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What do dockworkers do, and which parts of the job are automated?
The three-day dockworker strike that crippled East and Gulf Coast ports put a spotlight on one of America’s most important jobs: loading and unloading the billions of products — from food to cars — that keep the U.S. economy humming.
Although the work stoppage has ended for now, the labor dispute reflects how robots, artificial intelligence and other potent technologies are changing the nature of operations in the nation’s supply chains and in other industries.
“We’re really at a moment here where we’re taking about the future of work and what that looks like in America and around the world,” John Samuel, managing director with consulting firm AlixPartners, told CBS News. “And so, how do we combine the natural evolutions of technology with the right to human decency and human work?”
The tentative agreement announced on Friday between the International Longshoremen’s Association — which led last week’s strike — and the United States Maritime Alliance, bridges the divide on wages, giving dockworkers an immediate $4 per hour raise and a $24 per hour pay hike over a six-year labor contract.
Yet the pact doesn’t resolve worker concerns over automation. Read on to learn about what dockworkers do and how new technologies are changing the job.
From boxes, bails and bundles to containers
In recent decades, longshore work has been transformed by technology, a key sticking point in the labor dispute that pitted unionized workers against shipping companies and port operators.
Dockworkers handle freight by loading and unloading cargo ships that come to port. Up until the late 1950s, that meant carrying boxes, bails and bundles of goods by hand from incoming ships into storage, before loading them onto trains for transport to their final destination.
Today, cargo is stored in large, standardized containers — designed to be transported by ship, rail or truck — that dockworkers handle with cranes and other equipment.
“It’s all about operating the lifting equipment that’s required to move the containers around. A lot of it is transferring containers from ship to shore, and vice versa,” Kent Gourdin, professor and director of the global logistics and transportation program at College of Charleston, told CBS MoneyWatch. “They handle containers on the terminals where ships dock, and keep track of what container needs to go where.”
These days, the job largely involves operating machinery, as well as tracking cargo and keeping records. For example, dockworkers coordinate with trucking companies that come to port to retrieve containers and transport them to their next stop. Dockworkers are also responsible for securing cargo on ships. Containers are stacked on top of one another, and it’s dockworkers’ job to make sure the containers are latched together.
Although operating heavy machinery is less physically arduous than toting boxes, nearly all dockworkers “are out in the weather to some degree and working in an environment where they are surrounded by heavy equipment,” Gourdin said.
“Whereas back in the day it was labor-intensive, today it’s mainly about operating machinery,” Henry Sims Jr., a fourth-generation longshoreman and president of the ILA local 3,000 in New Orleans, told CBS MoneyWatch. “Now, you have to be skilled. You can’t hire someone off the street, because they wouldn’t be able to do it without killing somebody, or themselves.”
U.S. behind in automation
The 10 largest U.S. ports all use some kind of automation technology to move cargo, according to a March GAO report. These include automated gates, which let trucks and containers move through cargo terminals with limited worker interaction; so-called port community systems, which are digital platforms that automatically streamline logistics and supply-chain data; and technologies used in “internet-of-things” systems, such as RFID, GPS and cameras, to operate equipment and track containers.
Semi-automated terminals employ people to operate machinery that moves containers from the cargo berth — the area where a ship is moored — to the yard. Equipment used to stack containers on top of one another is fully automated.
But only three domestic ports, Long Beach Container Terminal in Long Beach, California; and TraPac and APM Terminal Pier 400 in Los Angeles are fully automated.
At fully automated ports, both horizontal and vertical container movement is handled by machines. Other technologies put to use at automated ports include AI-powered sensors, digital twins — or identical, digital replicas of ports — and blockchain to automate recording transactions and track container locations.
Automated cargo-handling equipment eliminates the need for humans on site to operate a crane, for example, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report on port automation.
“Ports in other parts of the world are much more advanced than in the U.S., partly because the unions have been blocking the adoption of technology and automation,” global supply chain management expert Chris Tang told CBS MoneyWatch.
“If you go to modern ports in China, you hardly see any humans,” he said. “They use automated cranes, and when a ship comes in a crane picks up the containers to stack them.”
Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Despite the shift toward automation, Sims Jr. said human workers remain essential to the industry.
“We move things more efficiently and productively than automation does. The machines are slower, and when they break down, they can’t go back to work until we get someone out there to look at it and fix it.”
Gourdin, the professor, backed up that claim.
“Machines, I think, can do the job as well, but people are faster. I’ve been to automated terminals and it’s just slower,” he said, while acknowledging that more fully automated ports in the U.S. may be inevitable.
“An extremely difficult problem”
Given the close coordination that is required between ships, trucking companies and their customers, artificial intelligence and data analytics can play a big role in getting a container from point A to point B, logistics experts say.
“Dockworkers communicate with trucking companies to find cranes to use to retrieve their containers when they’re arriving,” Tang explained. “But sometimes a trucker will show up and they’ll need a container that’s at the bottom of the pile. This is a problem.”
That’s where artificial intelligence and data analytics come in. These technologies help dockworkers track when a given container will arrive and coordinate with trucking companies for pick-up, affecting how containers are stacked.
“It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve — to synchronize when the container and truck are coming in. This is where automation comes into play,” Tang said.
Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said automation is well suited to the port system given how routine the nature of the work is.
“Ship comes in, they have all these containers loaded up, you take off the container and move it somewhere. Then you put it on an intermodal train or truck,” he said. “It’s the same thing over and over again. That’s something that technology can do really well because there is little variation.”
Atkinson favors cutting the amount of human labor in U.S. ports by 50% over the next 10 years, while he notes that remaining workers who survive would see their wages rise and consumers would save on shipping costs. Of course, that’s just the kind of major workforce reduction the dockworkers’ union is intent on preventing.
“If you automate a port, that means you buy something form a furniture store online and it costs less,” he said. That leads to savings for middle-class Americans.”
CBS News
Almost 10 million pounds of meat and poultry dishes recalled due to possible listeria contamination
A company is recalling nearly 10 million pounds of meat and poultry products made at an Oklahoma plant because they may be contaminated with listeria bacteria, which can cause illness and death.
BrucePac of Woodburn, Oregon, recalled the roughly 5,000 tons of ready-to-eat foods this week after U.S. Agriculture Department officials detected listeria in samples of poultry during routine testing. Further tests identified BrucePac chicken as the source. The recall includes 75 meat and chicken products.
The foods include products like grilled chicken breast strips that were made at the company’s facility in Durant, Oklahoma. They were produced between June 19 and Oct. 8 and shipped to restaurants, food service vendors and other sites nationwide, government officials said.
The products have a best-by date of June 19, 2025 to Oct. 8, 2025. Officials said they’re concerned that the foods may still be available for use or stored in refrigerators or freezers. The products should be thrown away, they stressed.
There are no confirmed reports of illness linked to the recall.
Eating foods contaminated with listeria can cause potentially serious illness. About 1,600 people are infected with listeria bacteria each year in the U.S. and about 260 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Listeria infections typically cause fever, muscle aches and tiredness and may cause stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance and convulsions. Symptoms can occur quickly or to up to 10 weeks after eating contaminated food. The infections are especially dangerous for older people, those with weakened immune systems or who are pregnant.
CBS News
Human remains found on Mount Everest apparently belong to famed climber who vanished 100 years ago
A documentary team discovered human remains on Mount Everest apparently belonging to a man who went missing while trying to summit the peak 100 years ago, National Geographic magazine reported Friday.
Climate change is thinning snow and ice around the Himalayas, increasingly exposing the bodies of mountaineers who died chasing their dream of scaling the world’s highest mountain.
Briton Andrew Irvine went missing in 1924 alongside climbing partner George Mallory as the pair attempted to be the first to reach Everest’s summit, 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) above sea level.
Mallory’s body was found in 1999 but clues about Irvine’s fate were elusive until a National Geographic team discovered a boot, still clothing the remains of a foot, on the peak’s Central Rongbuk Glacier.
On closer inspection, they found a sock with “a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it,” the magazine reported.
/ AP
The discovery could give further clues as to the location of the team’s personal effects and may help resolve one of mountaineering’s most enduring mysteries: whether Irvine and Mallory ever managed to reach the summit.
That could confirm Irvine and Mallory as the first to successfully scale the peak, nearly three decades before the first currently recognized summit in 1953 by climbers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
“It tells the whole story about what probably happened,” Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers told National Geographic.
The first documented ascent of Everest came nearly three decades later when New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay scaled the mountain on May 29, 1953. In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to reach the summit.
Hundreds of climbers have died on Everest
Members of the Irvine family reportedly offered to share DNA samples to confirm the identity of the remains.
Irvine was 22 when he went missing.
He, along with Mallory, was last spotted by one of the members of their expedition on the afternoon of June 8, 1924, after beginning their final ascent to the summit that morning.
Earlier this year, Mallory’s final letter to his wife was digitized for the first time and published online by Cambridge University. In the letter, he wrote that his chances of reaching the world’s highest peak were “50 to 1 against us.”
Irvine is believed to have been carrying a vest camera — the discovery of which could rewrite mountaineering history.
Photographer and director Jimmy Chin, who was part of the National Geographic team, believes the discovery “certainly reduces the search area” for the elusive camera.
More than 300 people have perished on the mountain since expeditions started in the 1920s.
Some are hidden by snow or swallowed down deep crevasses.
Others, still in their colorful climbing gear, have become landmarks en route to the summit and bestowed with gallows humor nicknames, including “Green Boots” and “Sleeping Beauty.”
In June, five frozen bodies were retrieved from Mount Everest — including one that was just skeletal remains — as part of Nepal’s mountain clean-up campaign on Everest and adjoining peaks Lhotse and Nuptse.
Washington — Two U.S. Navy SEALs drowned as they tried to climb aboard a ship carrying illicit Iranian-made weapons to Yemen because of glaring training failures and a lack of understanding about what to do after falling into deep, turbulent waters, according to a military investigation into the January deaths.
The review concluded that the drownings of Chief Special Warfare Operator Christopher J. Chambers and Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Nathan Gage Ingram could have been prevented.
But both sank quickly in the high seas off the coast of Somalia, weighed down by heavy equipment they were carrying and not knowing or disregarding concerns that their flotation devices couldn’t compensate for the additional weight. Both were lost at sea.
U.S. Navy
The highly critical and heavily redacted report – written by a Navy officer from outside Naval Special Warfare Command, which oversees the SEALs – concluded there were “deficiencies, gaps and inconsistencies” in training, policies, tactics and procedures as well as “conflicting guidance” on when and how to use emergency flotation devices and extra buoyancy material that could have kept them alive.
The Associated Press obtained the report upon request before its public release.
The mission’s goal was to intercept weapons headed to the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, who have been launching missile and drone attacks against commercial and U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began a year ago. U.S. retaliatory strikes haven’t deterred their assaults.
Chambers and Ingram, members of SEAL Team 3, died during a nighttime mission to board an unflagged ship in the Arabian Sea. Their names were redacted in the report, but officials have confirmed Chambers slipped and fell as he was climbing onto the ship’s deck and Ingram jumped in to try to save him.
“Encumbered by the weight of each individual’s gear, neither their physical capability nor emergency supplemental flotations devices, if activated, were sufficient to keep them at the surface,” Rear Adm. Michael DeVore wrote in the report.
The report said Chambers was “intermittently” at the surface for 26 seconds after his fall and Ingram was at the surface for about 32 seconds.
“The entire tragic event elapsed in just 47 seconds and two NSW warriors were lost to the sea,” DeVore wrote, referring to the Naval Special Warfare Command.
Flotation equipment that was properly maintained, working well and used correctly would have been able to keep them afloat until they were rescued, the report said. Other team members told investigators that while they knew the importance of their tactical flotation system – which includes two inflatable floats that attach to a belt and foam inserts that can be added – few had ever operated one in training and there is little instruction on how to wear it.
How Chambers and Ingram died
The report said the team was operating in 6- to 8-foot seas and, while the vessel they were boarding was rolling in the waves, the conditions were well within their abilities.
As time went on, however, the rolling increased, and Chambers tried to board by jumping from his combat craft’s engine compartment to the top rail of the ship they were boarding, the report said. Some of the commandos used an attachable ladder but because of the waves, others jumped to the top rail, which they said was within reach but slippery.
Chambers’ hands slipped off the rail and he fell 9 feet into the water. Based on video of the mission, he was able to grab the lower rung of the ladder but when he turned to try to get back to the combat craft, he was swept under by a wave.
Eleven seconds after he fell, Ingram jumped in. For at least 10 seconds, video shows they were above water intermittently and at times were able to grab a ladder extension that was submerged. But both were knocked about by waves. The last sighting of Chambers was about 26 seconds after he fell.
At one point, Ingram tried to climb back on the ladder but was overcome by a wave. He appeared to try to deploy his flotation device, but within two seconds, an unattached water wing was seen about a foot away from him. He also seemed to try to remove some of his equipment, but he slipped underwater and wasn’t seen again. The sea depth was about 12,000 feet.
Both were wearing body armor and Ingram was also carrying radio equipment that added as much as 40 more pounds. Each of the inflatable floats can lift a minimum of 40 pounds in seawater, the report said.
It said members of the SEAL team expressed “shock and disbelief” that Chambers, their strongest swimmer, couldn’t stay at the surface. The report concluded that the conflicting and meager guidance on the flotation devices may have left it to individuals to configure their buoyancy needs, potentially leading to mistakes.
While SEALs routinely conduct pre-mission “buddy checks” to review each other’s gear, it said Ingram’s flotation equipment may have been incorrectly attached and a more thorough buddy exam could have discovered that.
SEAL team members also told investigators that adding the foam inserts makes the flotation device more bulky and it becomes more difficult to climb or crawl.
The report said SEAL Team 3 members began prompt and appropriate man-overboard procedures “within seconds,” and there were two helicopters and two drones overhead providing surveillance, light and video for the mission.
After 10 days, the search was called off because of the water depth and low probability of finding the two.
“The Navy respects the sanctity of human remains and recognized the sea as a fit and final resting place,” the report said.
Chambers, 37, of Maryland, enlisted in the Navy in 2012 and graduated from SEAL training in 2014. Ingram, 27, of Texas, enlisted in 2019 and graduated from SEAL training in 2021.
Losses prompt training changes
In response to the investigation, Naval Special Warfare Command said changes are already being made to training and guidance.
It said the command is considering developing a force-wide policy to address water safety during maritime operations and is setting standard procedures for buoyancy requirements.
Other changes would refine man-overboard procedures, pre-mission checks and maintenance of flotation devices. It also said it’s looking into “fail safe” buoyancy equipment and plans to review safety processes.
Rear Adm. Keith Davids, who headed the command at the time of the mission, said it would learn from the tragic deaths and “doggedly pursue” recommended changes. Davids left the job in August in a routine change of command and is in the process of retiring.
The report recommends that Ingram receive a commendation for heroism for giving his life while trying to save his teammate. That recommendation is under review. Both were posthumously promoted one rank.
According to a separate Defense Intelligence Agency report, the Jan. 11 mission seized Iranian “propulsion, guidance systems and warheads” for medium-range ballistic missiles and antiship cruise missiles destined for the Houthis.
Almost 10 million pounds of meat and poultry dishes recalled due to possible listeria contamination
Human remains found on Mount Everest apparently belong to famed climber who vanished 100 years ago
Drownings of 2 Navy SEALS were preventable, military probe finds
Almost 10 million pounds of meat and poultry dishes recalled due to possible listeria contamination
Human remains found on Mount Everest apparently belong to famed climber who vanished 100 years ago