Someone Else’s Ocean: Shipping and Jobs in the San Pedro Bay, a new report published by the Economic Roundtable and underwritten by the Coast Longshore Division of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), looks at a host of issues pertaining to the political economy of the West Coast’s ports, from cargo volume to the balance of trade and hours of dock work.

Considerable pages are devoted to automation, a subject at the center of ongoing contract negotiations between the ILWU, which represents twenty-two thousand workers at twenty-nine ports, and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), representing the shipping terminals.

Port automation entails the replacement of workers by machines that operate largely, though not entirely, autonomously. The issue has been at the heart of contract negotiations for decades: in 2008, the ILWU agreed to allow increased use of technology, and in the years since, the union has argued that automation has meant job losses, with automated terminals both requiring fewer workers and leading to less work at traditional terminals, as cargo shifts to automated terminals.