When some 25,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike last October, bringing three dozen container ports on the east and Gulf coasts of the US to a halt, there was widespread alarm. Some predictions were that, because these ports handle one-quarter of the country’s international trade, the stoppage could cost the American economy as much as $4.5bn a day, reignite inflation and initiate ripple effects that will be felt the world over.
In the event, the panic lasted just 72 hours. Following hurried negotiations and the offer of a salary increase value nearly 62 per cent over six years, the longshoremen agreed to return to work, albeit temporarily — perhaps “essentially the most lucrative three days in labour-management history”, within the words of Patrick L Anderson, CEO of business consultancy Anderson Economic Group.
But in some ways the battle is simply just getting began. Although it was the pay rise that caught the eye of the media, the union’s real issue is with automation — specifically proposals by the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents port operators and container carriers, to equip more US ports with semi-automated cranes.
These cranes are equipped with advanced technology that makes them faster and more efficient to operate, say the owners. But the ILA claims that their introduction threatens their members’ livelihoods. Unless USMX agrees to a complete ban on automated machinery, the union has threatened to strike again as early as next week.
“We embrace technologies that improve safety and efficiency,” the ILA’s vibrant president, Harold Daggett, said in an announcement. “But only when a human being stays on the helm.”
The dispute has drawn attention not simply because of its potential outsized impact, but since it is one in every of the primary of its kind. As increasingly more businesses experiment with next-generation robotics, US labour unions representing industries as varied as UPS drivers, Las Vegas casino staff and food market employees are fighting for provisions to be added to contracts that deal with retaining jobs and compensating displaced staff within the event of automation.
What were previously run-of-the-mill negotiations over pay and conditions have mushroomed into larger, more existential disputes over the connection between humans and machines. Some 70 per cent of the 12mn people represented by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations now worry about being replaced by technology, estimates AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler: “Workers are fed up with how they’ve been treated for a very long time and are scared about what the longer term might hold.”
Whatever contract the longshoremen negotiate, say analysts, could help provide a template for agreements nationwide. “What you see is labour attempting to have a seat on the table,” says Robert Bruno, a labour professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
US investors have piled greater than $15bn into robotics start-ups since 2019, in response to PitchBook, and the remarkable growth of artificial intelligence prior to now 18 months has begun to indicate dividends. Jobs that looked like they might only be done by people suddenly look dangerous; economists have warned of wholesale and disruptive changes to the workforce as machines are able to increasingly more.
Adding to the pressure in economies just like the US, say business owners, is sluggish growth within the labour force, which is making it increasingly hard to recruit staff. President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations — he told NBC News last month that he goals to deport the entire estimated 11mn people within the US illegally in the following 4 years — will probably only intensify such concerns.
As Trump weighs public vows of support for some unions, including the Longshoremen, with relationships in Silicon Valley, the robot wars are prone to change into a flashpoint contained in the recent administration. Elon Musk is a full-blown enthusiast for the technology, speaking of fully automating Tesla factories and desperate to showcase a Tesla-developed humanoid robot called Optimus. But Trump, perhaps mindful of his Maga base, appears to take a distinct view: writing on Truth Social in regards to the dockworkers last month, the president-elect said that “the sum of money saved (by automation) is nowhere near the distress, hurt and harm it causes for American staff.”
Leaders including Daggett have vowed that in the event that they reach holding off robots, they plan to work with unions across the globe to do the identical.
“In workplaces which can be unionised, not less than in industries with unions which can be making this a priority, that’s the one likely effective mechanism . . . to maintain industries from form of running wild,” Bruno says.
One reason that the longshoremen’s strike has change into so bitter, says the union, is that they feel they’ve been here before.
Before the arrival of containerisation, longshoremen spent long days unloading individual boxes, barrels and crates, then transferring their contents on to trucks and freight trains — dangerous but reliable, well-paid work that, at its peak, employed an estimated 100,000 men in ports across the US.
After the trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean championed the 8ft-wide steel container within the mid-Nineteen Fifties, that world fell away. The recent technology meant that cargo may very well be transferred with a minimum of effort and drastically reduced costs. Tens of hundreds of jobs disappeared almost overnight.
Despite an enormous increase in world exports, the variety of longshoremen employed on the Port of New York and New Jersey plummeted from 55,000 within the Nineteen Fifties to about 4,000 today, says Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of maritime business at Texas A&M University. “It destroyed a variety of longshoremen’s jobs and was a giant issue,” Rodrigue says.
When semi-automated cranes were first brought in to terminals on the east coast of the US within the early 2000s, ILA leaders say they agreed to the changes because it could help create jobs. But they now say that the other happened.
“Automation, whether full or semi, replaces jobs and erodes the historical work functions we’ve fought hard to guard,” Daggett said in an announcement. (The ILA didn’t conform to an interview with the Financial Times.)
A 2022 survey commissioned by the west coast dockworkers’ union found that partial automation of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach resulted within the lack of nearly 1,200 jobs in 2020 and 2021.
USMX says that because a lot of the ports its members operate haven’t any spare land available, the one alternative is to “densify terminals” by adding machinery that accelerates operations.
In a standard crane, an operator sits inside a cab, lifting containers off ships and sorting them, before transferring them to trucks or trains — a highly expert job that may earn staff as much as $200,000 annually. In a semi-automated rail-mounted gantry crane (RMG) system, the operator works remotely from an off-site office, monitoring the crane via video link but letting the system do a lot of the work. The job requires similar skills and training, but fewer persons are required.
Union leaders claim they’ve already completed a “leap in productivity” using a few of this technology, but say that further automation is a step too far.
“This isn’t about meeting operational needs — it’s about replacing staff under the guise of progress, while maximising corporate profits,” Dennis Daggett, the president of ILA Local 1804-1 and Harold Daggett’s son, wrote in a recent essay on the union’s website.
The Longshoremen are right to be afraid, Rodrigue says, estimating that as many as 40 per cent of them are prone to losing their jobs.
But USMX describes calls to ban automation as “unworkable”, saying that modern crane technology has “nearly doubled” each the throughput of containers and the variety of staff on the ports using it.
“USMX will not be, nor has it ever been, in search of to eliminate jobs,” it said in an announcement.
Since General Motors first put robots on assembly lines within the Nineteen Sixties, carmakers have been pioneers in automation. Yet until the rise of AI, other industries — ones requiring more dexterous tasks, or where robots might need to reply to unpredictable or hazardous environments — struggled to follow suit.
Yet recent advances have given machines capabilities that even experts previously thought were unimaginable, meaning that they’re getting used in an increasingly wide range of workspaces. Manufacturing firms specifically have invested heavily, with total installations of business robots rising by 12 per cent to over 44,000 units in 2023 — the most important volume in not less than a decade, in response to the International Federation of Robotics. Again, the automobile industry has led the best way, followed by electrical and electronics firms.
US enterprise capital investment in robotics has risen from around $2bn in 2019 to greater than $3.5bn last 12 months, in response to data from PitchBook. In the primary nine months of 2024, there have been 130 fundraising deals for robotics start-ups — greater than across the whole thing of 2019.
Among essentially the most high-profile was a $675mn investment last February by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft and Nvidia in Figure AI, a Silicon Valley start-up founded in 2022 that’s working on a faceless, humanoid “general-purpose” robot.
It said that month that these robots — whose cost to customers is estimated at between $30,000 and $150,000 — could complete tasks including moving a box on to a conveyor belt, potentially endangering the job of anyone working in, say, a distribution centre. The first models were delivered to a “business client” last month.
On their annual trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last 12 months, members of the Culinary Union, which represents staff at casinos in the town, were shocked to see robots frying food and making cocktails.
“If they put in machines, how are people going to make a living?” says Francisco Rufino, a cook on the Paris Las Vegas hotel and casino. “How are they going to pay for rent? How are they going to pay for food?”
Employers and analysts say there are strong reasons to pursue automation. Salary increases experienced by many Americans prior to now few years have come at a price, says Laurie Harbour, chief executive of consultancy Harbour Results. “(American staff) fought for wages that might sustain our inflation,” she says. “The problem with that’s it makes the US somewhat uncompetitive.”
60.4%Economists’ estimate of share of Americans in work or in search of work by 2030, down from 67.3% in 2000
Some sectors say that they’re fearful about running out of individuals, particularly for essentially the most difficult and dangerous jobs. As the population ages and families struggle to search out childcare, the share of Americans in work or in search of work has been declining for a long time — dropping from 67.3 per cent in 2000 to 62.5 per cent late last 12 months. Economists estimate that it is going to sink to 60.4 per cent by 2030.
In a recent report by the recruitment site Indeed, analysts wrote that they expect that the dwindling “supply of staff will weigh heavily on the job market in coming years”, particularly if the Trump administration follows through on its deportation threats.
Nick Durst, a senior analyst at the true estate developer The Durst Organization, cites the diminishing ranks of window washers within the US. Despite a boom in development, the number of individuals employed washing windows within the country has fallen greater than 5 per cent since 2019, suggests evaluation by IbisWorld.
In 2022, the corporate’s enterprise arm invested within the maker of a glass-washing robot, Skyline Robotics, based in Israel. The Ozmo robot can now be seen scrubbing the windows of a skyscraper near Times Square. The investment is a strategy to be “proactive” in addressing the labour shortage, says Durst.
“It’s very comprehensible to me why that next generation isn’t showing up,” says Skyline Robotics president Ross Blum. “It is a very tough job . . . Who desires to go hang 1,000 feet within the air today and do manual labour outdoors?”
Blum and other robotics enthusiasts insist their goal will not be to interchange staff, but to provide them tools to make them safer and more productive. Yet labour groups are unconvinced. Edwin Quezada, a produce manager at a Stop & Shop on Long Island, who can be a member of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union, says robots that may scan shelves overnight were “a double-edged sword”.
“It makes a number of the features of what we do easier,” Quezada says. “But on the other hand, sometimes that technology is only a way of them eliminating more jobs.”
In recent years, each retail and culinary unions have negotiated clauses in contracts they hope will protect human staff. Las Vegas casinos at the moment are required to provide people six months’ notice before implementing recent technologies and free training on the right way to use them, plus severance packages for anyone laid off due to technology.
UPS has agreed to barter with the Teamsters, one of the powerful unions within the US, before introducing drones or driverless pick-up vehicles. New York retail stores whose staff are represented by RWDSU, including Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, also require management to return to an agreement before introducing recent technologies.
But that has not stopped anxiety about widespread job displacement. “Machinery is sweet for companies,” says Rufino, the Las Vegas cook. “It saves them labour costs. But at the identical time, the unemployment rate will skyrocket.”
Some analysts argue that staff could also be winning battles, but they’re prone to lose the war. Few people have the form of leverage enjoyed by dockworkers, says Rodrigue of Texas A&M.
Yet if robots do reach taking on workplaces, economists are divided on how many individuals will actually be displaced. “Historically, widespread, massive job losses (just don’t occur) when recent technologies emerge,” says Bill Rodgers, director of the Institute for Economic Equity on the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. “Does that mean it couldn’t occur? Possibly, but I might (side) with history.”
Others are less optimistic. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu says that robots’ current capabilities mean that those most prone to being displaced are in blue-collar jobs and lack college degrees, which can make it difficult for them to shift into the high-tech roles prone to be created by automation.
That might boost economic inequality by “(driving) a much bigger wedge between” staff who shouldn’t have college degrees and people do, Acemoglu says.
Daggett of the International Longshoremen’s Association agrees. Determined to bring a halt to automation by whatever means possible, he and his members recognise what the stakes are, he says: “They understand it’s a fight for his or her very survival.”
