Another similar proposal:
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From the article:
“Because the cost of peacefully eliminating the unions is likely to be small relative to the potential wealth there is to gain, we should just pay off the unions now and [be done with them forever”
Although well written, the author of the article didn’t put enough thought into the problem to come up with the least expensive solution. Why pay each of the 45,000 members hundreds of thousands of dollars for 20 years when they could just pay the ILA hierarchy a few million each up front with a few more million more in campaign contributions to the politicians the ILA has bought off. $50 million cash split between 15-20 briefcases & the ILA would be finished.
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The Government should simply MANDATE (Rotterdam or Singapore style) automation by regulation. Cite national security as a reason and authority for the mandate. No need to pay off anyone.
Maybe offer the longshoremen retraining money to become ABs, Tankermen, truck drivers, plumbers, or whatever.
Let’s stop wasting the talents of the longshoremen and make them available to fill needed jobs where there is a shortage of workers.
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The entire idea of paying them off to allow automation is just silly. The west coast is already automated, check and see how that happened. Paying off any worker for a lost career who is replaced by automation or AI will not happen in the USA, . There is an evolution with jobs, has been for some time but the evolution is speeding up. If companies can hire illegals and forgo automation they will do so. Witness the meatpacking and construction industry. If they were ever forced to hire citizens they would have to increase the wages so high that it would make it economically feasible to develop advanced automation and AI will help. This has already happened in the automobile and other industries. The future is going to be grim for those with little education and not real bright for those with a college degree. Many of the Silicon Valley billionaires now sound like libertarians because they don’t need government as they think they will control everything eventually anyway.
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Maybe the ILA needs to include a little history lesson at the beginning of each union meeting. They might benefit from their equivalent in the very early 19th century, the Luddites.
From USA Today
In Europe, port workers unions have already negotiated protections against automation, after Europe Container Terminals opened the world’s first automated container terminal in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1993, according to Berardina Tommasi, policy officer at the European Transport Workers’ Federation for dockworkers.
“Nobody can be sacked because of automation,” said Niek Stam, secretary of FNV Havens, the largest Dutch dockworkers union.
The Dutch union has more than 6,000 members across three ports in the Netherlands, including the Port of Rotterdam, which is considered one of the most technologically advanced in the world. “We’ve had this in our contracts for many years,” Stam said.
“We have to talk about early retirement (with terminal operators) because workers can’t work until 67 doing the most labor-intensive jobs,” Stam said.
A certain level of automation is tolerable in the dockworker industry, according to some European and U.S. union officials.
So if I invent the AutomaticShip that needs one person to reset the breakers if it trips one and otherwise sails herself, you all would be happy with 3 year’s pay and then find another career?
If so, you have crap unions.
No, only the Captain and a parrot will be left on autonomous ships .
- Why a parrot?
- To keep the Captain company on long voyages.
- Why keep the Captain onboard then?
- To feed the parrot and to take the blame if anything goes wrong.
PS> Freely from a cartoon seen many years ago. (Can’t find it now)
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Let’s ban the containers and come back to good old general cgo ships. Let’s consider paying seafarers loosing jobs MASS compensation bonus. Let’s come back to Liberty ships. 
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I would be the 1st in line to get the 3 yr salary to go home. Then I would go to a casino, snap some selfies & swear that I lost it all playing roulette. Why? Because Racors don’t change themselves, no matter how good Alfa Laval centrifuges are they all shit the bed eventually to dump fuel or lube oil everywhere, the Dali is only 9 yrs old & knocked over a bridge & the US military has a history of scrapping technological marvels before they’re even commissioned. All the bells, whistles & technology on the Manawanui & that thing ran aground, flipped over, caught on fire & sank to the bottom of the ocean. I’d take the 3 yr salary & probably be ready to go back to work 6 months later when they called me.
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Not actually the point: I too think automatic ships will automatically quit working.
The point was I would think mariners would not be the ones suggesting another part of the marine industry give up their careers forever for 3 years pay.
This may in the end be a hopeless task, but I can’t blame them for trying. It isn’t like all of them have some other high-paying job waiting.
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The flying version is a man and a dog. The man feeds the dog and the dog bites the man if he attempts to touch any of the controls.
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The old ships supported an enormous ecosystem of jobs in all the ports. I read some memoirs of 1950s era sailing and one thing that would happen if the port authority bought a nice new crane the locals would destroy it, it reduced the labor needed to unload the ships.
No we aren’t doing that again, but it did spread a lot of money around.
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I don’t think it was a mariner who wrote the opinion piece the OP referenced nor do I believe the OP is suggesting that. I assumed he was reposting it to show how ridiculous some can be concerning automation & anti-labor policies. Except for primitive, Amish furniture makers, we’re all adapting to automation in the workplace. Store clerks, hospitals, engine room personnel, airline pilots etc. Amazon & the US mail run so efficiently today because of automation. Free 2 day shipping 20 yrs ago was a dream & now many of us use it everyday. Resistance is futile.
BTW, expect some skeletons to start falling out of Harold Daggetts closet soon. He broke a golden rule when it comes to criminality, don’t draw attention to yourself.
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He seems a very old school union/mafia dual career type. He for some reason thought he could screw the Harris campaign good and maybe didn’t think through how the entire country would look at him taking a wrecking ball to the economy with Helene recovery just getting started.
I get the automation thing, in the end a stevedore will be a high-tech job riding herd on robots. I also can see just tossing a bunch of people out of the middle class - too bad, so sad, learn to code*, is also not in anyone’s best interests in the long run.
- longstanding sad joke in the IT profession, supposedly what IT people do is so easy any unemployed coal miner can be raking in the big bucks coding in a few weeks
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Have you mailed an envelope lately? We hand deliver some documents from Fort Lauderdale to Miami because after DeJoy literally destroyed the automatic sorting machines in order to cripple vote by mail, the post office lost around 25 percent of them.
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The question of the efficiency or effectiveness of automation is not really directly relevant.
A very good source on this subject is the book about containerization: The Box by Marc Levinson. The dockworker’s unions made missteps and stumbles but the main lesson was to negotiate wrt layoffs rather than fight to stop the inevitable.
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As seen from the outside world of shipping:
I have noticed that there is a lot of reference to “greedy foreign shipowners” as one of the targets of the strike, but who ultimately pay the cost of inefficient US ports?
My guess is that the high cost of handling imports at inefficient US ports are passed on to US consumers.
Likewise, high cost of loading commodities at US ports ultimately hurt US exporters and their competitiveness on the world market.
PS> That dockworkers try to stop automation is not exactly new: Coastal Transportation’s YouTube Series - #90 by ombugge
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I hate to say this but a lot of things in the Lauderdale, Miami, Dade County area are fucked up. My inlaws live in Mexico on a busy street & their mail hasn’t passed by in over 10 yrs. Problem bigger than faulty automation imo. Mail runs like clockwork where I live.
The UAW has nearly 400k members & growing compared to recent, previous years & automotive manufacturing is perhaps one of the most automated industries in the nation. If the ILA plays there cards right most of their members should be able to keep their jobs with increased automation. There’s only 85k of them. I know of 50 IBEW training facilities but never heard of a ILA school. With increased automation NY/NJ mafia members might not be able to pull down a quarter million a year for not showing up but screw 'em.
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Only about 45,000 of them.
Wonder what effect increased automation would have on the importation of illicit goods/people/etc., and how much that even happens. I assume some, and it seems logical that increased automation might make it harder for a container to go astray, but maybe not.
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