Same for the longshoremen union, much is still done by hand whereas in other countries the shipping infrastructure is largely automated and much more efficient.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...
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.
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.