly.

thesausageking 7y ago
Or maybe using laws to prevent technology from making the port more efficient has downsides that affect not just management and shipping companies, but working class people as well.
- tehjoker 7y ago
  How would keeping things exactly the same hurt working class people? Making the port more efficient helps business and consumers, but not workers who are continuously ground into the dirt, commanded, and deprived of basic necessities. These workers have a decent job because they have banded together to challenge management through their union. Unfortunately, making things efficient on management's terms means that workers are fired rather than sharing in the fruits of a more efficient company. Only democratic ownership of the companies by the working class can change this equation. Then improved efficiency would be enacted on the workers' terms and would actually improve the lives of ordinary people.
maximente 7y ago
sad to see this grey. there's a clear angle on all sorts of issues, to include class and immigration status: > On one side are well-paid union members, many of them third- and fourth-generation dockworkers. On the other is a nonunion, largely immigrant and Spanish-speaking workforce of independent contractors, who lack the hourly pay, overtime guarantees, pensions, healthcare insurance and job security that ILWU workers enjoy. geez, it's almost as if there's a racial and cultural divide at play here... The Bearded One would be sad, i think. if what i keep reading about trucking being the most popular job in many states per capita, then these workers don't understand the power they hold via striking. unfortunately they're probably not willing to do so, being "content" with slightly less horrible conditions than whatever/wherever they're coming from. seriously, labor should be on the same side. those who helped capital get to the point that will allow them to automate will not be thanked or "grandfathered in". it's disappointing that truckers seem unwilling or unable to stand up for their enormous power. if 10% of trucks stopped running in the US, and 1% were found to have parked on various onramps/highways in the US, i have a feeling you'd have a major win for truck drivers and labor generally.

dmix 7y ago

> On one side are well-paid union members, many of them third- and fourth-generation dockworkers. Which highlights one of the dirtier parts of the history of union jobs: the rampant nepotism and exclusionary culture it develops in local communities. Valuing who you know in a community over your merits as a worker. It had a long history of being used to keep black workers out of white jobs: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 and the note about workers taking "2hr lunch breaks" is unsurprising in such a culture.

deleted 7y ago

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