Great comment, and I'm glad you brought this point up so we can deep dive. If you read the book "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson," (Chapter 6: Union Disunion) [1] it covers the historical negotiation and agreement between the longshoreman unions and shippers when the shipping container improved efficiencies; they split the gains from the efficiency improvements knowing it was going to reduce the need for labor into the future.

If that was on offer today, I would have a different opinion, for sure. I would strongly support Automating All The Things. I think the grand bargain that was previously made when the world standardized on shipping containers was reasonable and fair. But that is not what is on offer. What is on offer is the Robber Barron equivalent of folks attempting to automate as much as possible to the detriment of labor for shareholder and management returns, and because of that, I hold the opinion that I do. With the decline in labor unions and lack of labor regulation in the US for the last several decades (since the Ronald Reagan era, broadly speaking), Capital has ground down Labor, and Labor needs to grind back to make up for lost time and ground [2] [3].

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...

[2] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[3] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...