Striking Port Workers’ Most Controversial Demand
Why you should support the International Longshoremen's Association's demands concerning automation
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
Last night, 45,000 workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association, which represents the people who load and unload goods at many of our ports, went on strike. The resulting total shutdown of East Coast ports will have dramatic consequences if it lasts for more than a few days. As ILA President Harold Daggett put it, “first week it will be all over the news . . . second week, guys who sell cars can’t sell cars . . . third week, malls start closing down . . . everybody is hating the Longshoremen now because now they realize how important our jobs are.” He’s undoubtedly right about the hostility– American capital and the American consumer do not like any disruption.
The ILA’s most controversial demand is a complete ban on certain forms of automation– cranes, gates, and container movement. Capitalists are furious. The shipping news outlet Lloyd's List accused Daggett of spreading misinformation on par with Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants because he… has been misleading about container rates. Business forces and the right are calling for the government to crush striking workers with the force of the law. “American competitiveness” demands pushing through ILA resistance and automating ports.
We should take the economic benefits of port automation seriously. I’ve heard a number of reasons why, practically speaking, automating these ports in particular might be unwise in general, not just for workers. But broadly speaking, faster movement of goods in ports means more economic activity, whether you want a Green New Deal or cheaper consumer goods. It’s easy to get from here to the position I’ve (apologies that this is anecdotal) seen from more than a few liberal and leftish commentators today: while it’s unfortunate that port workers’ livelihoods and power are threatened by automation, we can’t weigh down the American economy over a few unnecessary jobs. The ILA should accept automation, get all the money it can for it, let their industry change, and let their jobs as they know it die with them. Workers can hardly be blamed for defending their narrow interest, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree with them.
This perspective is wrong. Even if we put aside questions of pay equity– ILA members sacrificed a great deal during COVID– or details on automation– the benefits of automation in this particular way and in these particular ports may be limited at best– striking port workers are not actually defending a narrow interest at all. At stake here is “industrial democracy,” the right of workers to have a say in their work. This is a moral value, but also a practical economic concern. Technology always presents choices: which technologies will we invest in? How will we implement them? Who gets to benefit, and who gets to decide? When these choices are made from the top down, it hurts workers and the broader economy. The earliest forms of automation were cataclysmic, both for the workers involved and for the social fabric in general. They did improve material living standards– on average, in the long run, by some measures. But people don’t live on average.
An alternative world where automation was introduced more slowly, differently, and only with workers’ say is probably one with slower economic growth– though that’s not certain. But it is absolutely one in which better growth is possible. The economic disruptions of industrialization shattered the very communities it supposedly benefited, and ignited a new wave of colonial expansion and exploitation. We have a strong tendency to aggregate “technology” in a way we shouldn’t; the Industrial Revolution, in this view, is bad because it hurts factory workers but good because it leads to modern medicine or sewers. But nothing about modern medicine or sewers required 19th-century Japanese silk workers to burn to death en masse in unsafe night shifts– uncontrolled market competition in high-volume low-price industrialized textile production did that. Industrial democracy makes it possible for those most affected by technological change to limit its harms and disruption while we seek together to maximize its benefits. This does slow down progress in some areas. But speed isn’t a virtue if you’re about to drive right off the road.
Industrial democracy is also a more fundamental moral value. The cruelty of political coercion is something we generally agree on– the governor of your state shouldn’t have the ability to decide arbitrarily that your job shouldn’t exist. Yet when “the economy” makes that decision, we consider this normal, we throw up our hands, we say it is what it is– or worse, scorn anyone who dares to fight for an alternative. Advances in crane technology shouldn’t ruin your life. You shouldn’t be powerless to decide what your work will look like, in the present or in the future.
The core value of democracy is that you should not be powerless anywhere in your life. Economic changes should have to pass the same standard political changes do (in theory if not always in practice): if they’re truly beneficial to all, their advocates should be able to convince workers and the public to embrace them. If that frequently involves substantial concessions on pay or power, all the better. Industrial democracy is both a moral necessity and a practical good. While the longshoremen have played their hand reasonably well and earned stronger wages in the process, the ILA is not a “labor aristocracy” or protection racket. This is a struggle of human intention against the mindless demands of the market.
Automation struggles are relevant for all of us in the age of AI. I don’t want to oversell “artificial intelligence”-- its capacities are widely misunderstood, far more limited than they seem, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I continue to suspect the “age of AI” will be brief.
But we shouldn’t only defend the value of our jobs in economic terms. Even if AI could do all the things its boosters claim, we would have every right to reject it or shape it together. You and I and your co-workers and your neighbors and your family and your friends– we should decide what work looks like. Not Sam Altman, not the stock market, not venture capital, and above all not the mindless profit optimization they all serve.
You often hear people say technology is “inevitable.” But we’ve said no to, or determined the implementation of, new technology all the time. We rejected biological weapons because they promised calamity. We rejected 3D television because it was weird. Whenever someone tells you something is inevitable, what they’re really doing– whether they know it or not– is giving up on viable alternatives. From AI in schools to port automation, we have choices. No one can say with certainty what the right timing or manner for automating ports is– not shipping bosses, not the government, and certainly not the mindless operations of market competition itself. I wouldn’t want the longshoremen demanding I introduce AI into my classroom– I know better than they do, and it should be my right to have a say in my work. Likewise, I’m not going to demand they automate cranes– they know better, and it is their right to shape the place where they spend long hours moving the products we want and need. The ILA deserves a role in automation decisions– even and especially if that means simply saying no.