Good day all. Recently the dock workers on the East Coast went on strike. The Strike lasted a few days before the Port administrations caved in to the union’s extortion. One of the things the union has opposed is anything that might improve the efficiency of moving cargo, especially automation.
The reason for this is simple. Automation can replace a number of workers. Of course, the reality is generally different. When automation is brought in, it may lower the number of people needed, but as more cargo is being moved, they find they may need more people.
This brings us to the president of the International Longshoreman’s Association, Harold Daggett. He recently went full Luddite on any automation anywhere. Here are the details from Fox Business News:
The union leader behind the ongoing dockworkers’ strike in the U.S. is not just against automation technology at America’s ports.
International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) President Harold Daggett warned in a recent interview that machines are taking too many people’s jobs, and pointed to automated toll booths and self-checkout machines as examples.
In an interview posted on ILA’s YouTube channel a month ago, Daggett said he has been fighting automation for years because machines replace workers.
“Take EZPass,” Daggett said, referring to the electronic toll system that allows drivers the ability to pay tolls without stopping their vehicles to pay. “The first time they come out with EZPass, one lane of cars were going through, and everybody’s sitting in their car and go, ‘What? What’s that all about? I’m gonna get one of them.'”
Everyone has EZPass these days. I have one. You rarely see backups at toll booths any longer since people generally only slow down enough to negotiate the toll lane. Where do you see backups? Where they have manned tollbooth. Usually these are needed to handle people towing trailers or commercial trucks.
“Today, all those union jobs are gone, and it’s all EZPass,” the ILA president continued. “People don’t realize it. Everybody’s got three cars. Everybody got an easy pass on the window, and they go through like it’s nothing, and they get billed in the mail. They didn’t care about that union worker working in the booth.”
You got that right Ace. Tollbooth attendants are making upwards of $40-$50K a year for doing nothing more then making change and handing out receipts. (Hamburger flippers at McDonald’s work harder) I won’t bother going into the problems of theft and embezzlement that has happened in the past. Then you have all the logistics of handling hundreds of pounds of coins, getting the counted correctly and deposited. Doing everything electronically saves millions of dollars.
Daggett then railed against self-checkout machines, and suggested federal lawmakers need to take action to stop the trend of automated technologies.
“You go in a store today, it’s self-checking — they don’t need anybody to check out,” Daggett said. “Someone has to get into Congress and say, ‘Whoa. Time out. This world is going too fast for us. Machines got to stop.’”
This dinosaur needs to just go extinct and become a pool of oil. Now personally, I hate self checkouts. They really aren’t that much faster and have significant issues. There is also the problem of people just not scanning items and sticking them in bags then walking out. A lot of places are either removing them or revamping how they work. They just aren’t ready for Prime Time in my opinion. However, the tech will get there eventually.
Of course, like pretty much all of these Union leaders, Daggett makes more then a lot of CEO’s.
Since entering the national spotlight, Daggett has garnered scrutiny from critics over his pay package and luxury lifestyle. Filings show that the ILA leader was paid more than $900,000 in salary last year.
I don’t know what the agreement was between the ports and the union, but of Daggett thinks that he’s stopping automation, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn he might be interested in. If he thinks that the Port management isn’t looking at how to automate as much as possible, he needs to have his head examined. I have a feeling that the next time the Union tries this, the Port Management will be ready and promptly start automating everything and hiring new people to run the systems. Then the ILA will discover the joys of being PATCO’d.
Thatisall
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