But as with most economics, it doesn't really matter what you think is fair, or who has the best justification. These are simply economic forces testing each other, and whichever is strongest will prevail.
People in the US are so accustomed to working class people being universally disempowered that we find it perverse and "upside down" that some workers could actually have the economic force to make demands and have them met. Meanwhile employers routinely make arbitrary demands and have them met. It doesn't even occur to anyone to argue about them, because it's recognized that employers simply have the power to demand whatever they want from their employees, and that this is natural and reasonable.
That's because they are political.
> But as with most economics, it doesn't really matter what you think is fair, or who has the best justification. These are simply economic forces testing each other, and whichever is strongest will prevail.
That's not different than other political issues (“politics” and “economics” are different lenses for viewing the same disputes over the distribution of social power) and “strength” here is absolutely inclusive of political strength in the narrow sense, since government has a substantial potential role in both the immediate resolution of the dispute and in setting the playing field on which the repeated series of disputes takes place.
I guess the mob making demands on business is simply economic forces testing each-other, by one accounting. But it feels a tad incomplete.
They also dont get much love from the public. The known ties with organized crime might have something to do with it and the general impression (right or wrong) that they are never happy despite having very good conditions/salaries.
Better: encourage automation, but require re-training alongside job guarantees and better pay and benefits. Do we really think making our ports more efficient won’t yield dividends in increased volumes?
[1] https://apnews.com/article/longshoremen-strike-ports-pay-con...
The port workers are negotiating based on what is best for their careers, not what would be optimum for society broadly.
Almost everyone does this with their own career - we push for more favorable wages, conditions etc simply because we want them and we believe our value to our employer justifies them.
Rarely does anyone else complain about this. The difference is that union workers do it at scale, and are therefore often more effective than the rest of us. So it seems like they're getting an unfair deal, but there's nothing unfair about it - they're just better negotiators.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/26/port-worker-...
If you want a payment for doing nothing of value, that's something government handles, not a private employer.
There's SO MUCH demand for labor right now, let's not have people do jobs that computers can do.
I'm personally in much agreement with you and am not sympathetic to unions generally speaking. It's one thing if a company needs you and you band together to get better pay, it's another to blackmail whole industries and even countries to keep paying you for something nobody needs you to do.
To be honest, this comment reads like a political campaign statement, and I’d like less of this on Hacker News.
There is a reason it’s faster, simpler and cheaper to ship stuff via air versus ports in cases where it seems to not make sense. (I recently dealt with this in olive oil and glassware.) The idea that we can run inefficient ports so someone can manually pilot a crane without any cost is ridiculous.
I’m not sure jobs should be the priority over progress.
In the entire history of the world automation has never caused employment reduction, only a shift.
Why should we care if the corporation profits more? I am not in the top 10% owning 93% of total US equities, so I do not care. Automation so the wealthy get wealthier doesn’t help anyone but the wealthy, and they need no help. Consumer excess can come from there as well, vs the pockets of people who do actual work.
As a hypothetical example, if there was some new method of transport that bypassed ports entirely at 1/10th the cost, would you support an effort to scuttle it to support longshoreman?
This same issue played out with the introduction of the shipping container; if history had played out differently and we were still manually packing ships I don't think you'd choose that world over what we have today.
Of course it isn’t. To make this construct work in the modern world requires amortising past labour across future automation in a way that almost deifies the first work.
If they don’t find things profitable, then they would just not run said infrastructure, disrupting the lives of many people.
This is why strikes make people nervous.
There has been an unprecedented acceleration of the concentration of wealth to the billionaire class, and that’s fundamentally unsustainable. History has shown the end result is either a decrease in inequality naturally, through government intervention, or violence.
I prefer naturally (a strike and negotiation), I’d accept government intervention, but I fear a lot of people will take your jaded view of “why should they get more money when we can replace them with automation” and we’re going to eventually end up with violence when enough people can’t afford the basic necessities.
My worry would be that by making possibly excessive demands that would further benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of the nation, they may accelerate the demise of their positions altogether. I'm not altogether against this (because I do think would benefit the rest of the nation in the medium term) but like you I also worry about the increased chance of societal collapse if inequality keeps increasing. I'd probably prefer the safer choice of two decently paid new jobs for new workers than one soon-to-be-phased out job at a higher rate. I'm asking so I can understand better the opposite preference.
