The Rise of the Machines?

Dock-workers vs. Automation

Most of the students in my introduction to macroeconomics course this fall were born in 2005 or close to it. As such, most of them may not remember a time without ordering-kiosks at fast food restaurants, bag-check-in kiosks at airports, or a time when, if you wanted a ride somewhere, you had to stand on the sidewalk and hope a taxi cab would see you.

Those modern features came up this week since we were discussing a time-honored topic in macroeconomics known as the “production function,” which emphasizes how an economy utilizes both people and machines to produce things. (Though as part of our effort to bore students we macro instructors call those two things “labor” and “capital.”)

The mix of people and machines was in the news this week, too. The dock-workers’ strike highlights a sector with a robust mix of the two things. In this case, the humans want a bigger cut of the take than they have been getting. An additional consideration, too, is that the humans are not a fan of the machines, or at least not a fan of having more of them.

This made Macrosight wonder if dock-workers have been increasingly “out-sourced” by machines, much like ATMs did to bank-tellers. Figure 1 displays the number of “total employed in transportation and warehousing” as a ratio of total employed persons in the economy (from 1972 through September of this year).

While the category shown in Figure 1 does not narrow it down to just “dock-workers,” those working the ports in this country fall under this category (via the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

As it turns out, while these workers makes up a very small share of total employees in this country, the number of these workers as a share of the total is higher than it used to be. While the ratio has come down a little the past two years, the decline in the number of transportation and warehouse workers has been less than 1 percent over that time (notice the values on the axis suggest very minor differences in the ratio over time).  

Also notice that the ratio has especially increased since about 2010/2011. From 2011 to the peak of the ratio in mid-2022, the total number of employees classified as “transportation or warehousing” increased by 67 percent from about 4.2 million people to about 6.5 million. Over that same period, total employment only increased by 16 percent.

Of course, the increase in the number of these workers does not suggest that the number of automated machines, robots, drones, artificial intelligence, and so on, has not increased. It is possible that even more humans would have been hired over this timeline, but for those pesky machines.

Overall, the amount and value of cargo moving through America’s ports has steadily increased (at least through 2021, shown here). That steady increase has surely been handled by an increase in machines as well as humans.