Connect with us

New York

Schumer Wields Political Heft in Bid for New York Chips Funds

Published

on

Schumer Wields Political Heft in Bid for New York Chips Funds

In a darkened hotel ballroom in San Jose, Calif., last November, the most powerful players in the semiconductor industry received a familiar sales pitch.

Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, appeared by video message to urge the industry titans at the Semiconductor Industry Association’s annual awards dinner to work together to strengthen American manufacturing of a critical technology — and to invest more in his home state of New York.

“I ask that more of the industry consider investing in the Empire State, and if you do, you’ll find no greater champion in your corner than me, the Senate majority leader,” Mr. Schumer said, to cheers and laughs of recognition from a crowd accustomed to the senator’s solicitations.

Amid growing fears about China’s dominance of technology and America’s loss of competitiveness, Mr. Schumer last year helped rally Congress to push through the biggest industrial policy programs the United States has seen a generation. The Biden administration is now preparing to invest tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. semiconductor industry in an effort to boost chip manufacturing across the country and lessen U.S. reliance on foreign factories.

If Mr. Schumer gets his way, a substantial part of that funding will flow to New York.

Advertisement

In his encounters with chip executives, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and President Biden himself, Mr. Schumer has openly and aggressively drawn on his political capital as majority leader to try to channel investment to his home state. During the months where Congress was debating whether to approve that funding, industry executives who set foot in Mr. Schumer’s office or spoke to him on the flip phone he carries in his breast pocket were asked when, not if, they would invest in New York.

Mr. Schumer, a longtime China critic, primarily views the investments as critical to reducing America’s reliance on Beijing for a technology that powers everything from cars and dishwashers to missiles and fighter jets. Most chip production has moved to Asia in recent decades, leaving the U.S. economy highly vulnerable to shortages, as became apparent during the pandemic.

But he also saw the opportunity to fulfill a more personal goal: securing investment that could revive the factory towns of his home state, which had been hollowed out through decades of competition with China. The move would also augment his local political support, attract donations from chip companies to fill Democratic coffers and cement his legacy as a proponent of upstate New York.

“I cared about upstate and I cared about competition with China,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview in Albany in June. “When I drafted the legislation, I did things with New York companies in mind.”

Senate majority leaders and other legislators have long used their clout to drive federal funds back home. But Mr. Schumer is capitalizing on his position at an opportune moment, as the United States prepares to invest nearly $53 billion in the sector, including $11 billion for chip research and $39 billion in manufacturing grants.

Advertisement

Still, some critics have cautioned that economic and strategic factors, not political influence, must determine the investment decisions that could shape the U.S. economy for decades to come.

If the proposed investments are realized, New York could become one of the country’s busiest hubs for chip production. Chip makers like GlobalFoundries, IBM, Onsemi and Wolfspeed are applying for funds to build or expand facilities there. Micron Technology, a memory chip maker, is proposing to invest up to $100 billion near Syracuse over the next two decades to build what would be the largest high-tech chips facility proposed in the United States, employing up to 9,000 people.

Mr. Schumer is also pushing for New York to play a leading role in semiconductor research, as the headquarters of a new federal chip research organization.

Competition for federal funding is expected to be fierce. By late June, the Commerce Department — which will dole out the funds — had received nearly 400 statements of interest from companies that intended to apply for money.

“I suspect there will be many disappointed companies who feel that they should have a certain amount of money,” Ms. Raimondo said in February.

Advertisement

New York has already faced some setbacks. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Samsung and Intel, makers of the most cutting-edge types of logic chips, passed over the state in recent years in favor of Arizona, Texas and Ohio, where they are now building large facilities that could absorb a significant portion of government funding.

Chip industry executives say practical factors, like the cost of electricity, land and capital, the availability of workers and the proximity of their suppliers, weigh heaviest in their decisions about where to invest.

But the pressure from Mr. Schumer — and from other influential lawmakers, university presidents and company executives who helped secure the funding — raises questions about the role powerful political figures will play in the next chapter of American industrial policy.

“I think there is and ought to be a lot of skepticism about political players having a major say in decision making over where these funds are spent,” said Chris Miller, an associate professor at Tufts University and the author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.”

“If you want effective industrial policy, you have to keep it as far away as possible from pork barrel politics,” he said.

Advertisement

The Commerce Department has been hiring experts in finance and semiconductors to review company applications, and it has set up a selection committee to chose the board for the new research center, called the National Semiconductor Technology Center. The department appears to be trying to avoid any undue influence or favoritism.

“Our awards will be entirely dependent upon the strength of applications and which projects will advance U.S. economic and national security interests,” the Commerce Department said in a statement.

Mr. Schumer insists that New York will win federal dollars on its own merits, but he is also explicit about the benefit his position brings. In June, as he walked the sunlit halls of the Albany NanoTech Complex, a long-running chip research and educational facility, Mr. Schumer said he “did not close out a single discussion” with a semiconductor company without encouraging them to invest in New York.

New York has five main advantages, he told executives: Skilled workers, stemming from New York’s history of manufacturing. Cheap and plentiful water. Cheap hydropower. Shovel-ready sites for companies to build on.

“And fifth, they had the majority leader,” he said.

Advertisement

In a yellow-lit clean room behind Mr. Schumer, workers in white protective suits were tending to hundreds of millions of dollars of advanced machinery. On tracks overhead, mechanized metal pails whizzed by carrying silicon wafers, each roughly the size of a record, to and from the machines, where they would be imprinted with layers of intricate circuitry.

Mr. Schumer paused to peer over his reading glasses at a smooth, white box the size of a mobile home: an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, made by the Dutch firm ASML, arguably the most advanced piece of machinery ever developed.

Albany NanoTech is the only public research facility in the United States with such a machine. The facility is applying for federal funding to build a new clean room in an adjacent parking lot, and it hopes to become home to part of the government’s new research center.

“This is the perfect place,” Mr. Schumer said. “When we wrote the CHIPS and Science bill to set up a National Semiconductor Technology Center, I had Albany in mind. And I’m pushing to get it.”

Mr. Schumer said he had personally made that case to a parade of administration officials he brought through the state. That included Mr. Biden, who was pitched on New York’s potential as the two men rode in a motorcade to hear Micron’s investment announcement last October.

Advertisement

By his telling, Mr. Schumer’s efforts on behalf of upstate New York are a personal mission, stemming in part from an early challenge from a political opponent who told voters they would never see Mr. Schumer, a Brooklyn native, west of the Hudson River. As Mr. Schumer watched companies like General Motors, General Electric and Carrier shutter their New York facilities, he said, he vowed to do something to stop the flow of young people out of the state.

Mr. Schumer had also been one of Congress’ earliest China hawks, particularly on the issue of Chinese currency manipulation. During a workout in 2019 in the Senate gym, Mr. Schumer began forming a plan with Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, to bolster the U.S. economy by dedicating over $100 billion to technology research.

It took two years — and an aggressive, coordinated lobbying effort between government and industry — to amass the support and momentum to turn that bill into law. Mr. Schumer and other key Republican and Democratic lawmakers enlisted company executives, university presidents and state officials to talk publicly about the importance of the funding, and put pressure on reluctant members of Congress.

Mr. Schumer also worked closely with Ms. Raimondo to push the bill forward. He called her frequently as obstacles arose, including during Sunday Mass and her daughter’s 18th birthday party, she said in an interview in July 2022.

As the bill progressed, the prospect of funding for new U.S. factories touched off an elaborate game of courtship among legislators, state officials and companies.

Advertisement

The number of chip lobbyists in Washington multiplied. Companies like GlobalFoundries and Intel, which stood to benefit enormously from the legislation, hosted or attended fund-raisers and virtual events for Mr. Schumer in the months before the CHIPS Act was passed. From the beginning of 2021 through June 2023, political action committees linked with Mr. Schumer received more than $350,000 in donations from executives at chip companies and their suppliers, including a $5,000 donation from Intel’s chief executive, Pat Gelsinger, data from the Federal Election Commission shows.

New York played host to a series of chip companies considering potential investments, particularly for the plot that Micron now plans to build on. TSMC looked at the site in 2019 before it chose Arizona, and Intel considered the same location but ultimately chose Ohio.

Micron was ready to write off New York because the state did not have a big enough site, Ryan McMahon, the local county executive, said. To win the final bid, the county spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring land, including buying out a street of homeowners, and running gas and electricity to the site, he said.

“If Schumer didn’t introduce us, it’s one of those things, you wonder if it ever would have happened,” Mr. McMahon, a Republican, said.

Mr. Schumer, along with other proponents, secured an investment tax credit in the chips legislation that Micron saw as key to making the economics of the project work. And at the urging of Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York state lawmakers passed their own chips subsidy bill to complement the federal one, approving up to $500 million a year in tax abatements to chip manufacturers.

Advertisement

Micron has said it plans to start construction next year and complete the first $20 billion phrase of the factory by 2030. New York State has promised to give Micron $5.5 billion in tax credits over the life of the project if the company meets certain employment targets.

As the biggest maker of memory chips with headquarters in the United States, Micron is seen as a likely candidate for a federal grant. But other developments have thrown the project into question: Micron has recently become the subject of a crackdown in China that could cost the company an eighth of its global revenues, potentially undercutting its ability to make ambitious investments.

The deal has also been met with skepticism from local government watchdogs, who fear that Micron will become the latest firm to be offered taxpayer subsidies but fail to deliver the promised economic impact.

“It might be good geostrategic policy for the United States,” said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, a watchdog focused on the New York government. “But for New York, it’s an incredibly low return on the investment of subsidy dollars.”

For both Mr. Schumer and Governor Hochul, the Micron investment became a centerpiece of their electoral strategy last fall. With Republicans on their way to the best statewide showing in two decades, both Democrats packaged clips of themselves with Micron’s chief executive into TV ads that blanketed parts of the state otherwise wary of Democrats’ economic agenda.

Advertisement

“Transformational for upstate New York, transformational for America,” Mr. Schumer said in one.

Nicholas Fandos and Eric Lipton contributed reporting.

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

New York

When Carter Went to the Bronx

Published

on

When Carter Went to the Bronx

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today, on a national day of mourning for former President Jimmy Carter, we’ll look at Carter’s relationship to New York. We’ll also get details on the decision by the city’s Board of Elections not to fire its executive director after investigators found that he had harassed two female employees.

President Jimmy Carter flew to New York in October 1977 to tell the United Nations General Assembly that he was “willing” to shrink the United States’ nuclear arsenal if the Soviet Union matched the reductions. The next day, he did something unannounced, unexpected and unrelated to foreign policy.

He went to the South Bronx.

It was a symbolic side trip to show that he was willing to face urban problems. Leaders like Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League had already begun to talk about dashed expectations: “We expected Carter to be working as hard to meet the needs of the poor as he did to get our votes,” Jordan had said a couple of months earlier. “But so far, we have been disappointed.”

Carter, a Democrat, wasn’t satisfied with driving through neighborhoods dominated by desolation and despair. “Let me walk about a block,” he told the Secret Service agents accompanying him, and he got out of the limousine.

Advertisement

That morning in the South Bronx became an enduring memory of his presidency. But there are other New York memories to remember today, a national day of mourning for Carter, who died on Dec. 29.

There was the high of his nomination in 1976, at the first national political convention held in Manhattan since the Roaring Twenties.

There was also the not-so-high of his nomination in the same place four years later, when haplessness seemed to reign: The teleprompter malfunctioned during his acceptance speech. He flubbed a line about former Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, calling him “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.” The balloons didn’t tumble from the ceiling when they were supposed to. And his long feud with Senator Edward Kennedy simmered on.

Another New York memory now seems as improbable as Carter’s candidacy had once been: a high-kicking photo op with the Radio City Rockettes in 1973. Carter, then a Georgia governor who had taught Sunday school, hammed it up with dancers who showed a lot of leg. (The governor, joining the kick line in his crisp suit, did not.)

Carter was an ambitious Navy lieutenant turned peanut farmer turned politician, and he understood what New York could do for him. The Carter biographer Jonathan Alter wrote that the publicity stunt with the Rockettes helped bring him name recognition, as did a full-page ad in Variety that showed him in a director’s chair. The ad, and that trip to New York, promoted a push to lure filmmaking to Georgia.

Advertisement

By the time Carter went to the South Bronx, 10 months into his presidency, New York was struggling to pull out of its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” abyss. But whatever hope Carter seemed to bring soon faded: A week later, during a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, the sportscaster Howard Cosell supposedly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”

“Somehow that sentence entered the language, though he never said that, or exactly that,” Ian Frazier explained in his book “Paradise Bronx.” “In any case, it’s what people remember.”

People yelled “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!” as Carter went by. On one ruined block, “he stood looking around, his expression blank and dazed,” Frazier wrote. “For a president to allow himself to be seen when he appears so overwhelmed required self-sacrifice and moral fortitude.”

With him was Mayor Abraham Beame, a lame duck — but not Representative Ed Koch, who had defeated Beame in the Democratic primary and would be elected mayor in November. The president and the mayor-in-waiting were feuding over Middle East policy.

Back at his hotel, Carter called it “a very sobering trip.” And as Frazier noted, the drive-by made America look at “this place that most had been looking away from.”

Advertisement

Politicians stopped looking away: The stretch of Charlotte Street that he visited became a stop on campaign after campaign. “Reagan went there in 1980 to try to show up Carter,” Alter said. But the policy Carter pushed for in response to the poverty he saw — changes that effectively forced banks to provide home loans in low-income neighborhoods — worked, Alter said. “It just took a while.”

A few years later, there were more than 100 suburban-style houses in the neighborhood Carter walked through. Today the houses are worth roughly $750,000 apiece, according to the real estate website Trulia.

“He cared about people — he wanted to help people,” Alter said. “Jimmy Carter was a rural Georgian, but he had a lot of empathy for New Yorkers who needed a break.”


Weather

Today will be mostly sunny and breezy with a high near 34 degrees. Tonight, expect a mostly clear sky, strong winds and a low near 26.

Advertisement

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Jan. 20 (Martin Luther King’s Birthday).



The New York City Board of Elections — which is responsible for registering voters, repairing voting machines and tallying ballots — refused to dismiss its top official after he harassed two female employees, according to a report released by the city’s Department of Investigation.

Investigators found that the board’s executive director, Michael Ryan, had “created a hostile work environment for these two employees” in violation of the board’s own policies. The investigation department added that those policies had “serious deficiencies” that limited the board’s ability “to effectively prevent and address workplace misconduct and harassment.”

Advertisement

The board released a statement defending its decision not to fire Ryan, who was suspended for three weeks without pay and ordered to attend sensitivity training. The board’s statement quoted Ryan as apologizing for his actions.

“While I dispute these allegations and disagree with the report’s conclusion,” he said, “I accept the determination of the commissioners” to suspend him as being “in the best interest of the agency.”

According to the report from the investigation department, Ryan made a series of sexual comments to one female employee over several months, some of which were accompanied by physical gestures such as puckering his lips at her or touching her face with his hand.

He also engaged in a conversation with Michael Corbett, the board’s administrative manager, in the presence of the woman about what the best age gap might be in a heterosexual relationship. The two men determined that the age difference between her and Ryan would not be a problem, investigators said.

Investigators said that Ryan’s conduct had caused the woman “significant anxiety and emotional distress,” which figured in her decision to leave her job.

Advertisement

Investigators also found that Ryan had made “ethnicity- and gender-based comments toward” a second female employee, including some that trafficked in racial stereotypes.

Corbett was also suspended for one week, placed on probation for one year and ordered to attend sensitivity training.

Rodney Pepe-Souvenir, the president of the board of commissioners that oversees the agency, and Frederic Umane, its secretary, said in the statement released on Wednesday that they believed the penalties Ryan was given “sent a strong message that these types of unwelcomed and insensitive comments will not be tolerated by anyone” at the Board of Elections.


METROPOLITAN diary

Dear Diary:

Advertisement

I was waiting in line to pick up a prescription at a crowded Duane Reade. An older woman who was clearly exhausted left the line to sit down in a nearby chair.

When it was her turn to get her prescription, she stood up, left her belongings on the chair and went to the counter.

While waiting for the pharmacist, she turned and looked at the man who was sitting next to where she had been.

“You know what’s in that bag?” she asked, motioning toward her stuff.

The man shook his head.

Advertisement

“My husband,” she said. “He died last week, and I have his remains in there.”

— Brad Rothschild

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.


Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

New York

Carole Wilbourn, Who Put Cats on the Couch, Dies at 84

Published

on

Carole Wilbourn, Who Put Cats on the Couch, Dies at 84

Carole Wilbourn, a self-described cat therapist, who was known for her skill in decoding the emotional life of cats, as confounding as that would seem to be, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her sister Gail Mutrux.

Ms. Wilbourn’s patients shredded sofas, toilet paper and romantic partners. They soiled rugs and beds. They galloped over their sleeping humans in the wee hours. They hissed at babies, dogs and other cats. They chewed electrical wires. They sulked in closets, and went on hunger strikes.

They suffered from childhood trauma, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, jealousy and just plain rage. And Ms. Wilbourn, who was self-taught — in college she had studied (human) psychology and majored in education — seemed particularly attuned to the inner workings of their furry minds. A minor Manhattan celebrity, she was often called the kitty Freud, or the mother of cat psychiatry.

Cats hate change, she often noted. Even a new slipcover on the sofa can undo them. Cats are selfish. Unlike dogs, who strive to please their master, a cat strives to please itself. To mangle a cliché, happy cat, happy (human) life.

Advertisement

“A cat behaves badly when it’s trying to communicate,” she told The Los Angeles Daily News in 1990. “It’s sending an SOS. It’s saying, ‘Please help me.’”

Ms. Wilbourn developed her specialty over a half-century after founding The Cat Practice, billed as Manhattan’s first cats-only hospital, in 1973 with Paul Rowan, a veterinarian. She said she was the first feline therapist in the country, a claim that is not known to have been disputed.

She was the author of six books, including “Cats on the Couch” (first published in 1982), which offered case studies to help cat lovers better understand their furry friends. She treated patients as far away as Australia and Turkey (by phone), and made house calls as far away as Maui.

“Cats have emotions,” she said. “They get happy and sad and frustrated, and, since I understand emotions in people, I understand them in cats.”

She estimated that she had treated some 13,000 cats, and claimed a success rate of 75 to 80 percent. Take Snoopy, who didn’t like to be held and played rough when he was, and ran around in circles if he was over-excited. Sobriety, a 3-year-old tabby, scratched her own skin raw. Minina bit all visitors, and had to be locked away during dinner parties. Ms. Wilbourn’s diagnosis? Single cat syndrome. The treatment? Another cat, preferably a kitten; lots of attention, but not to the kitten; and, in Sobriety’s case, Valium.

Advertisement

She once treated a cat with Reiki energy healing after it had accidentally been run through the dryer.

Ms. Wilbourn’s go-to prescriptions also included New Age and classical music, recordings of whale songs and an abundance of treats, like catnip (a natural antidepressant, she pointed out). She also suggested canny behavior modifications by the humans, like having a new romantic partner feed the cat. She often recommended, in the days of landlines and answering machines, that humans call their pets and leave them cheerful messages. Her services did not come cheap. House-visits in Manhattan hovered at $400.

“If I lived anywhere besides a big city like New York,” she told The New York Times in 2004, “I’d be on food stamps.”

Ms. Wilbourn was the author of six books, including “The Inner Cat: A New Approach to Cat Behavior.”Credit…Stein & Day Pub

Carole Cecile Engel was born on March 19, 1940, in the Flushing section of Queens, one of four children of Harriet (Greenwald) and Gustave Engel, a taxi driver. There were no cats in their Queens apartment, but the family did have a canary named Petey. Carole graduated from Bayside High School and attended Albany State University’s School of Education before transferring to New York University, where she studied psychology and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business education in 1964.

Her first cat was a part-Siamese named Oliver, whom she adopted through an ad in The Village Voice. She was working as a substitute teacher and a Playboy bunny before opening The Cat Practice with Dr. Rowan, whom she later married.

Advertisement

“She was very attuned to the animals, to their emotional states,” Dr. Rowan said in an interview. “It was very unusual for the time.” As a result, their business flourished.

An earlier marriage to David Wilbourn, a photographer, ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Dr. Rowan. In addition to Ms. Mutrux, her sister, she is survived by Orion 2, a Siamese.

Ms. Wilbourn was a dog lover too, and on occasion treated canines, though she never had a dog herself. But she had definite views about anti-cat people. In her experience, she said, some of those who claimed they were allergic to cats often just didn’t like them.

“A cat is a free spirit and will not be subservient,” she wrote in “The Inner Cat” (1978). “People who derive their gratification from giving commands that others must obey can be threatened by a cat. It’s hard to assert your sense of power over a cat.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading

New York

Port Workers Could Strike Again if No Deal Is Reached on Automation

Published

on

Port Workers Could Strike Again if No Deal Is Reached on Automation

Ports on the East and Gulf Coasts could close next week if dockworkers and employers cannot overcome their big differences over the use of automated machines to move cargo.

The International Longshoremen’s Association, the union that represents dockworkers, and the United States Maritime Alliance, the employers’ negotiating group, on Tuesday resumed in-person talks aimed at forging a new labor contract.

After a short strike in October, the union and the alliance agreed on a 62 percent raise over six years for the longshoremen — and said they would try to work out other parts of the contract, including provisions governing automated technology, before Jan. 15.

If they don’t have a deal by that date, ports that account for three-fifths of U.S. container shipments could shut, harming businesses that rely on imports and exports and providing an early test for the new Trump administration.

“If there’s a strike, it will have a significant impact on the U.S. economy and the supply chain,” said Dennis Monts, chief operating officer of PayCargo, a freight payments company.

Advertisement

The union is resisting automation because it fears the loss of jobs at the ports. President-elect Donald J. Trump lent his support to the union’s position last month. “I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” he said on his website Truth Social. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.”

But figures close to Mr. Trump, like Vivek Ramaswamy, who the president-elect says will co-head an agency that will advise his administration on slimming down the government, have been critical of the union. In October, Republicans in Congress called on President Biden to use the Taft-Hartley Act to force striking longshoremen back to work.

And while the maritime alliance has agreed to a hefty raise, it may not be as ready to compromise on technology. Employers say that the technology is needed to make the ports more efficient and that they want the new contract to give them more leeway to introduce the sort of machinery that the union opposes.

To prepare for the potential closing of East and Gulf Coast ports, businesses have accelerated some imports, delayed others and diverted some to West Coast ports, said Jess Dankert, vice president for supply chain at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represents many businesses that import goods.

“Contingency plans are pretty well developed,” she said, but added that a strike of more than a week would have significant ripple effects that could take a while to disentangle.

Advertisement

The International Longshoremen’s Association declined to comment.

The cost of shipping a container has risen over 60 percent on average in the past year, in large part because attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have forced ocean carriers to travel a longer, more expensive route and use more vessels. And if the East and Gulf Coast ports close, some carriers recently said, they will add surcharges to shipping rates for containers destined for the ports.

In earlier negotiations, the union secured a deal that would increase wages to $63 an hour, from $39, by the end of a new six-year contract. With shift work and overtime, the pay of many longshoremen at some East Coast ports could rise to well over $200,000 a year. (At the Port of New York and New Jersey, nearly 60 percent of the longshoremen made $100,000 to $200,000 in the 12 months through June 2020, the latest figures available, according to data from an agency that helped oversee the port.)

But to get those raises, the union will have to reach a deal on the rest of the contract, including new provisions on automation.

The core of the technology dispute concerns “semi-automated” port machinery that does not always require the involvement of humans. At the Port of Virginia, humans operate cranes that load containers onto trucks, but the cranes can also arrange huge stacks of containers on their own.

Advertisement

The last labor contract allowed for the introduction of semi-automated technology when both parties agreed to work-force protections and staffing levels. But in recent months, leaders of the International Longshoremen’s Association criticized port operators’ use of semi-automated technology, contending that it will lead to job losses.

“Now, employers are coming for the last remaining jobs under the shiny banner of semi-automation,” Dennis A. Daggett, the union’s executive vice president, wrote in a message to members last month.

The employers want the new contract to let them introduce more technology. In a statement to The New York Times last month, the maritime alliance said it was committed to keeping the job protections in place, but added, “Our focus now is how to also strengthen the ability to implement equipment that will improve safety, and increase efficiency, productivity and capacity.”

Even with automation, hiring of longshoremen has gone up at the Port of Virginia, according to union records. An increase in the number of containers the port handles is largely behind the increase in hiring.

“The Port of Virginia is thriving with automation,” said Ram Ganeshan, professor of operations and supply chain at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

Advertisement

Some labor experts said there was a model for compromise: The union could agree to more automation, and the employers would offer solid job guarantees.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents dockworkers on the West Coast, agreed to a contract over a decade ago that “recognized that the introduction of new technologies, including fully mechanized and robotic-operated marine terminals, necessarily displaces traditional longshore work and workers.” The union got guarantees that its members would maintain and repair the machinery at the terminals.

Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said a deal on the East and Gulf Coasts was possible in part because the employers were profitable enough to offer job guarantees. “I do expect a compromise,” he said.

Continue Reading

Trending