Workers' innovation vs. capitalist control of work process

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

How a high-tech toy provoked a dock strike
By Steve Kovsky, ZD Net AnchorDesk
October 10, 2002 9:00 PM PT

[snip]

THE CURRENT DISPUTE between dockworkers and port owners is a repetition of
the age-old union struggle, but with a technological twist: One of the
primary stumbling blocks is over the possible adoption of new technology
that could eliminate up to 800 union jobs. But what most media reports have
failed to mention thus far is that the technology at the center of that
dispute was invented by a member of the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU). He is, in fact, among those in danger of losing his
job if the technology is adopted.

Bob Carson, the "chief visionary officer" of three-year-old tech start-up
ContainerTrac, is also the chief clerk for Pier 80 in San Francisco. Adding
to the irony, ContainerTrac chief operating officer Red Smith says the
Berkeley, Calif., company's technology is actually endorsed by the union.

Smith confirmed ContainerTrac's estimate that about 38 percent of the ILWU's
2,400 ships clerks would lose their jobs if port owners adopt his company's
technology, which would employ a combination of GPS receivers, gyroscopes,
digital mapping, and motion sensors to automatically track the 8.5 million
containers that pour into West Coast ports every year.

However, the 800 lost jobs are not the central bone of contention between
the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). At issue are 200 new
jobs that would be created for high-tech operators of the ContainerTrac
system. Port owners of the PMA want the new jobs to be non-union, Smith
says, while the ILWU has vowed that the 200 tech workers must carry union
cards.

SO WHY would a longshoreman create a technology that puts his very
profession at risk? One assumes that financial gain is among his motives,
but so is saving lives, and solving a technological puzzle that has so far
confounded maritime engineers.

The puzzle is to find a way of tracking millions of containers as they flow
in and out of West Coast ports, without relying on costly labor or
endangering lives. One of the reasons the ILWU supports the ContainerTrac
system, Smith says, is because five ships clerks have been killed in the
line of duty already this year, victims of the severe and dangerous
conditions that prevail in the waterfront realm of heavy equipment and
RV-sized containers stacked high into the air.

So what's so tough about keeping track of containers? At roughly 8 feet
square and 20 feet long, they'd be pretty hard to misplace, right? Wrong.
Ports store these things by the acre, in stacks that are several stories
high. Like anything else, says Smith, "the one you need is usually going to
be at the bottom of the stack." That means containers are constantly being
shuffled top to bottom and side to side, creating paperwork nightmares for
the ships clerks assigned to keep track of them.

Attempts to solve the problem using bar codes and optical recognition have
been thwarted by a number of factors, not least the harsh conditions
containers are subject to as they ride the seas on open decks. Placing GPS-
and radio-based transmitters on the containers themselves has proven both
costly and ineffective, as these technologies tend to break down in the
"container canyons" that are simply too dense for the transmissions to get
through.

LONGSHOREMAN CARSON saw these attempted solutions try and fail, says Smith.
Finally, he had his epiphany: "It occurred to him that containers can't move
by themselves." He hit on the idea of equipping the vehicles that move the
containers--essentially flatbed trucks called "yard chassis" and tractors
called "top-picks"--with the tracking and transmitting equipment. Match a
container to the vehicle that moved it and, voila, you've got a tracking
system.

Full: http://www.zdnet.com/filters/printerfriendly/0,6061,2885230-10,00.html



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