Robots are playing a big part in the U.S. port strike. Here's how

As many as 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association walked off the job at 36 major U.S. ports on Tuesday after negotiations over higher wages and protection against automation broke down between the union and the United States Maritime Alliance, which represents shipping companies and ports.

The workers, who load and unload cargo at over a dozen major ports, “are prepared to fight as long as necessary, to stay out on strike for whatever period of time it takes, to get the wages and protections against automation our ILA members deserve,” ILA President Harold Daggett said in a statement.

Automation has already taken over some major ports, and studies show it has led to job losses for dockworkers. For example, a report from the Economic Roundtable found that automation eliminated 572 full-time-equivalent jobs a year at the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles in California in 2020 and 2021.

With automation, shipping companies have the advantage of “elimination of the inconvenience of dealing with American workers and, more specifically, the union that protects dockworkers,” the report, financed by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said. The union represents port workers on the West Coast.

“You don’t have to pay pensions to robots,” Brian Jones, a foreman at the Port of Philadelphia, told The New York Times.

In a Facebook $META post before the strike, Jack Pennington, president of a local ILA group, wrote about “the never ending threat of automation,” and how automation has left “thousands of workers” in the automobile industry “jobless.” He added the same is happening at major retail chains and grocery stores.

“So don’t be so quick to judgment on us the longshoremen of this country for fighting for our jobs because who knows when it will be your turn next,” Pennington wrote. “We are fighting for our rights to make a honest living not to allow a robot to wipe us out so that them corporate bastards can buy another vacation island somewhere!!!!”

The dockworkers’ strike could cost between $1 billion and $5 billion per day, analyses by Container xChange, a shipping container marketplace, and J.P. Morgan (JPM) found. If the strike persists, up to 100,000 jobs could be impacted, and U.S. economic activity could fall by between $4.5 billion and $7.5 billion a week, Oxford Economics said.