New container system could mean a new dawn for ports
Inventions, enthusiasm for new technology and boldness are said by historians and political scientists to be an essential feature for any nation's climb up the economic ladder. America's quick and triumphant rise as the greatest power in the world is testament to the principle.
Sadly, the converse is holding true in the ports up and down the West Coast. Efficiency, power and popularity are waning because the urge to do better is itself waning. But, there are still sparks of the old entrepreneurial spirit that give cause for hope and which deserve to be highlighted.
SSA Terminals is negotiating to buy new electric container cranes and associated equipment from China's Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Company, one of the top five crane makers in the world, for use at Pier J in Long Beach. They work on a grid and shuttle system – taking the boxes off the ship, slotting them into an electric grid, shuttling them to a storage park and then loading them onto rail cars.
All done by one or two people, none of them sitting in the crane but in a control room. (The thread of this story should be easy to predict.) At the moment, the operation is done by transtaineers, which, by virtue of the contract with the ILWU, have to be operated by four people. Also, the cranes have to be staffed by two drivers.
SSA boss Ed DeNike says container moves will soar from the average of a lowly 26-27 an hour (other assessments put them at 25 an hour) to as much as 50 an hour. This would revolutionize cargo handling in the US and put Long Beach up there with Rotterdam and Hong Kong. DeNike has been quoted as saying "Labor needs to be convinced", which no one will dispute, and says that costs per box can be at least halved.
An indication of the overloaded operational costs that bedevil the port can be gauged from DeNike's estimate that each longshore worker costs a terminal operator about $1,000 a day, when benefits are taken into account.
Obviously, the industry is more than curious to know how the ILWU will react. DeNike says employers won the right to introduce new technology in the last two contract negotiations (the latest went into effect in 2008 and lasts for six years) in return for giving union members big increases in pension, medical and related benefits. These, predictably, include huge payouts for loss of jobs.
"We, as employers, earned it. We deserve this technology," the SSA boss has been quoted in news reports. To that, insiders say not only "Amen" but expand it to include the whole industry.