The high-tech angle on an old-fashioned dock strike
Steve Kovsky,
Contributing Editor,
AnchorDesk
Friday, October 11, 2002
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stor...885230,00.html

This column is dedicated to high-tech toys, as is this columnist. So you can imagine my growing alarm this month over the possibility that tech toy shelves will soon be bare, even as we head into the holiday buying season.

I'm referring to the lockdown of 29 seaports on the West Coast and its impact on all things imported. An interruption in the gadget supply is hardly the main concern here, as economists warn of economic impacts mounting into the tens of billions of dollars. The fact that Microsoft is already reporting trouble in the supply lines to its Xbox factory in Mexico just throws a little added gloom on the matter.


THE CURRENT DISPUTE between dockworkers and port owners is a repetition of the age-old union struggle, but with a technological twist: One of the primary stumbling blocks is over the possible adoption of new technology that could eliminate up to 800 union jobs. But what most media reports have failed to mention thus far is that the technology at the center of that dispute was invented by a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). He is, in fact, among those in danger of losing his job if the technology is adopted.

Bob Carson, the "chief visionary officer" of three-year-old tech start-up ContainerTrac, is also the chief clerk for Pier 80 in San Francisco. Adding to the irony, ContainerTrac chief operating officer Red Smith says the Berkeley, Calif., company's technology is actually endorsed by the union.

Smith confirmed ContainerTrac's estimate that about 38 percent of the ILWU's 2,400 ships clerks would lose their jobs if port owners adopt his company's technology, which would employ a combination of GPS receivers, gyroscopes, digital mapping, and motion sensors to automatically track the 8.5 million containers that pour into West Coast ports every year.

However, the 800 lost jobs are not the central bone of contention between the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). At issue are 200 new jobs that would be created for high-tech operators of the ContainerTrac system. Port owners of the PMA want the new jobs to be non-union, Smith says, while the ILWU has vowed that the 200 tech workers must carry union cards.

SO WHY would a longshoreman create a technology that puts his very profession at risk? One assumes that financial gain is among his motives, but so is saving lives, and solving a technological puzzle that has so far confounded maritime engineers.

The puzzle is to find a way of tracking millions of containers as they flow in and out of West Coast ports, without relying on costly labor or endangering lives. One of the reasons the ILWU supports the ContainerTrac system, Smith says, is because five ships clerks have been killed in the line of duty already this year, victims of the severe and dangerous conditions that prevail in the waterfront realm of heavy equipment and RV-sized containers stacked high into the air.

So what's so tough about keeping track of containers? At roughly 8 feet square and 20 feet long, they'd be pretty hard to misplace, right? Wrong. Ports store these things by the acre, in stacks that are several stories high. Like anything else, says Smith, "the one you need is usually going to be at the bottom of the stack." That means containers are constantly being shuffled top to bottom and side to side, creating paperwork nightmares for the ships clerks assigned to keep track of them.

Attempts to solve the problem using bar codes and optical recognition have been thwarted by a number of factors, not least the harsh conditions containers are subject to as they ride the seas on open decks. Placing GPS- and radio-based transmitters on the containers themselves has proven both costly and ineffective, as these technologies tend to break down in the "container canyons" that are simply too dense for the transmissions to get through.

LONGSHOREMAN CARSON saw these attempted solutions try and fail, says Smith. Finally, he had his epiphany: "It occurred to him that containers can't move by themselves." He hit on the idea of equipping the vehicles that move the containers--essentially flatbed trucks called "yard chassis" and tractors called "top-picks"--with the tracking and transmitting equipment. Match a container to the vehicle that moved it and, voila, you've got a tracking system.

To achieve the necessary accuracy--100 percent with a 12-inch variance--required a patented combination of satellite positioning, gyroscope-based inertial navigation, and motion detectors attached to the wheels of the vehicle, all calibrated to a highly detailed digital map of the freight yard.

Best of all, the equipment that makes up ContainerTrac's Port Automated Tracking System (PATS) is fitted onto at most several dozen vehicles at a given port, rather than each of the 13 million containers worldwide that might wind up in any port on any given day.

So, as much as this story is about potentially empty toy shelves and an epic labor dispute, it's also the story of a struggling start-up, trying to get its first round of funding and get to market with an apparently better mousetrap.

As I write this, contract negotiations remain at an impasse, but dockworkers have returned to their jobs--at least temporarily--under a federally imposed cooling-off period. Perhaps cooler heads really will prevail, and port owners and union workers will both agree to trade a certain amount of self-interest for the greater good.

In the meantime, where does that leave ContainerTrac, shiploads of Xbox parts, and millions of other items that are even more important to our flailing economy? It means they're on their way, but their progress will be slow.

What do you think? Is the ILWU holding back the tide of technology on the docks? Or are port owners using automation as an excuse to break the union? TalkBack to me!

Steve Kovsky is author of High-Tech Toys for Your TV: Secrets of TiVo, Xbox, UltimateTV, ReplayTV and More (Que Publishing, March 2002), and a daily technology commentator for the KFWB/LA Times Noon Business Hour, on CBS Radio in Los Angeles.