Automate our ports for the good of us all

Any time a business is at the rock bottom of a worldwide report analyzing operating efficiency, it’s time to take stock, wouldn’t you say?

For instance, the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles found themselves in the absolute last two positions in the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence’s 370-member Container Port Performance Index for 2021.

It’s true that United States ports in general tend to be less efficient than other giant ports in Europe and Asia especially, and that New York, New Jersey and Oakland were all in the bottom half of the global list.

But there’s the bottom half and then there’s dead last. Everyone involved, from management to (extremely highly paid) longshore workers, should be given pause by the simple facts at hand.

Instead, management gets defensive and has quibbles with the methodology of the report, and dock workers as usual scream bloody murder about the very idea of automation that makes other ports around the world so much more efficient and less expensive to places in which to unload goods.

As everyone in Southern California saw during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer demand for goods during the stay-at-home lockdowns were at least partially responsible for a massive backup at the ports, with dozens of giant freighters anchored offshore waiting weeks at a time to unload.

As Bloomberg and staffer Donna Littlejohn reported this month, “Maritime transport moves more than 80% of global merchandise by volume; even before the COVID-19 outbreak, ports were already handling more cargo, which pushed those with weaker infrastructure to ‘the limits of their capacity,’ said S&P Global Market Intelligence Associate Director Turloch Mooney, one of the authors of the report.”

That’s why the Pacific Maritime Association Automation released a report touting new automation projects that “will enable West Coast ports to remain competitive, facilitate growth in both cargo and jobs, and reduce greenhouse gasemissions, according to a new study by Dr. Michael Nacht, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and Larry Henry, founder of Containertrac, Inc.”

The study found that in the few small experiments with automation here along the lines of what foreign ports do, “cargo handling was accelerated, terminal capacity was expanded and longshore work was generated ‘significantly faster’ there than at conventional terminals.”

While the rest of the entire world appropriately rushes to automation in the name of efficiency, the artificially tiny membership of the local ports’ dock worker unions pushes back. The report is “a self-serving document by one party to a labor contract, and even worse (it) is an insult to all workers who have seen their jobs outsourced to machines.”

That latter bit would be a point worth hearing — if it were true. All of us who work, from supermarket checkers to even lawyers and other formerly lucrative jobs involving human labor and intellect, have reasons for concern when it comes to being replaced by automation and by artificial intelligence algorithms.

In this case, though, in fact, the study shows that the dock workers at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles very much stand to gain from automation. In the two small-scale experiments in automation that have been allowed here in our ports, “Paid ILWU hours at the two automated terminals rose 31.5%, more than twice the 13.9% growth rate at the nonautomated terminals. The registered ILWU workforce in Los Angeles and Long Beach grew 11.2% compared to 8.4% for the other 27 West Coast ports.”

Technology replaces old-fashioned stevedore-type jobs with other work. It does not eliminate jobs or workers. “Leading ports in Rotterdam, Singapore, and along China’s coast are technological marvels that fuel world trade,” the report said. “For its size, the United States lags behind the number of automated terminals and cargo volume handled by them.”

Let’s join the modern world and automate the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles for the sake of American supply-chain efficiency, for growing the Southern California economy and for creating more jobs for our workers.