New York Area Longshoremen Seeing Jobs Dwindle From Automation

Fifty feet above the deck, crane trolleys flew through the air, their jawlike spreaders plucking boxes from the giant vessel’s hold. As the boxes were lowered onto the wharf, they were gobbled up by a waiting fleet of straddle carriers, busy arachnid vehicles that alerted a computer to the cargo’s arrival, and hauled it off to preordained locations in the yard.

From the asphalt dock, the scene looked a little like the launching pad at Cape Canaveral: a sprawling techno-space dominated by Jurassic-size, seemingly autonomous machines. One astonishing thing about the longshore business these days is how its vast scope — tons of roses from Costa Rica, sneakers from South Korea and children’s clothes from Malaysia are moved each year — requires so few visible human bodies.

Much of the work takes place indoors. Up in a control room, sitting among some peers, a superintendent monitored a digital schematic of the ship, tracking the operation, step by step, in real time. His blinking, changing screen showed the number of containers already unloaded and the number still aboard. It showed how many crane lifts and straddle-carrier moves had been accomplished and, moreover, whether the ratio of moves-per-15-minute-increment was faster, or slower, than the terminal had planned.

Sitting in an office nearby was James Pelliccio, the president of the terminal, one of six such outfits that make up the Port of New York and New Jersey and lie in a loose semicircle south of Manhattan from Newark Bay through the Kill Van Kull to Upper New York Bay. “The way I see it, we’re not really in the transportation business anymore,” Mr. Pelliccio said. “We’re in the information business.”

It was a striking thing to say about the classic New York task of handling seaborne cargo, an activity that, if only in the collective imagination, still remains connected to the grueling leg-and-shoulder work immortalized on film by Marlon Brando. The truth, of course, is that today’s port is driven more by brains than by brawn. Terminal workers speak a florid corporate language of “space optimization” and “key performance indicators.” Longshoremen click computer mice and complain about Microsoft Windows as everyone else in the white-collar world does.

It is partly because of these mechanical and technological advances that the New York area ports are now booming, after the last few difficult years. In 2011, the six terminals in Brooklyn and New Jersey and on Staten Island handled the equivalent of 5.5 million container loads of cargo, more than at any point since New York was founded by the Dutch. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey estimates that this year will be just as busy, leading one former Port Authority economist to write in August that the city is in “striking distance” of reclaiming from Los Angeles the title of the country’s busiest trade zone.

The history of the region’s port has always been marked by transformation, whether in 1825, when the Erie Canal was opened, allowing trade with the flourishing Midwest; or in 1956, when standardized containers began ushering out the era of winching unevenly shaped break-bulk cargo out of holds.

Those at the port today agree that this is another moment ripe with change, even if they disagree about what that change will bring. The Panama Canal is scheduled to be widened in a few years, and the Port Authority will, by then, have spent the better portion of a $3.8 billion capital investment plan to attract its massive freighters, which will have nearly double the capacity of current cargo ships. Terminal executives, like Mr. Pelliccio, have spent an additional $1 billion on infrastructure improvements, eagerly joining the “arms race” for business out of Panama against rival ports in Long Beach, Calif.; Norfolk, Va.; and Savannah, Ga.

While all this money and frenzied preparation have lent the port an atmosphere of energy, it has also destabilized its inherent balance of forces, as a small group of stakeholders — shipping companies, terminal owners, the Port Authority, the longshoremen’s union — jockeys to promote specific visions of the future. Not surprisingly, these conflicting visions have become a central issue in the bitter contract talks between the union and its local negotiating partner, the New York Shipping Association. The talks fell apart last month and would have resulted in a strike on Oct. 1, right before the Christmas inventory season, if a federal mediator hadn’t gotten both sides to agree to a three-month extension.

Beyond the specifics — the shippers’ frustration, say, with antiquated work rules or the union’s concern with protecting jobs against advancing automation — the debate has pitted self-professed visionary capitalists, who have spent a fortune hoping to seize the next big thing, against a shrinking working class that sees itself as besieged not only by management and an unsympathetic news media, but also by potential obsolescence.

“The longshore community is worried that the next phase of evolution will render them irrelevant,” said Jim Devine, the president of Global Container Terminals on Staten Island, which recently began a $350 million automation project. “In my opinion, that’s not true. While jobs will be lost, new jobs will be created.”

Officials from the International Longshoremen’s Association turned down repeated requests to answer questions for this article. Then again, the facts speak for themselves.

Thirty years ago, there would have been 40 or 50 longshoremen — lashers, hustlers, checkers — working on the CSAV Pyrenees. Now, there were fewer than half that.