Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When some 25,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike last October, bringing three dozen container ports on the east and Gulf coasts of the US to a halt, there was widespread alarm. Some predictions were that, because these ports handle one-quarter of the country’s international trade, the stoppage could cost the American economy up to $4.5bn a day, reignite inflation and initiate ripple effects that would be felt across the world.In the event, the panic lasted just 72 hours. Following hurried negotiations and the offer of a salary increase worth nearly 62 per cent over six years, the longshoremen agreed to return to work, albeit temporarily — perhaps “the most lucrative three days in labour-management history”, in the words of Patrick L Anderson, CEO of business consultancy Anderson Economic Group.But in some ways the battle is only just getting started. Although it was the pay rise that caught the attention of the media, the union’s real issue is with automation — specifically proposals by the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX), which represents port operators and container carriers, to equip more US ports with semi-automated cranes. These cranes are equipped with advanced technology that makes them faster and more efficient to operate, say the owners. But the ILA claims that their introduction threatens their members’ livelihoods. Unless USMX agrees to a total ban on automated machinery, the union has threatened to strike again as early as next week.“We embrace technologies that improve safety and efficiency,” the ILA’s colourful president, Harold Daggett, said in a statement. “But only when a human being remains at the helm.” The dispute has drawn attention not just because of its potential outsized impact, but because it is one of the first of its kind. As more and more businesses experiment with next-generation robotics, US labour unions representing industries as varied as UPS drivers, Las Vegas casino workers and grocery store employees are fighting for provisions to be added to contracts that focus on retaining jobs and compensating displaced workers in the event of automation. What were previously run-of-the-mill negotiations over pay and conditions have mushroomed into larger, more existential disputes over the relationship between humans and machines. Some 70 per cent of the 12mn people represented by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations now worry about being replaced by technology, estimates AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler: “Workers are fed up with how they’ve been treated for a long time and are scared about what the future might hold.”Whatever contract the longshoremen negotiate, say analysts, could help provide a template for agreements nationwide. “What you see is labour attempting to have a seat at the table,” says Robert Bruno, a labour professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.US investors have piled more than $15bn into robotics start-ups since 2019, according to PitchBook, and the remarkable growth of artificial intelligence in the past 18 months has begun to show dividends. Jobs that looked like they could only be done by people suddenly look risky; economists have warned of wholesale and disruptive changes to the workforce as machines are capable of more and more.Adding to the pressure in economies like the US, say business owners, is sluggish growth in the labour force, which is making it increasingly hard to recruit workers. President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations — he told NBC News last month that he aims to deport all of the estimated 11mn people in the US illegally in the next four years — will probably only intensify such concerns.As Trump weighs public vows of support for some unions, including the Longshoremen, with relationships in Silicon Valley, the robot wars are likely to become a flashpoint inside the new administration. Elon Musk is a full-blown enthusiast for the technology, speaking of fully automating Tesla factories and eager to show off a Tesla-developed humanoid robot called Optimus. But Trump, perhaps mindful of his Maga base, appears to take a different view: writing on Truth Social about the dockworkers last month, the president-elect said that “the amount of money saved [by automation] is nowhere near the distress, hurt and harm it causes for American workers.”Leaders including Daggett have vowed that if they succeed in holding off robots, they plan to work with unions across the globe to do the same.“In workplaces that are unionised, at least in industries with unions that are making this a priority, that’s the one likely effective mechanism . . . to keep industries from kind of running wild,” Bruno says.One reason that the longshoremen’s strike has become so bitter, says the union, is they feel they have been here before. Before the advent of containerisation, longshoremen spent long days unloading individual boxes, barrels and crates, then transferring their contents on to trucks and freight trains — dangerous but reliable, well-paid work that, at its peak, employed an estimated 100,000 men in ports around the US.After the trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean championed the 8ft-wide steel container in the mid-1950s, that world fell away. The new technology meant that cargo could be transferred with a minimum of effort and drastically reduced costs. Tens of thousands of jobs disappeared almost overnight.Despite a huge increase in world exports, the number of longshoremen employed at the Port of New York and New Jersey plummeted from 55,000 in the 1950s to about 4,000 today, says Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of maritime business at Texas A&M University. “It destroyed a lot of longshoremen’s jobs and was a big issue,” Rodrigue says.When semi-automated cranes were first brought in to terminals on the east coast of the US in the early 2000s, ILA leaders say they agreed to the changes because it would help create jobs. But they now say that the opposite happened. “Automation, whether full or semi, replaces jobs and erodes the historical work functions we’ve fought hard to protect,” Daggett said in a statement. (The ILA did not agree to an interview with the Financial Times.) A 2022 survey commissioned by the west coast dockworkers’ union found that partial automation of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach resulted in the loss of nearly 1,200 jobs in 2020 and 2021.USMX says that because most of the ports its members operate have no spare land available, the only choice is to “densify terminals” by adding machinery that speeds up operations. In a conventional crane, an operator sits inside a cab, lifting containers off ships and sorting them, before transferring them to trucks or trains — a highly skilled job that can earn workers as much as $200,000 annually. In a semi-automated rail-mounted gantry crane (RMG) system, the operator works remotely from an off-site office, monitoring the crane via video link but letting the system do most of the work. The job requires similar skills and training, but fewer people are required.Union leaders claim they have already accomplished a “leap in productivity” using some of this technology, but say that further automation is a step too far. “This isn’t about meeting operational needs — it’s about replacing workers under the guise of progress, while maximising corporate profits,” Dennis Daggett, the president of ILA Local 1804-1 and Harold Daggett’s son, wrote in a recent essay on the union’s website.The Longshoremen are right to be afraid, Rodrigue says, estimating that as many as 40 per cent of them are at risk of losing their jobs.But USMX describes calls to ban automation as “unworkable”, saying that modern crane technology has “nearly doubled” both the throughput of containers and the number of workers at the ports using it. “USMX is not, nor has it ever been, seeking to eliminate jobs,” it said in a statement.Since General Motors first put robots on assembly lines in the 1960s, carmakers have been pioneers in automation. Yet until the rise of AI, other industries — ones requiring more dexterous tasks, or where robots might need to respond to unpredictable or hazardous environments — struggled to follow suit.Yet recent advances have given machines capabilities that even experts previously thought were impossible, meaning that they are being used in an increasingly wide variety of workspaces. Manufacturing companies in particular have invested heavily, with total installations of industrial robots rising by 12 per cent to over 44,000 units in 2023 — the largest volume in at least a decade, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Again, the car industry has led the way, followed by electrical and electronics companies.US venture capital investment in robotics has risen from around $2bn in 2019 to more than $3.5bn last year, according to data from PitchBook. In the first nine months of 2024, there were 130 fundraising deals for robotics start-ups — more than across the entirety of 2019.Among the most high-profile was a $675mn investment last February by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft and Nvidia in Figure AI, a Silicon Valley start-up founded in 2022 that is working on a faceless, humanoid “general-purpose” robot. It said that month that these robots — whose cost to customers is estimated at between $30,000 and $150,000 — could complete tasks including moving a box on to a conveyor belt, potentially endangering the job of anyone working in, say, a distribution centre. The first models were delivered to a “commercial client” last month.On their annual trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year, members of the Culinary Union, which represents staff at casinos in the city, were shocked to see robots frying food and making cocktails.“If they put in machines, how are people going to make a living?” says Francisco Rufino, a cook at the Paris Las Vegas hotel and casino. “How are they going to pay for rent? How are they going to pay for food?”Employers and analysts say there are strong reasons to pursue automation. Salary increases experienced by many Americans in the past few years have come at a cost, says Laurie Harbour, chief executive of consultancy Harbour Results. “[American workers] fought for wages that could sustain our inflation,” she says. “The problem with that is it makes the US somewhat uncompetitive.”60.4%Economists’ estimate of share of Americans in work or seeking work by 2030, down from 67.3% in 2000Some sectors say that they are worried about running out of people, particularly for the most difficult and dangerous jobs. As the population ages and families struggle to find childcare, the share of Americans in work or seeking work has been declining for decades — dropping from 67.3 per cent in 2000 to 62.5 per cent late last year. Economists estimate that it will sink to 60.4 per cent by 2030.In a recent report by the recruitment site Indeed, analysts wrote that they expect that the dwindling “supply of workers will weigh heavily on the job market in coming years”, particularly if the Trump administration follows through on its deportation threats.Nick Durst, a senior analyst at the real estate developer The Durst Organization, cites the diminishing ranks of window washers in the US. Despite a boom in development, the number of people employed washing windows in the country has fallen more than 5 per cent since 2019, suggests analysis by IbisWorld.In 2022, the company’s venture arm invested in the maker of a glass-washing robot, Skyline Robotics, based in Israel. The Ozmo robot can now be seen scrubbing the windows of a skyscraper near Times Square. The investment is a way to be “proactive” in addressing the labour shortage, says Durst.“It’s very understandable to me why that next generation isn’t showing up,” says Skyline Robotics president Ross Blum. “It is a really tough job . . . Who wants to go hang 1,000 feet in the air today and do manual labour outdoors?”Blum and other robotics enthusiasts insist their goal is not to replace workers, but to give them tools to make them safer and more productive. Yet labour groups are unconvinced. Edwin Quezada, a produce manager at a Stop & Shop on Long Island, who is also a member of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union, says robots that can scan shelves overnight were “a double-edged sword”.“It makes some of the aspects of what we do easier,” Quezada says. “But then again, sometimes that technology is just a way of them eliminating more jobs.”In recent years, both retail and culinary unions have negotiated clauses in contracts they hope will protect human workers. Las Vegas casinos are now required to give people six months’ notice before implementing new technologies and free training on how to use them, plus severance packages for anyone laid off because of technology. UPS has agreed to negotiate with the Teamsters, one of the most powerful unions in the US, before introducing drones or driverless pick-up vehicles. New York retail stores whose workers are represented by RWDSU, including Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, also require management to come to an agreement before introducing new technologies. But that has not stopped anxiety about widespread job displacement. “Machinery is good for corporations,” says Rufino, the Las Vegas cook. “It saves them labour costs. But at the same time, the unemployment rate will skyrocket.”Machinery is good for corporations. It saves them labour costs. But the unemployment rate will skyrocketSome analysts argue that workers may be winning battles, but they are likely to lose the war. Few people have the kind of leverage enjoyed by dockworkers, says Rodrigue of Texas A&M. Yet if robots do succeed in taking over workplaces, economists are divided on how many people will actually be displaced. “Historically, widespread, massive job losses [just don’t happen] when new technologies emerge,” says Bill Rodgers, director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. “Does that mean it couldn’t happen? Possibly, but I would [side] with history.”Others are less optimistic. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu says that robots’ current capabilities mean that those most at risk of being displaced are in blue-collar jobs and lack college degrees, which may make it difficult for them to shift into the high-tech roles likely to be created by automation. That might boost economic inequality by “[driving] a bigger wedge between” workers who do not have college degrees and those do, Acemoglu says.Daggett of the International Longshoremen’s Association agrees. Determined to bring a halt to automation by whatever means possible, he and his members recognise what the stakes are, he says: “They understand it’s a fight for their very survival.”Additional reporting by Tabby Kinder in San Francisco
