[ResNet]

> I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day

This is surprisingly high in that I would have assumed it would be far more cost-effective for the company to improve automation here and bring in more equipment to assist — intuitively, even if such equipment would be expensive, it couldn't be more expensive than the labor costs.

What industry was this?

[TrackerFF]

Unloading frozen blocks of fish off factory fishing trawlers.

In short, these trawlers catch the fish (by trawling the ocean floor), produce the fish onboard (fish fillets), pack the product (in 25 and 50 kg blocks), and store them in large freezing rooms. Then when the capacity is full, they dock, and the product is unloaded. Usually some company offers this loading/unloading service. The product was the either placed in freezing warehouse, or loaded directly onto trucks.

The trawlers we unloaded, would usually carry 300 - 500 metric tons of fish. When I worked, we'd get around $0.03 pr kg fish unloaded, so a 300 metric tonne assignment would result in $9000 split on 10-15 people. Some days we'd unload 500-700 metric ton. That would be very long days - but the work had to be done, as the there were ships standing in queue.

The main problem with automation is that all the ships look a bit different, and there are so many edge cases there. Sometimes the blocks are frozen together, and you'll have to use a crowbar to get them loose. Sometimes the blocks have shifted due to rough seas. It can be a fucking mess, other times it's nice and straightforward.

The largest boats do have conveyer belt, so the longshoremen are just throwing blocks on the belt, and the other crew is on land putting said blocks onto pallets. But 9 out of 10 times, there's a crew in the freezer loading blocks onto pallets, and then the pallets are brought up from the ship, and sorted on land. People work surprisingly fast.

As for the vessels, it's just a cost of doing business.

[pinko]

I think the OP already said: dockworkers unloading ships -- that's the industry.

And to the extent that the cargo isn't containerized (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't), automation is harder than it sounds here: sequencing, unstacking, moving, and re-stacking irregularly-shaped, imbalanced, fragile, and dissimilarly-packaged objects requires lots of experience and judgement or things go awry very fast, and one mistake can cost a ton of time to deal with when something falls over, gets punctured, or gets in the way.

This is also true of movers (as in house movers). It's harder than it looks, at least to do well -- many cheaper companies write contracts such that they can screw up and customers have no recourse, which changes the economics a bit -- but the first-rate movers are expensive for a reason. Unless you're incredibly careful (which often implies going more slowly), bodies get wrecked and objects get broken.

As an aside, one proxy for a first-rate moving company is them having front-line employees who have been on the job for 5+ years. It's basically impossible for companies that cut corners because no one survives that long. Firms like Gentle Giant out of Boston (I have no stake in the company, I just know them well)) have a stable of long-term employees, many of them athletes, because they're incentivized to do a good job while not hurting themselves. And they're expensive (but not necessarily more expensive than cut-rate firms if you factor in the risk of damage, and/or the likelihood of being fairly reimbursed if something is damaged).