The dockworkers union won a 62% pay raise thanks to President Biden, but it still opposes any automation. Wall Street Jornal

The Editorial Board Oct. 6, 2024 at 5:28 pm

The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) has reached a tentative agreement to return to work after winning a 62% pay raise over six years, but the labor dispute isn’t over. Round II will be fought over the union’s demand to protect its jobs forever by banning any automation at American ports.

The union’s demand is no automation—ever. In a Sept. 7 letter to fellow ILA members, union boss Harold Daggett and his executive vice president and son Dennis put it this way: “We want ironclad language, and we want the intent of that language in writing. Bottom line: the ILA does not support any kind of automation, including semi-automation.”

What they mean is they don’t want any technological advances that would make loading and unloading ships faster, safer and more efficient—e.g., smarter cranes, gates, and container-moving trucks that require fewer workers to operate. In other words, they want higher pay with no productivity gains, which is unsustainable in a competitive global economy.

The World Bank global port ranking helps show what this means in practice. The Container Port Performance Index 2023 ranks ports by the amount of time a ship spends in port. Not a single American port cracks the top 50, with top-ranked Charleston, S.C., coming in at 53. Yangshan in China is No. 1, and China is investing in ports throughout Latin America.

This isn’t the longshoremen’s first tangle with technology. In the 1960s the container revolution marked a shift from stuffing cargo inside the holds of a ship to putting cargo inside steel containers. Containers reduced the number of dockworkers needed, and the ranks of longshoremen declined as it was adopted. Today other nations are automating faster than the U.S. That means they are becoming cheaper and more productive.

By now the 78-year-old Mr. Daggett should have learned that the fight against productivity is a losing battle. Look at what happened to the British miners who thought they could oppose the closure of unprofitable coal pits and preserve their jobs. British textile workers a century earlier revolted against the introduction of mechanized looms.

The hard truth is that technological advances that make companies more productive often mean they need fewer workers. The longshoremen would do better in the long-term if the union negotiated sweeter buyout packages for senior workers who have grandfathered job protections, rather than trying to hold off the inevitable. It would also help displaced workers if they could count on a healthy and growing economy that created new and better jobs.

Fighting productivity tools that the rest of the world is adopting harms the U.S. economy and millions of Americans workers beyond the ports. Mr. Daggett—and his pal President Biden—owes his 50,000 members better.