East and Gulf Coast port operators reached an agreement with a dockworkers union late Wednesday, resolving a labor dispute. threatened to stop the shipment Second time in three months.
The two sides — the International Longshoremen's Association and the United States Maritime Alliance — announced in a joint statement Wednesday evening that they had reached a tentative agreement on a new six-year contract that would avert a strike that was scheduled to begin Jan. 15.
“This agreement protects current ILA jobs and establishes a framework for implementing technologies that will create more jobs while modernizing East and Gulf Coast ports – making them safer and more efficient, and our supply chains. We will build the capacity needed to keep it strong,” both parties said in their statement.
Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.
This comes after members of the ILA ended three day walkout After reaching a temporary agreement with the USMX in October, which initially suspended the strike until January 15. While issues related to wages were resolved, job security issues remained, with the union looking for guarantees that the port would not use technology to replace workers.
ILA argued against overuse automation at portsThat being said, USMX wants to cut its labor costs and increase profits.
For their part, port operators and shipping companies argued that the US was lagging behind automated ports like Dubai, Rotterdam and Singapore.
The stakes were high for the American economy. Ports on the East and Gulf coasts handle more than half the nation's traffic in shipping containers, the steel boxes at the center of world trade that carry everything from smartphones to fresh fruit to automobiles.
Under the current contract with the Maritime Alliance, the highest-paid dockworkers earn $39 an hour, or $81,000 a year. Under a temporary agreement reached in October, the maximum hourly wage will increase to more than $60 an hour.
A 2019-2020 report from the Waterfront Commission, which oversees New York Harbor, found that a third of longshoremen based there earned $200,000 or more annually, including overtime pay. This did not include workers' share of the royalties on goods moved through the ports, payments which could come to thousands of dollars per year.
2024 According to the Government Accountability Office, the 10 largest US ports use some form of automation technology to move cargo. reportThese include automated gates, which allow trucks and containers to pass through cargo terminals with limited worker contact; so-called port community systems, which are digital platforms that automatically streamline logistics and supply-chain data; and technologies used in “Internet-of-Things” systems, such as RFID, GPS, and cameras, to operate equipment and track containers.
Only three domestic ports – Long Beach Container Terminal in Long Beach, California, and Trapac and APM Terminals Pier 400 in Los Angeles – are fully automatedAt fully automated ports, both horizontal and vertical container movement is controlled by machines. Other techniques used automatic port This includes AI-powered sensors, so-called digital twins – or similar, digital replicas of ports and blockchain to automate the recording of transactions and track container locations.
In 2023, the Center for Innovation in Transport in Barcelona, Spain found “no clear evidence confirming that automated terminals outperform traditional terminals,” although the research firm acknowledged that technological advances could change things in the future. Can.