Automated cranes at my port: freedom from drudgery, or the end of what gave the day shape?

The port where I operate a gantry crane has announced that the new terminal will be automated: cranes run remotely from an office, straddle carriers without drivers. Some of us will retrain to sit at screens. Most won't be needed.

As a union delegate I'll fight for jobs and pay, that's the easy part. The hard part is what I say to the younger men who ask whether it matters, since the work is hard, dangerous and often boring. Isn't being freed from it good news?

Arendt has a sharp warning in The Human Condition: a society of labourers that is liberated from labour, and no longer knows the higher activities for whose sake the freedom would be worth having. The danger isn't losing the work. It's that we've forgotten what else a life is for, so freedom from work becomes just emptiness, or more consumption.

Marx says something different: the problem was never the work, it was how it was organised. Shorter hours, shared control, and the time freed could be used for real development.

I think both are right and neither tells me what to say on Monday. The crane gave my days a shape: shifts, skill, a crew who depend on you, the satisfaction of a clean lift in bad wind. Even the boredom had a rhythm. When it's gone, the shape goes too, and I'm not sure a screen or a pension replaces it.

Has anyone lived through a change like this, or found words for it?