Dock workers are waging a battle against automation. The rest of us might want to take notes

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The longshoremen striking along the East Coast are culturally and geographically distant from the Hollywood actors and writers who staged a four-month strike last year. But their protests have one basic principle in common: They don’t want bots to take their jobs.

This battle is expected to continue to unfold as advanced automation and AI creep into virtually every workforce.

Here’s the deal: The East Coast port strike is attracting a lot of attention because of its potential to disrupt the economy – and that’s exactly what it’s all about. Port work can be strenuous, and the people who work at the ports are crucial in getting all the things we want to buy onto store shelves. No dockworkers means no bananas (or whatever), which means the companies that produce and ship them make no profits.

The strike, which began early Tuesday, focuses on two issues: wages and automation. Workers can be seen around the ports carrying signs reading “Robots don’t pay taxes” and “Automation hurts families.”

They’re combating a trend that port operators want more than anything to accelerate: more cranes and driverless trucks moving goods from container ships and fewer people demanding compensation.

Of course, the economics of automation are not that simple. While research shows that automation brings obvious benefits, such as lower operating costs and fewer human errors, port automation alone does not lead to significant performance improvements, according to a 2018 McKinsey report.

Automated ports “are generally less productive than their traditional counterparts,” and returns on their significant capital investments fall short of the industry norm, according to industry leaders surveyed by McKinsey. (However, the report notes that these challenges can be overcome through “careful planning and management.”)

Still, automation is clearly a trend, and U.S. shipping executives appear to be envious of modern ports in 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 Tuesday morning outside the Port of New York and New Jersey. “Remember that this industry, this union, has always adapted to innovation. But we will never get used to robots taking over our jobs.”

The port workers’ concerns are justified.

Automation will not completely eliminate the need for human labor, but it will significantly reduce the number of positions needed on payroll, as has happened in many industries Automobile manufacturing and mining. An Economic Roundtable report found that automation eliminated 572 full-time jobs at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles in 2020 and 2021.

The longshoremen’s union is demanding a pay increase of $5 an hour in each of the six years of the next contract and “opaque” language that ports will not adopt automation “or semi-automation.”

Displacement by automation is a familiar theme in the history of blue-collar labor and became a central sticking point in last year’s Hollywood strikes, as actors and writers seek to protect their creative work from duplication by artificial intelligence.

But fear of automation is quickly spreading to office work, where managers are using AI in hopes of replacing human labor or increasing production.

Over the summer, a survey of large U.S. companies found that more than 60% plan to use AI within the next year to automate tasks previously done by employees.

said Sameera Fazili, former deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration By and large, workers are not saying “no” to all automation, but rather that they want to have a voice in shaping how it becomes part of the workplace. And that fear is part of what is driving the growing interest in union organizing.

“This is all happening in an environment where it’s not like CEOs and shareholders are losing out – they can still be compensated… all the risk is borne by other workers and the company,” Fazili told me. “And I think it’s interesting that people are saying ‘no’ more and trying to explore collective bargaining and worker organizing as a way to make that voice heard.”

Conclusion: The bots are coming for all of us, which is why it is especially important to keep an eye on the outcome of the port strike. Washington Post columnist Heather Long wrote Tuesday that the strike was “an early fight by well-paid workers against advanced automation.” There will be many more to come.”