As L.A. ports automate, some workers are cheering on the robots | Hacker News Reader

As L.A. ports automate, some workers are cheering on the robots

latimes.com

92 pointsnotlukesky123 comments

It’s hard to root for the ILWU. I grew up in San Pedro, where many of the long shoremen live (near the port of L.A.). Once you’ve known these people for a while, you start to understand that the problem is not only a strong union but also a stubborn and incompetent people.

The workers there are known for working doubles while on meth/speed. There are horror stories of crane operators high while operating machinery. Every so often a worker is flattened by a container.

Outside of work, the longies act like royalty in San Pedro. I grew up with their self entitled kids who would refuse to study in high school because they knew their parents would get them into the union. They drive around in jumbo SUVs like maniacs around town.

The longshoremen are still living off the karma of bloody Thursday, but one day that karma will wear off and the port will be modernized.

That might have been then. But I haven't heard anything like that for Port of Oakland. The Bay Area ports have drug testing when you get a job and random drug testing when you have the job. I knew someone who worked at SFO (ports is ports) and he said if you failed a drug test you got counseling, .... But if you failed a second, it was a lifetime employment ban.

This is for Port of Seattle.

https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Drug...

That said, I'm completely in favor of automating this. Oakland is downwind from the port and anything which cuts down on idling fumes is a good thing.

"Random drug testing" often tends to be less than random. I know people who have worked in drug tested industries and they'd always get a heads up or be able to skip out of testing when they needed to.

Use of amphetamines on the job is incredibly common, even in professional white collar industries. When there's work to get done, it gets done. Everyone knows it goes on, and you'd rather have speedy workers than workers falling asleep at the wheel. Obviously the actual solution is that you employ enough workers and ensure that they get adequate sleep. Using drugs for work is a fast and easy pathway towards addiction.

Amphetamines (or basically crystal meth) is becoming super popular in China. I've heard a bunch of stories from the news and anecdotes from people living there. Something something evil capitalist drug-of-choice.

But ultimately that sort of thing is more destructive than helpful. Missing valuable hours of sleep and the (well recorded) low ROI of working long hours is extremely overrated in its utility to society. Which has been a particular problem in asian work cultures where working yourself to death is cheered on. While actual output of those hours and big-picture returns of employing someone over a long period of time, where outside-of-work things like family and health really does matter, is often ignored.

> they knew their parents would get them into the union

Ironic that union membership would become just another form of heritable wealth.

It feels just like rent control. They’re obviously not equivalent, but they’re similar in that you’re just changing the rules for how people are prioritized for access to finite resources; you’re not really increasing availability of said resources

It has in Hollywood especially things like key grip jobs are passed down generation to generation. Having none of this in LA I spent half my working life homeless with a master's degree in Socal the economy is all about what you inherit not what you do the system has treated me Lowe than a dog my entire life despite my skills and education I'm simply someone you hit with cars and leave for dead

Yeah, I’m fine with questioning heritable wealth, but it should be across the board.

We shouldn’t chop up the middle class’ heritable tokens while letting the upper class keep theirs.

That just makes things worse.

Not all heritability is identical nor are their side effects. A literal caste system is worse than generational wealth transfer.

While one may gave an advantage to their off spring the previous effectively restricts others and is way unhealthier for society.

Just treating it like factions where just whose team is good for isn't a very healthy approach.

We shouldn't avoid chopping up one form of inheritable wealth just because we can't target all of it effectively or all of it at once though.

It's a great evil that needs to be stomped on viciously.

Hollywood is about who you know. That would be the same without the unions.

Basically every industry is like that. Leads to my comment that at a job you get paid in money, experience, and connections. People fret about being underpaid and don't consider how bad it is being chintzed on the others. Especially the last one.

I’m sorry to hear that you are feeling so upset about this.

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t seems that way to most of the people, most of the time.

Maybe somehow you can get to a place where your influence on your fate seems more real?

Is it ironic? Restricting the labor supply is the core of a union's ability to demand higher wages for its members.

Even if we were to accept that, there are many ways of "restricting the labor supply"; and nepotism is just about the least efficient you could think of. If you're going to "restrict" access to something, it should be done by rewarding individual merit and competence.

(At least that would imply a pretty nice improvement in labor conditions - no more workers being flattened by containers! Which is also the kind of thing unions typically care about.)

> If you're going to "restrict" access to something, it should be done by rewarding individual merit and competence.

It should be the case no doubt, but often isn’t because there’s less to leverage. Sometimes you need a favor, you know? But if you give a job to Joe Schmuckus that he could get anywhere, whats the motivation to do you a solid?

There are at least three propositions in your comment:

- Efficiency is implicitly good.

- Material rewards can/should be allocated according to some measure of individual merit and competence.

- Meritocracy and nepotism are distinct.

I tend to agree, but these statements are at least controversial (if not obviously wrong) within the political consciousness that does labor organizing these days. Read Jacobin sometime, you'll see vehement opposition. Internalizing the violent logic of capitalism, etc.

it's not wealth, it's advantage. once you get the job handed down to you, you still have to do the work to get the money, unlike wealth.

not saying jobs should be doled out that way, but it's quite different to get a chance at future income vs. having it mounded in your lap without lifting a finger.

That's just as true with wealth. Sure, you could spend your wealth down, but that's like eating your seed corn; very few actually do that, because it means you're not wealthy anymore afterwards.

Uh, the money grows by itself if properly invested. Investing in an index fund hardly counts as working.

I think you're vastly over-estimating how much you actually need to do your job to stick around in a workplace heavy on connections/nepotism. I have stories from state government that are almost beyond belief. Elected officials using backwater departments as a place to give jobs to people they owe favors is a recurring scandal in my state. Said people get a six figure salary just for showing up, sometimes not even that, somebody noticing lots of people paid for not showing up is how the "scandal" often starts. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the people who got their jobs by knowing someone do their jobs but a disturbing number don't.

This is why we should be thankful for pure capitalism. Inefficient companies should go bust and overtaken by those who are more efficient.

Advantage can be pretty synonymous with wealth though. Could be your dad happens to run the "People's Industry X" or simply you inherited a role that "X many people have to hold for the production to be not shut down".

> it's not wealth, it's advantage. once you get the job handed down to you, you still have to do the work to get the money, unlike wealth.

So like a taxi medallion. Which when sold on a free market had (before Uber, in NYC) a market value on the order of a million dollars.

That's a pretty huge advantage to pass down.

No, a taxi medallion could be rented out to drivers. For example, for a period Michael Cohen owned 34 NYC medallions.

Right, but the reason it has value is that it's tied to a high paying job where the supply of labor is limited. (Which is why, as soon as Uber flooded the labor side, the value of taxi medallions plummeted.)

If longshoremen were allowed to buy and sell their union memberships (say in the form of "union member medallions") they'd probably have similar value to taxi medallions.

You can’t make a loyal mafia out of just anyone who shows up.

It’s not that different than communist systems that result in a class of people who leverage their position to enrich themselves and their families.

The problem isn’t the economic system, the problem is human nature.

Rents are by their nature exclusionary; it is hardly surprising they became hereditary rights. They are called guilds after all.

I experienced them early in my career working for a shipping company. They were quite willing to attack the while collar staff trying to get to work while they were on strike, despite not being the same job, not being on strike and our office was not even in the port, just nearby and despite being paid a LOT more than we were. The salaries were insane and the theft was something else. We shipped a lot of beer and if a fork lift was going to damage a pallet, it would just happen to be a beer pallet and just happen break a couple of bottles. The pallet would be considered destroy and they would never need to pay for beer while they had the job.

I'm sure you can find bad and annoying people in any group. I have no way of knowing whether your story is representative at all.

I think this is most ports? (Except the royalty part)

On the west coast canada.

Most people I hear about at the ports are wasted, drunk, or doing some coke or else at the port.

Have heard recently of dudes banging prostitutes(street walkers, not "escorts") in the parking lot... so there's that.

I think just the fact its really good money for grunt work, requiring no education, any job that has these characteristics are bound to have people who do crazy things or like to get messed up on the job. It's the people the jobs attract

While true, you won’t hear about the ones that go to work, do their job, and go home to take care of their family.

Those stories are both boring and work against the narrative that they deserve lower pay.

> really good money for grunt work

Really good money for grunt work plus the risk of being flattened by a container. I think I'll pass.

Pretty much all grunt work comes with the risk of being flattened by something. If it didn't it would pay much less.

Looking up the history of Bloody Thursday, I can’t find a clear cut academic account of what actually happened. Do you have any sources?

I believe that's when all west coast ports first unionized. Some believe unions can stifle innovation and progress. I believe that there's some truth to that.

It was apparently a deadly altercation between police and workers. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts show disagreement about who started it. Police say that the parade of striking workers broke the line and headed as a mob toward the piers, and started pulling inspectors out of cars, tried to tip over police cars, etc. The union replied that the police just started firing shot guns into the crowd.

Construction unions in NYC have certainly done this. We have a terrible subway because it costs about 10x/mile to build here compared to London or Paris. Unionized employees often make $300,000 or $400,000 a year for manual labor. Crane operator make $700,009 a year. It's completely insane.

Interesting data for Los Angeles (from maximente link below https://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/PositionDetail.aspx?employe...)

I fetched the data using curl and filtered out any rows where wages were less than 24,960 (minimum wage in California).

  Wages:
  Max = $526,553
  Mean = $111,095
  Median = $106,749
  P75 = $137,051
  P90 = $173,958
  P95 = $201,611

https://ibb.co/qk2dfd9

Health And Retirement: (not sure if this is a separate yearly contribution by the city) https://ibb.co/c19Qcff

Citation needed on these numbers. They strain credulity.

I personally knew longshoremen who were making close to $300k working as clerks in an office (this was about 15 years ago, so adjust for inflation). Clerks were the most coveted job that senior longshoremen wanted since you sat in an AC office away from any danger and made top dollar.

it's all online, just go look it up. here's some firefighter that makes $300k. help yourself.

https://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/PositionDetail.aspx?employe...

I'm curious where you're getting these wage stats from

I wouldn't be surprised if they're accurate. Here in the port of LA there's around 20 guys making $400,000-600,000. You could make the argument that the work can be dangerous, requires skill, etc. etc. But that skill must be highly genetic, because most of them work or used to work the same union jobs as their fathers.

Edit: after doublechecking TransparentCalifornia there might only be around 15 guys making $400k and up at the harbor. I accidentally included some firefighters, who also have a tendency to rack up the overtime.

I would guess those numbers have to be largely due to overtime regardless of occupation. In a previous job, it wasn't unheard of for blue collar workers to get $200k+ but overtime hours made up a disproportionate amount of their income. This was in the midwest where housing and cost of living is relatively cheap, so it may even be on par with the numbers quoted for longshoremen.

Yeah but is the overtime real?

In my experience, yes. The overtime is "real" in the sense that it's actually needed and worked. Of course there's people who will game the system like in any arrangement and put off work so that they can instead do it while getting paid an overtime rate, but that seemed to be the exception. What makes you question whether or not it is "real" overtime?

Interesting. Sounds a lot like Season 2 of The Wire.

Meanwhile across town parents are indicted for trying to get their kids into USC and people are dying on the ER floor.

In all that I never realized the good life was a union job.

"Trying to get their kids into USC" is very kind description for a program of bribery and systematic lying on college applications.

> .. workers there are known for working doubles while ..

this is classic slander .. you just grouped every worker into some obviously reckless and illegal BS. Whatever is said after this will play to the emotions and prejuidice of the reader -- anti-factual AND anti-empathy at the same time

> On one side are well-paid union members, many of them third- and fourth-generation dockworkers.

Which highlights one of the dirtier parts of the history of union jobs: the rampant nepotism and exclusionary culture it develops in local communities. Valuing who you know in a community over your merits as a worker. It had a long history of being used to keep black workers out of white jobs: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646 and the note about workers taking "2hr lunch breaks" is unsurprising in such a culture.

Note that Shanghai and Rotterdam's ports are already leagues ahead in terms of automation.

On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation. This is why you see such a high level of automation in Europe, Australia etc: cost of labor is higher.

I think the US has made the wrong tradeoff, but this factor has gone back decades.

> On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation.

Are you saying that ports in China have high wages AND high union rates compared to US? Because even if that was true, it didn't stopped them automating the ports.

Good point I was talking about OECD countries, basically.

China has a different problem, though related. Of course unions are illegal there ("not needed -- the communist party represents the workers"). But they have a large pool of uneducated very low cost labor they are trying to keep out of the cities (e.g. via Hukou system), trouble with controls on things like "shrinkage" (containers help a lot here) and yes, relatively high wages for the workers who are in the port cities (working in factories and white collar jobs).

LA Longshoremen have been fighting automation for my entire lifetime. Every five years, there's a rash of stories about it, and then Longshoremen eventually get even bigger guaranteed-pay-regardless-of-work deals, and the next token amount of automation happens.

From the complaints of the trucker they interviewed, it sounds like Maersk has a management problem. Crane operators have long breaks because the work is taxing. But having an operator on break shouldn’t mean the crane stops. Two hour breaks are basically split shifts. So five operators for four cranes should cover you. If the don’t all work identical split shifts.

Robots are a pretty passive aggressive way to get rid of bad management.

Trying to fix people problems with technology is pervasive unfortunately.

It’s also sometimes the only way, with certain people problems.

Other way around, robots are a way to get around the consequences of bad management while the managers keep their jobs. Was middle management slashed too when the robots were rolled out?

Middle managers don't typically keep their jobs for long once all their direct reports are gone.

No, they were already slashed back in the early 90s as systems computerized.

It's also a good way to ensure that wealth becomes concentrated in upper management. I'm all for automation provided it's done in a way that workers would actually want and ensures they continue to get a (growing) piece of the pie.

Surprisingly, there is no mention in the article of how the truckers feel about the threat of automation to their own jobs.

Pretty much every single truck driver I've talked to on the subject is in deep denial. They believe that the weird layout of the loading dock at some warehouse could never be navigated by automated system or that them handing documents to someone at the point of delivery cannot be automated. They don't seem to understand just how much capital businesses are willing to spend to get rid of reoccurring labor costs.

If there are any bright spots in all of this, it's that trucking has a high turnover rate already so few will directly lose their jobs and that trucking in general is rough on the body and the mind. The difficult question to answer is where will all of the people who would have gone into trucking going to go instead?

> They don't seem to understand just how much capital businesses are willing to spend to get rid of reoccurring labor costs.

The trucking industry doesn't need to automate to slash labor costs. Exploitation is much simpler and more effective.

A lot of truckers get the lesson eventually. The hard way. See for example:

https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forc...

A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.

If a driver quit, the company seized his truck and kept everything he had paid towards owning it.

If drivers missed payments, or if they got sick or became too exhausted to go on, their companies fired them and kept everything. Then they turned around and leased the trucks to someone else.

Drivers who manage to hang on to their jobs sometimes end up owing money to their employers – essentially working for free. Reporters identified seven different companies that have told their employees they owe money at week’s end.

Company mining towns all over again, eh?

My guess is that the "death of trucking" will come in two parts.

The part they say is 'hard' - is definitely a hard nut to crack - but maybe only a few percentage of the time they spend trucking.

The "endless trips down thousands of miles of interstate, whilst remaining alert" - well that definitely sounds like something robots could do better right now.

If I were "Lord of all truckers", I'd be negotiating right now. Build some idiot-robot-proof lots near major cities that their new robot overlords could drop off/pick up from, and then focus on just the difficult short trips from these lots to drop-off/pick-up points. Nobody else seems to be working on building these hubs, and truckers themselves could send a day working to/fro and then sleep in their own beds.

Truckers are fucked because of motor carrier regulations that were changed to bust unions in the 80s.

There’s no organization going to happen because distance trucking operates from labor hostile states.

That said, the automation story is overplayed. Trains are the threat to trucking as fuel goes up.

What about electric trucks?

Almost like a railway?

You need a lot of cargo heading into the same direction for railways to work. Without a direct connection it's still cheaper but much slower than rail. Automated truck "trains" could work well for much less volume, i.e. 3-5 trucks going between two cities.

Fedex and UPS would be well suited to that, they can easily pool a few trucks that have 95%+ route overlap and drive roughly at the same time.

> The difficult question to answer is where will all of the people who would have gone into trucking going to go instead?

Revolution? I know and see lots of cheering in the tech world for automated driving, but not a lot of honest discussion about how it will probably be the largest upheaval in social order in at least a century, if not longer.

Last I looked, in something like 48 of the 50 states the number one job involved driving for pay. While I happen to think we are further from driving automation than is usually presented, when it does come it will basically come all at once. There will just not be enough time for these millions of people to be absorbed elsewhere in the economy. Will be very interesting to see how society responds.

LIFO, Last In First Out, likely will be the response if several million are put out of work, or more accurately, unable to find work in a labor market where demand for human drivers has been significantly reduced. In a crowded labor market, there is a desire to thin out the competition. Those with the weakest connections here will get the brunt of the response.

I'm not sure that it will happen all at once. My guess is long haul trucking restricted to interstates and certain limited access highways will be the first to be automated while residential delivery will be the last. The window might be relatively short. Perhaps five years or less from the start of autonomous driving until it's almost all autonomous. Certainly not longer that ten.

It will be there when auto-driving trucks come out in the near future. I think the trucks will get automated first, and then maybe city transit, especially subways, then it will spread from there.

Any work that doesn't require a huge amount of human intelligence or human interaction will be automated maybe sooner than we think.

But trucking does require a decent amount of human intelligence and interaction, for now. (My dad is a trucker. He’s 50+, it won’t matter to him if his job gets automated.)

About the only place that self-driving trucks can do decently is long-haul highway travel, and that’s probably the place where it’s most needed. Any type of intra-city travel, and low-speed maneuvering requires a lot of I/O and responding to a wide variety of conditions. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying that the work involved in automating that may not be worth the effort compared to paying a trucker.

Wow, your dad is in an unusually good financial situation if at the age of 50 it "won't matter to him if his job gets automated".

Truckers earn a lot. Especially owner-operators. Much more than you might assume. If he had been a trucker for most of his life, I would assume he probably had enough savings for early retirement.

His job isn't getting automated tomorrow or even in the next 5yr and there are very, very few 50yo truckers that are dragging a dry van around the interstates (the first job to be automated)

The opposite really, but he has poor health, and will probably rely on me to support him. Plus, the comment below mentions what I was thinking: by the time automation happens, he won't be trucking anymore.

“Large corporations pit worker against worker,” said Joe Gasperov, president of ILWU Local 63, which represents the clerks. “I feel sorry for the truckers. They’re exploited. They’re paid by the load, not the hour, so they assume all the risk of terminal delays. And some companies care more about saving a buck than servicing the trucks.”

Let's not pay by what you produce (number of loads), but by how much time you take, and drivers will not care about the delays, and the ILWU will not care about delays, and you will have a more efficient, egalitarian system? Yeah, right. Then you will get ILWU types driving trucks and taking their time is all you will have in the end.

There is a structural problem though, where the truckers don't have the leverage to minimize their downtime.

It could be that truckers that arrive on time for a pickup get a payment from the port when they experience an excessive delay. Incentive for the port to perform, harm reduction for the trucker, etc, but they don't have it in place because they can get truckers without it.

Salaries work pretty well in most places.

Yes, as I responded above where typically you are in an office or report to someone regularly. Sales people make some of the highest salaries on a low salary with commissions for the sales they produce.

> Let's not pay by what you produce...

Aren't...a ton of jobs paid by the hour, or salaried?

Shouldn't we, according to this logic, only pay software engineers for lines of code written?

Maybe. People hire by the hour or salary after an interview, and supposedly vetting the employee to be able to produce an expected amount of work at a reasonable quality, while being sequestered in an office under supervision (usually). A trucker is on the road, and until the latest in GPS tracking and packages with sensors, was pretty much their own person. It would be reasonable to gauge their work performance by the load.

The commodity you sell as an employee is time. Piecework is dumping risk in the employee.

Should developers be paid by the lines of code they produce?

If lines of code were a useful commodity in themselves? Yes it would be reasonable. Now we know that is not the case and any attempt to do so would ens in foregone disaster.

The reason not to do things like that is if said metrics can do more harm than good. However freight is pretty commodity by definition. Aside from not doing damage to goods and people, throughput is basically the only things that matter in that context.

Employees demanding a "standby base rate" would also be sensible if they were required to wait while lacking work to do.

What about by files of code they produce? Or webpages or assets? I imagine some contractors work this way.

Why can't what developers produce be commodified?

Should developers keep their job if they fail to deliver every sprint and miss deadlines? At the end of the day we are all judged by output; it just so happens that output is more easily measured in trucking (ie the status is binary) than in development.

People are paid based on what they have the leverage to demand, not based on what's right or wrong.

Regulated taxi fare formulas usually include both time and distance. A mile in a traffic jam will be based on time. Ten miles with no traffic will be based on distance. Why should truckers not get paid for sitting in a traffic jam if cabbies do? It still costs the trucker time that he can't be doing/working something/somewhere else.

Because then they might take excessively long breaks and get paid for not working. It would be extremely difficult to audit time spent working while being plagued by inefficiencies vs time spent messing around. Paying per delivery aligns incentives and is easy to audit. It also incentivizes truckers to push on dock workers to be more efficient which is in the entire supply chain's best interest.

You can make the same argument against paying developers a salary. Ditto on paying managers a salary.

Yes you could which is why you have contractors. However, it turns out that with "creative" work it's a lot harder to implement that payment model without having an incentives problem.

It's interesting to see that one group (truckers) are welcoming automation since it will boost their take home pay and the another group (longshoremen) are resistant because automation reduces their job security. I wonder if the truckers know that in the foreseeable future the activity of hauling containers in and out of port will be automated as well.

Most assume it's too hard to automate any time soon.

But most people driving to work assume we are nowhere near automating that either.

Automation will come sooner or later for many, if not most of the jobs that we have. Better to get prepared. From my POV, a lot of those jobs out there can already be 100% automated with human watch, we simply keep them for employment.

It's useful to look back in history: the automation of most of the work in agriculture over the last 10,000 years turned out to be mostly great in hindsight... but it was a lot slower than the pace of change today.

There also wasn't necessarily displacement.

Much of the agricultural automation that occurred in the 19th century was a response to labor shortages as people moved to industrial centers for jobs that were more attractive than farm labor.

In the UK people didn't move because the jobs were more attractive. They moved because the enclosure movement stripped them of land and they had nowhere else to go. They hated working in factories.

There are pamphlets by early industrialists who advocated this as a way of dealing with labor shortages in their factories and the natural idleness of peasants.

I don’t think the industrial revolution was slower.

My one experience with the port directly - I dropped off a car for a friend shipping the vehicle overseas. A complete logistics nightmare, and when it arrived in Europe, the plates had been stolen. Which port is to blame? Impossible to say, but the European port would have less use for stolen US plates.

TL;DR:

Truckers are all for automation at the port, as it makes their job better as there will be fewer queues and delays in loading their cargo. Their job security is not affected and they can deliver quicker.

Port workers are against automation, as it replaces their job descriptions.

Many of the port workers are also unionised and have more influence over the politicians and port authority. Truckers and immigrant port workers are not unionised and less effective at being heard.

Luddites will always resist technological improvements that reduce their job security. Everyone else will be for it as it improves their interaction with whatever that job delivers.

> Luddites will always resist technological improvements

availability and administration of "jobs" is a constant battleground; I doubt it brings much to the discussion to reduce an entire portion of the situation to name calling.

Perhaps people who want to build automation see a "bright future", while people with no interest in building automation, and real-lives like family and housing, do not see it that way

Just about everyone (not just Luddites) will tend to resist technology changes that reduce their job security.

Automation is certainly not always a net improvement for users of the technology though. For example, self-service can certainly be good--ATMs, provisioning servers, even scanning one or two quick items in the store. But self-service for non-barcoded, awkwardly shaped, or just for large quantities is mostly a regression relative to a cashier as are all the automated phone systems that mostly try to keep you from actually reaching a person.

Just about everyone (not just Luddites) will tend to resist technology changes that reduce their job security.

The Luddites specifically opposed the textile technology because it threatened their jobs. Characterizing someone as a Luddite because they oppose a technology which threatens their job seems entirely appropriate even if they haven't sworn an oath to the society.

I'm not aware of a good word for people who oppose or resist technological changes in general. "technophobe" is inherently pejorative. Some writers are trying to use "Neo-Luddism", but adding modifiers to identifying names to make them identify something else does not lead to clarity.

Self serve will improve to the point where scanning each item won't be required.

Assuming everything is tagged for the scanning system which, for example, fresh produce often isn't. (Some chains get around this by packaging the fresh produce so it doesn't need to be individually weighed. Of course this generates additional packaging waste.)

But, yes, in general I expect self-serve checkout will get better/easier over time.

Upscale stores all package the freshest looking biggest produce and sell as a package for slightly more. Meat is similiar. Could be implemented right now in some places.

Whole Foods is pretty much unpackaged today for produce and much of the meat and fish.

Important detail: the port workers are paid hourly, while the truckers are paid by the load. These radically different financial incentives drive a deep wedge between them.

Great point. Imagine sitting in line waiting on someone while they're getting paid and you aren't.

> Everyone else will be for it as it improves their interaction with whatever that job delivers.

That's awfully optimistic.

Can you think of any reasons it might NOT be true that “everyone else is better off when people lose jobs to automation“?

If enough people lose their jobs at once, they may organize, turn violent, and overthrow the government.

You may think im being hyperbolic, but this is a very real situation if the longshoremen, truck drivers, and loaders all lose their jobs to automation with a few years of each other. This is especially true in LA as those jobs make up a significant percentage of employment in that area.

I think the risk of the scenario you describe is low, but it could happen and it has in the past.

Other reasons also come to mind. When someone is out of work tax revenues decrease and a variety of social costs can increase. Infrastructure costs and welfare expenditures are immediately impacted. The unemployed person is still using public roads & services, but no longer paying taxes to fund them. If the displaced employee gets hurt, then emergency services costs increase. If they turn to crime, court and jail costs go up. And that’s a cursory list of impacts. So there are many ways society pays a price for automation.

Very cool that management can get an anti-union piece in the mainstream media. The bulk of the article is about sowing division within the working class, and then there's some reasonable points by the union below the fold about how the reason the truckers are salty is in part because they are getting screwed by their management in a way that places them in opposition to the dockworkers by being paid per load instead of hourly.

sad to see this grey. there's a clear angle on all sorts of issues, to include class and immigration status:

> On one side are well-paid union members, many of them third- and fourth-generation dockworkers. On the other is a nonunion, largely immigrant and Spanish-speaking workforce of independent contractors, who lack the hourly pay, overtime guarantees, pensions, healthcare insurance and job security that ILWU workers enjoy.

geez, it's almost as if there's a racial and cultural divide at play here...

The Bearded One would be sad, i think. if what i keep reading about trucking being the most popular job in many states per capita, then these workers don't understand the power they hold via striking. unfortunately they're probably not willing to do so, being "content" with slightly less horrible conditions than whatever/wherever they're coming from.

seriously, labor should be on the same side. those who helped capital get to the point that will allow them to automate will not be thanked or "grandfathered in". it's disappointing that truckers seem unwilling or unable to stand up for their enormous power. if 10% of trucks stopped running in the US, and 1% were found to have parked on various onramps/highways in the US, i have a feeling you'd have a major win for truck drivers and labor generally.

Or maybe using laws to prevent technology from making the port more efficient has downsides that affect not just management and shipping companies, but working class people as well.

How would keeping things exactly the same hurt working class people? Making the port more efficient helps business and consumers, but not workers who are continuously ground into the dirt, commanded, and deprived of basic necessities. These workers have a decent job because they have banded together to challenge management through their union.

Unfortunately, making things efficient on management's terms means that workers are fired rather than sharing in the fruits of a more efficient company. Only democratic ownership of the companies by the working class can change this equation. Then improved efficiency would be enacted on the workers' terms and would actually improve the lives of ordinary people.

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