If you were at any of the city council meetings where this topic was brought up it was a circus show with people repeating 'boston is a union town' and grilling waymo execs.
It is not mentioned in "Fighting Traffic", which would be quite an oversight!
"From the first discoveries, teamsters, lashing their horses, had clogged the roads of the Oil Regions with their loads of barrels. They were more than just a physical bottleneck. Holding a monopoly position, they charged exorbitant rates; it cost more to move a barrel over a few miles of muddy road to a railway stop than to transport it by rail from western Pennsylvania all the way to New York. The teamsters’ stranglehold on transportation led to an ingenious effort to develop an alternative—transportation by pipeline."
Interestingly, the Teamsters (IBT) represents a lot of oil pipeline workers today.
https://teamster.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/6617pipeline...
Oil was solely a lighting product at this point. The Teamsters were clearly not thinking 70 years into the future to stop automobiles. But I think the "monopoly" part of the quote is somewhat germain, even if it's just opinion of the author.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...
This has been studied and the main takeaway is that automated terminals are generally not more productive than conventional ones *once you control for things like terminal layout, cargo patterns, rail/truck integration, and geography.*
A lot of the “look at Rotterdam/Singapore/Shanghai” comparisons are misleading because those are purpose-built megaterminals with entirely different infrastructure and logistics networks.
US ports have different constraints (that have nothing to do with longshoremen) that make the specific automations more common in foreign ports less effective and sometimes counter effective here.
That’s not to say there aren’t automation improvements that could be made or Longshoremen labor is currently at some perfect optimal productivity equilibrium with automation, but it’s not a simple we need automation and they are in the way stopping it scenario.
Automation can certainly reduce some labor costs and improve yard density, but the idea that US ports are uniquely inefficient because dockworkers are manually moving containers around is mostly political rhetoric, not what the actual studies by people designing and running ports say.
Some reading: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...
https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24106498.pdf
https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/container-...
The Port of Oakland is a purpose-built container port. The Port of San Francisco is dead as a cargo port.
The Port of San Francisco stopped being a freight port because of containerization. A new container port was built in Oakland, using dirt and rock excavated for BART construction. San Francisco lost its freight rail service, and the railroad yard became the Mission Bay development. The San Francisco Belt Railroad closed in 1992. There used to be freight trains on the Embarcadero.
Something similar happened in London. A small non-union port on the east cost of Britain became the main container port, and container ships never made it to London. Not that they'd fit in the Thames River anyway. No more London dock workers.
In container ports, "by hand" means cranes and big forklifts. "Automated" means very few people in the container areas at all.
Port of Antwerp, 2015.[1] That's real, but sped up.
Is that true?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
FWIW I tried to get AI to substantiate it and came up empty. Maybe it's not as "extraordinary" as "Obama was a reptilian alien" or whatever, but for everything else what counts as "extraordinary" depends on your prejudices, I suppose. Regardless of whether it's "extraordinary" or not, it's definitely not common knowledge and needs to be substantiated rather than asserted without evidence.
The only few that should benefit are the owners. If a few workers try to benefit, they're greedy bastards who would be pounded down.
Do you have a source for any of this beyond "a corporate spokesmouth said so"?
If you're looking at a union there's a specific reason it formed, and probably a specific person in management behind that reason.
> A lose-lose for workers.
There's an ancient saying in labor: "the only thing worse than a union is no union."