by Lloyd's List

2 May 2025 (Lloyd's List) - FOR much of their existence, longshoremen and dockworker trade unions have fought for two things for their members: more money and better conditions.

That’s changing. Now, they’re fighting for the very existence of their members’ jobs.

Terminals across Europe and Asia in particular have implemented automation at a rate of knots, and some of the biggest projects planned for the future, such as Singapore’s Tuas Mega Port, will be fully automated.

APM Terminals’ Maasvlakte II, in Rotterdam, is one of the most advanced container terminals in the world. It has invested heavily in automation. Humans operate twist locks on board vessels, and remote crane operators control the first part of the vertical lift, but after that the entire container movement process is automated.

In July 2024, the terminal broke its throughput record with 153,116 movements, and in the last week of July its cranes moved an average of 157.8 containers per hour.

The terminal is a key hub on Maersk’s Gemini network and is slated for an expansion, which will see a further 2m teu of capacity added.

Automation is crucial if the terminal is going to grow its footprint, Maasvlakte II managing director Harold Kunst said.

He said the terminal, like many others in northern and western Europe, had found it difficult to attract talent, especially given its location some 40 km outside of Rotterdam city centre.

Kunst said ports faced competition from other industries now, many of which did not demand weekend work or offer the ability to work closer to home, if not at home.

But Niek Stam, a negotiator at FNV Havens, which represents Dutch port workers, stressed that Maasvlakte’s inaccessibility by public transport and, crucially in the Netherlands, bicycle, contributed to any unattractiveness it possesses as a career option.

Bob Dhaliwal, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada secretary-treasurer and ITF dockers section future-of-work chair, said: “If you can’t get people to work on the waterfront, then you’re not paying them enough.”

He did, however, agree that recruitment was a “common problem” in North America and Europe, in terms of attracting skilled workers.

Kunst made it clear that APMT does not envisage achieving its ambitious expansion plans at Maasvlakte II with a smaller headcount. On the contrary, he said his company was “creating and sustaining jobs in technology, automation, engineering and maintenance which require a very high skill level, that would otherwise not be needed if it weren’t for the introduction of automation in terminals like Maasvlakte II”.

Dhaliwal said his members were generally afraid of automation, with job losses the obvious concern.

He said that in a dispute a few years ago, ILWU Canada sought explicit language around automation in the contract, as there had been none before.

A similar fight was held to ensure port workers would carry out maintenance work on new equipment, rather than work being contracted out.

Bringing in automation into existing terminals was not something that can happen overnight, Dhaliwal said, as new systems had to be built in around lots of legacy systems.

On the other hand, new terminals that rely solely on automation, such as Maasvlakte II, would actually create new jobs where there were none before, he said, albeit maybe fewer than a non-automated terminal.

The reasons for automation are multiple, Kunst told Lloyd’s List. They include improving the safety of port workers and accelerating decarbonisation efforts.

“We believe that through a balanced approach, technology-driven innovation will enable terminal operators to offer robust and resilient services to economies, become more sustainable and stay competitive,” he said.

“At the same time automation of terminals is also an important way to better protect the health and safety of our employees and make the job easier accessible for groups like women or individuals with disabilities. That’s something we are supporting and promoting globally already today.”

Working from height remains one of the most dangerous parts of the job for port workers, ranking highly on the causes of lost time through injury league table. 

Dhaliwal admitted that crane work was “one of the most demanding” jobs on the waterfront, with operators bent into uncomfortable positions for many hours at a time.

Making that work remote, if the headcount remained the same, was not an issue for trade unions, he said. It would, as Kunst points out, make the job accessible to many more groups of people.

“But normally, in these kinds of cases, the company is looking also for a reduction in the labour force at the same time,” Dhaliwal said.

Automated equipment was expensive, and operators had to recoup that cost somehow, he said. Job cuts were one way of doing exactly that.

But Stam argued that introducing automation was only about efficiency gains, and terminal operators “shouldn’t change” the arguments for it.

There remain question marks of just how efficient automated terminals are. Maasvlakte II’s performance is impressive, but Stam said fully automated terminals were less flexible to last-minute changes and required large amounts of space.

Dhaliwal said there was “no consensus in the industry” on whether automation delivered greater productivity.

“We’ve seen that human beings can operate machinery faster than machines can, and humans have more adaptability whereas machines follow certain routines,” he said.

When automated terminals do go wrong, they are not as easy to fix either. Large areas are forced to stop while workers perform maintenance, Stam argued.

But automation offers consistency, even if the jury is out on increased productivity. Dhaliwal said he thought operators were happy to accept a drop-off in productivity as a price for consistency. Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd’s Gemini alliance has been launched on that very promise: shippers would rather a container arrive when it supposed to, even if it’s a bit slower.

There is, of course, what Dhaliwal called the social cost to job cuts too. Fewer port workers mean less money spent in local shops and restaurants he said, echoing ILA executive vice-president Dennis Daggett’s “robots don’t pay taxes” comment during last year’s US port strikes.

Dhaliwal said his union worried that automation may well boost the profits of terminal operators, but their global nature means those profits don’t stay in the port community or even country.

The question is whether Dhaliwal and his colleagues can do much to stop the march of automation.

“We know that the technology is here”, he said, “but we have to figure out how both parties can adapt to it”.

“It’s not all doom and gloom. There’s a strong possibility that over time, we could evolve into a more technical union,” he said.

“That’s where the jobs get lost: fewer people operating equipment and more people in control rooms, more people handling exceptions when the machines go wrong, more people in maintenance. So there will be an evolution.”