Automate the Ports
The news that the International Longshoreman Association (ILA) agreed to suspend its strike until January is undeniably good news for just about every aspect of America’s economy.
But whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank’s most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which “reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction,” the World Bank notes.
That so many American ports are struggling to keep up with the rest of the world should be unacceptable. Fixing that ought to be one of the top priorities as negotiations between the ports and the ILA resume.
The union’s position is, unfortunately, that those inefficiencies aren’t just acceptable, but actually desirable.
The ILA’s strike had little to do with demands for higher wages—the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), which operates the ports, had reportedly offered a 50 percent raise to ILA workers, many of whom are already very well compensated. Instead, it seems to be driven mainly by the union’s desire to block automation at the ports where its members work.
As econ blogger Noah Smith points out, “port automation is already heavily discouraged, both by the ILA’s existing contract, and by Department of Transportation Rules that stipulate that automation is never allowed to reduce the number or quality of jobs. But now the ILA wants to ban automation completely.”
“Let me be clear: we don’t want any form of semi-automation or full automation,” two of the ILA’s top executives wrote in a letter to their members last month.
The problem is that American ports need more automation just to catch up with what’s considered normal in the rest of the world. For example, automated cranes in use at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands since the 1990s are 80 percent faster than the human-operated cranes used at the port in Oakland, California, according to an estimate by one trade publication.
It’s worth noting that the lack of automation, and the resulting inefficiencies, at American ports was a major factor in the
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