Prices of food went up 1.5%, which covered half the wage increase, and the employers ate (pun intended) the other half of the cost.

Here is the study by UC Berkeley from this April

https://irle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Effects...

This has been studied and the main takeaway is that automated terminals are generally not more productive than conventional ones *once you control for things like terminal layout, cargo patterns, rail/truck integration, and geography.*

A lot of the “look at Rotterdam/Singapore/Shanghai” comparisons are misleading because those are purpose-built megaterminals with entirely different infrastructure and logistics networks.

US ports have different constraints (that have nothing to do with longshoremen) that make the specific automations more common in foreign ports less effective and sometimes counter effective here.

That’s not to say there aren’t automation improvements that could be made or Longshoremen labor is currently at some perfect optimal productivity equilibrium with automation, but it’s not a simple we need automation and they are in the way stopping it scenario.

Automation can certainly reduce some labor costs and improve yard density, but the idea that US ports are uniquely inefficient because dockworkers are manually moving containers around is mostly political rhetoric, not what the actual studies by people designing and running ports say.

Some reading: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...

https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24106498.pdf

https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/container-...

It puts varying pressures on other elements in a dynamic system in different ratios and with second order effects that can’t be fully predicted until you “run the experiment.”

I’ll wait. You should be able to do it quickly though since LLMs are so good at it.