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Lessons should be learned from the chaos and animosity that festered throughout the negotiations over a new master contract between US east and Gulf coast port longshoremen and employer association USMX, it was said this week.

A last-minute deal at the end of the year, narrowly averting a strike, secured a new long-term contact that protects jobs and also creates a framework for the introduction of port automation.

Group VP of product strategy at supply chain management platform E2open John Lash welcomed the developments but said lessons must be learned to improve future talks.

Speaking to The Loadstar, Mr Lash said part of the problem was the language adopted by employer bodies, like USMX, when commencing talks, which had a tendency to deny that technological developments could result in lay-offs.

Check out The Loadstar’s series on port automation, including the impact of new technologies on labour

“Typically, you’ll hear claims made that they want to protect jobs’, and maybe it is this word ‘protect’ that sets discussions off on the wrong foot,” Mr Lash said. He argued that this set negotiations off on a footing of distrust.

He continued: “Yes, jobs will change[as a result of automation], but the discussions need to focus on how these changes can result in improvements for both parties.

“From the port operator’s perspective, it is looking for greater capacities, improved efficiencies, and better box flows. To sell this to the longshoremen in the US, they could have used the decade-long move to automation on the west coast as a case study.”

Mr Lash said studies indicated that, after the west coast’s push to automation, paid hours for dockers in the region increased by 32% against a national average increase of 14%. This, he said, offered an apportunity to point to some of the benefits.

However, he conceded that the data left gaps around how seasonal variations impacted those improvements – but he stressed that the point was to try to find harmony, so as to “enable discussions to begin”.

“And improved port efficiency is not just about operator’s bottom line, efficiency gains at terminals benefit everyone in the supply chain, including customers,” he said.

“These gains allow everything to move faster, because if goods are stuck on vessels they are not being sold, and in the US, the consumer is the economy; consumers drive it all, and if they cannot get their stuff, the economy stalls.

“If volumes decrease significantly through certain ports, that puts jobs at risk because the activity is not sufficient to support those jobs.”

 

 Listen to this clip of Henrik Schilling ,of Hapag-Lloyd, on Asia-Europe and transpacific contracting

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