Automation messes up the flow of illegal drugs. The big stuff does not come in a backpack but in container ships/trucks.<p>In LATAM, dock workers make sure this goes undetected. I know of an IE who was championing a dock worker scheduling optimization algo, typical Operations Management stuff. Dude was killed.<p>I'd like to think that this kind of things do not happen here. But every time I've thought along those lines, I've been mistaken. It's just happens at a different scale.
The metric used in this article is likely different than the metric that the port operators care about. The article was measuring productivity by turnaround time for ships. The port operator probably cares most about operating costs. Excess turnaround time for ships is a cost born by the shipping line (and consumer), and it is unlikely to affect whether people choose a given port because geographic concerns dominate most.<p>The goal of the port operator is explicitly to lay off longshoremen so they don't have to pay inflated salaries. It is diametrically opposed to the union's goals in this regard, hence the dispute. The article largely acknowledge that automation succeeds in reducing the number of longshoremen required, which is its actual purpose. (It did question whether the reduced labor costs actually pay for the capital investment required, but didn't give any numbers. Since capital investment is a one-time cost but wages are a recurring cost, this calculation needs to be subjected to discounted cash flow analysis, which also requires that an interest rate be specified.)
The article notes that many automated ports are poor performers productivity-wise and presents this as evidence that automation doesn't increase productivity. However, it stands to reason that ports already suffering from low productivity would be the most inclined to adopt automation. I think it's safe to say automation is not a silver bullet that will cause a port to jump from the bottom to the top of the rankings, but that doesn't mean these ports wouldn't be worse off without the improvements they've made.<p>Also while the article champions various process improvements to make ports more efficient that don't strictly require automation, it's not an either/or scenario. Implementing automation can make it easier to implement process improvements like scheduling, and process improvements which reduce variability make automation less expensive and more capable. It makes sense to pursue both in parallel.
Huh, it sounds like better places to act would be:<p>1. Repealing the Foreign Dredge Act [1] (or amending it to be compatible with friendshoring);<p>2. Mandating truck appointment systems (maybe even a centrally-run one, at least for each coast); <i>and</i><p>3. Moving to a 24/7 default for our nation’s ports.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Dredge_Act_of_1906" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Dredge_Act_of_1906</a>
It seems to me that comparing Chinese ports to American ports is comparing very different things: I would imagine that the vast majority of the traffic at a Chinese port is export traffic while at an American port it’s import traffic.¹ Furthermore, thanks to centralized decision making, the interface between surface traffic and ship in China will inherently be more efficient than the same interface in the U.S. What I’m wondering is how do U.S. ports compare to, say, Europe or Canada where the situation would be more comparable.<p>⸻<p>1. In fact, it occurs to me that loading the ship <i>should</i> be faster/more efficient than unloading as there’s not necessarily any reason to do any sorting beyond which ship a container goes on at the export point, while at the import point, there needs to be more direction of getting containers onto individual trucks and trains.
Yes. Not just the physical assets, but the data, too.<p>My favorite example is with rail ports. To pick up a container at a rail yard, the truck driver needs a pickup number. The pickup number is associated to the container and is shared (often times on a piece of paper) when the driver checks in.<p>The pickup number needs to make its way from the cargo owner to the truck driver. How does this happen?<p>Rail carriers issue the pickup number to cargo owners via email when the train arrives. Cargo owners email it to a freight forwarder. The freight forwarder emails it to the broker. The broker emails to the trucking company. The trucking company emails it or texts it to the driver. This needs to happen in less than 2 days, else someone along that chain is on the hook to pay a storage fee to the rail yard.
One thing abut cargo work is that it's always been at full scale since before anybody living was ever born.<p>Ships have always been as big as they can be, and fewer people handle more (retail value) quicker per person than during less-bulky links in the supply chain.<p>So fundamentally plenty of money is being made at the port, regardless of the state of automation, this boils down to the lowest priority until all the other elements leading up to the port are taken to a dramatically improved next level automation themselves.
I find this dockworker strike interesting because it's forcing people to re-evaluate their principles and beliefs about workers' rights and unions.<p>>yass! go labor unions! strike! power to the workers!<p>>NO, NOT LIKE THAT!<p>Some questions for those struggling with this:<p>- How will you reconcile your unconditional love for unions and laborers with the fact that you do not approve of what this labor union is striking against?<p>- Given that you believe these workers' complaints are invalid, will you continue to support the proliferation of unions?<p>- If you've deemed the complaints of a labor union to be invalid, what do you think should happen in that case? Would you like to see the union dissolved?<p>- Would you like to see "shell unions" that severely limit the power of the plebeians but still look good on paper because it's a union and "union == good"?
The article talks a lot about automated ports, but I am wondering what the variation in these automated ports is?<p>Surely a port built today from the ground up with automation in mind would outperform a port that was retrofitted 20 years ago? Or a port that was upgraded today performing much better than when it was first automated 20 years ago?
Are there any businesses that both have unions and grant employees equity? If so, can the employees transfer their equity to the union, perhaps in lieu of paying dues? I feel like it could be a good way to align incentives, but I'm not sure it's actually feasible in the US.<p>I suppose unions at public companies could always just buy the stock regardless of employee equity grants.
>current ILA president Harold Daggett has complained about EZ passes for highway tolls eliminating union jobs.<p>I mean that says it all right? I get union's pretty much exist to protect jobs, but it'd be comically inefficient to still require toll booth attendants in this day and age.<p>And you can pretty much extrapolate this to every industry. Improving technology has always eliminated jobs, in pretty much every field.
> the ILA demanded a complete ban on introducing new port automation<p><i>"The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality."</i> - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite</a>
The best part about the unions is there are 50k on strike for 25k jobs. How? Because we already paid off 25k of them so that we could do containerization. That's how it goes. You pay the danegeld and you get more Vikings.
We should back up and ask, "Why do we have an economy?"<p>If the response is to benefit people, then actions which benefit the economy at the expense of benefiting people are misaligned to our goals. It's an alignment problem and boy if we can't solve this, then I have some bad news for you regarding the next 30 years.
The one basic principle to automate can be that automation should be used as a means to supplement human productivity , but if it replace the basic livelihoods of human beings then it should be taxed and the proceeds distributed as UBI. After all what is the point of automation of it ends up causing suffering for us?
Interesting bad actor problems, whereas a union (which is typically a good thing) does a bad thing (25k job grift, making goods more expensive for everyone), and gives all unions a bad public image and weakens them as a result (bad thing, since it erodes worker leverage/rights in the long term)<p>What's the proposed solution here?
Half the so called dock workers don’t actually work. They sit at home and collect, “container royalties”.<p><a href="https://nypost.com/2024/10/04/business/how-did-50k-dockworkers-strike-at-us-ports-with-only-25k-jobs/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2024/10/04/business/how-did-50k-dockworke...</a>
> the video of Daggett threatening to “cripple” the entire economy, or the fact that Daggett is alleged to have connections to organized crime.<p>Half of our economy is built around making as many people replaceable as possible so that their wages can be driven into the ground. Pearl clutching about people resisting downward social mobility by any means necessary is cringe. This put me off to the rest of the article.