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Comment by pokstad | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard to root for the ILWU. I grew up in San Pedro, where many of the long shoremen live (near the port of L.A.). Once you’ve known these people for a while, you start to understand that the problem is not only a strong union but also a stubborn and incompetent people.

The workers there are known for working doubles while on meth/speed. There are horror stories of crane operators high while operating machinery. Every so often a worker is flattened by a container.

Outside of work, the longies act like royalty in San Pedro. I grew up with their self entitled kids who would refuse to study in high school because they knew their parents would get them into the union. They drive around in jumbo SUVs like maniacs around town.

The longshoremen are still living off the karma of bloody Thursday, but one day that karma will wear off and the port will be modernized.

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That might have been then. But I haven't heard anything like that for Port of Oakland. The Bay Area ports have drug testing when you get a job and random drug testing when you have the job. I knew someone who worked at SFO (ports is ports) and he said if you failed a drug test you got counseling, .... But if you failed a second, it was a lifetime employment ban.

This is for Port of Seattle.

https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Drug...

That said, I'm completely in favor of automating this. Oakland is downwind from the port and anything which cuts down on idling fumes is a good thing.

"Random drug testing" often tends to be less than random. I know people who have worked in drug tested industries and they'd always get a heads up or be able to skip out of testing when they needed to.

Use of amphetamines on the job is incredibly common, even in professional white collar industries. When there's work to get done, it gets done. Everyone knows it goes on, and you'd rather have speedy workers than workers falling asleep at the wheel. Obviously the actual solution is that you employ enough workers and ensure that they get adequate sleep. Using drugs for work is a fast and easy pathway towards addiction.

Amphetamines (or basically crystal meth) is becoming super popular in China. I've heard a bunch of stories from the news and anecdotes from people living there. Something something evil capitalist drug-of-choice.

But ultimately that sort of thing is more destructive than helpful. Missing valuable hours of sleep and the (well recorded) low ROI of working long hours is extremely overrated in its utility to society. Which has been a particular problem in asian work cultures where working yourself to death is cheered on. While actual output of those hours and big-picture returns of employing someone over a long period of time, where outside-of-work things like family and health really does matter, is often ignored.

> they knew their parents would get them into the union

Ironic that union membership would become just another form of heritable wealth.

It has in Hollywood especially things like key grip jobs are passed down generation to generation. Having none of this in LA I spent half my working life homeless with a master's degree in Socal the economy is all about what you inherit not what you do the system has treated me Lowe than a dog my entire life despite my skills and education I'm simply someone you hit with cars and leave for dead

Yeah, I’m fine with questioning heritable wealth, but it should be across the board.

We shouldn’t chop up the middle class’ heritable tokens while letting the upper class keep theirs.

That just makes things worse.

Not all heritability is identical nor are their side effects. A literal caste system is worse than generational wealth transfer.

While one may gave an advantage to their off spring the previous effectively restricts others and is way unhealthier for society.

Just treating it like factions where just whose team is good for isn't a very healthy approach.

We shouldn't avoid chopping up one form of inheritable wealth just because we can't target all of it effectively or all of it at once though.

It's a great evil that needs to be stomped on viciously.

I’m sorry to hear that you are feeling so upset about this.

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t seems that way to most of the people, most of the time.

Maybe somehow you can get to a place where your influence on your fate seems more real?

Hollywood is about who you know. That would be the same without the unions.

Basically every industry is like that. Leads to my comment that at a job you get paid in money, experience, and connections. People fret about being underpaid and don't consider how bad it is being chintzed on the others. Especially the last one.

Is it ironic? Restricting the labor supply is the core of a union's ability to demand higher wages for its members.

Even if we were to accept that, there are many ways of "restricting the labor supply"; and nepotism is just about the least efficient you could think of. If you're going to "restrict" access to something, it should be done by rewarding individual merit and competence.

(At least that would imply a pretty nice improvement in labor conditions - no more workers being flattened by containers! Which is also the kind of thing unions typically care about.)

> If you're going to "restrict" access to something, it should be done by rewarding individual merit and competence.

It should be the case no doubt, but often isn’t because there’s less to leverage. Sometimes you need a favor, you know? But if you give a job to Joe Schmuckus that he could get anywhere, whats the motivation to do you a solid?

There are at least three propositions in your comment:

- Efficiency is implicitly good.

- Material rewards can/should be allocated according to some measure of individual merit and competence.

- Meritocracy and nepotism are distinct.

I tend to agree, but these statements are at least controversial (if not obviously wrong) within the political consciousness that does labor organizing these days. Read Jacobin sometime, you'll see vehement opposition. Internalizing the violent logic of capitalism, etc.

it's not wealth, it's advantage. once you get the job handed down to you, you still have to do the work to get the money, unlike wealth.

not saying jobs should be doled out that way, but it's quite different to get a chance at future income vs. having it mounded in your lap without lifting a finger.

That's just as true with wealth. Sure, you could spend your wealth down, but that's like eating your seed corn; very few actually do that, because it means you're not wealthy anymore afterwards.

Uh, the money grows by itself if properly invested. Investing in an index fund hardly counts as working.

> it's not wealth, it's advantage. once you get the job handed down to you, you still have to do the work to get the money, unlike wealth.

So like a taxi medallion. Which when sold on a free market had (before Uber, in NYC) a market value on the order of a million dollars.

That's a pretty huge advantage to pass down.

No, a taxi medallion could be rented out to drivers. For example, for a period Michael Cohen owned 34 NYC medallions.

Right, but the reason it has value is that it's tied to a high paying job where the supply of labor is limited. (Which is why, as soon as Uber flooded the labor side, the value of taxi medallions plummeted.)

If longshoremen were allowed to buy and sell their union memberships (say in the form of "union member medallions") they'd probably have similar value to taxi medallions.

You can’t make a loyal mafia out of just anyone who shows up.

I think you're vastly over-estimating how much you actually need to do your job to stick around in a workplace heavy on connections/nepotism. I have stories from state government that are almost beyond belief. Elected officials using backwater departments as a place to give jobs to people they owe favors is a recurring scandal in my state. Said people get a six figure salary just for showing up, sometimes not even that, somebody noticing lots of people paid for not showing up is how the "scandal" often starts. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the people who got their jobs by knowing someone do their jobs but a disturbing number don't.

This is why we should be thankful for pure capitalism. Inefficient companies should go bust and overtaken by those who are more efficient.

Advantage can be pretty synonymous with wealth though. Could be your dad happens to run the "People's Industry X" or simply you inherited a role that "X many people have to hold for the production to be not shut down".

Rents are by their nature exclusionary; it is hardly surprising they became hereditary rights. They are called guilds after all.

It feels just like rent control. They’re obviously not equivalent, but they’re similar in that you’re just changing the rules for how people are prioritized for access to finite resources; you’re not really increasing availability of said resources

It’s not that different than communist systems that result in a class of people who leverage their position to enrich themselves and their families.

The problem isn’t the economic system, the problem is human nature.

I experienced them early in my career working for a shipping company. They were quite willing to attack the while collar staff trying to get to work while they were on strike, despite not being the same job, not being on strike and our office was not even in the port, just nearby and despite being paid a LOT more than we were. The salaries were insane and the theft was something else. We shipped a lot of beer and if a fork lift was going to damage a pallet, it would just happen to be a beer pallet and just happen break a couple of bottles. The pallet would be considered destroy and they would never need to pay for beer while they had the job.

I'm sure you can find bad and annoying people in any group. I have no way of knowing whether your story is representative at all.

I think this is most ports? (Except the royalty part)

On the west coast canada.

Most people I hear about at the ports are wasted, drunk, or doing some coke or else at the port.

Have heard recently of dudes banging prostitutes(street walkers, not "escorts") in the parking lot... so there's that.

I think just the fact its really good money for grunt work, requiring no education, any job that has these characteristics are bound to have people who do crazy things or like to get messed up on the job. It's the people the jobs attract

> really good money for grunt work

Really good money for grunt work plus the risk of being flattened by a container. I think I'll pass.

Pretty much all grunt work comes with the risk of being flattened by something. If it didn't it would pay much less.

While true, you won’t hear about the ones that go to work, do their job, and go home to take care of their family.

Those stories are both boring and work against the narrative that they deserve lower pay.

Looking up the history of Bloody Thursday, I can’t find a clear cut academic account of what actually happened. Do you have any sources?

I believe that's when all west coast ports first unionized. Some believe unions can stifle innovation and progress. I believe that there's some truth to that.

It was apparently a deadly altercation between police and workers. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts show disagreement about who started it. Police say that the parade of striking workers broke the line and headed as a mob toward the piers, and started pulling inspectors out of cars, tried to tip over police cars, etc. The union replied that the police just started firing shot guns into the crowd.

Construction unions in NYC have certainly done this. We have a terrible subway because it costs about 10x/mile to build here compared to London or Paris. Unionized employees often make $300,000 or $400,000 a year for manual labor. Crane operator make $700,009 a year. It's completely insane.

I'm curious where you're getting these wage stats from

I wouldn't be surprised if they're accurate. Here in the port of LA there's around 20 guys making $400,000-600,000. You could make the argument that the work can be dangerous, requires skill, etc. etc. But that skill must be highly genetic, because most of them work or used to work the same union jobs as their fathers.

Edit: after doublechecking TransparentCalifornia there might only be around 15 guys making $400k and up at the harbor. I accidentally included some firefighters, who also have a tendency to rack up the overtime.

I would guess those numbers have to be largely due to overtime regardless of occupation. In a previous job, it wasn't unheard of for blue collar workers to get $200k+ but overtime hours made up a disproportionate amount of their income. This was in the midwest where housing and cost of living is relatively cheap, so it may even be on par with the numbers quoted for longshoremen.

Yeah but is the overtime real?

In my experience, yes. The overtime is "real" in the sense that it's actually needed and worked. Of course there's people who will game the system like in any arrangement and put off work so that they can instead do it while getting paid an overtime rate, but that seemed to be the exception. What makes you question whether or not it is "real" overtime?

Citation needed on these numbers. They strain credulity.

I personally knew longshoremen who were making close to $300k working as clerks in an office (this was about 15 years ago, so adjust for inflation). Clerks were the most coveted job that senior longshoremen wanted since you sat in an AC office away from any danger and made top dollar.

it's all online, just go look it up. here's some firefighter that makes $300k. help yourself.

https://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/PositionDetail.aspx?employe...

Interesting data for Los Angeles (from maximente link below https://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/PositionDetail.aspx?employe...)

I fetched the data using curl and filtered out any rows where wages were less than 24,960 (minimum wage in California).

  Wages:
  Max = $526,553
  Mean = $111,095
  Median = $106,749
  P75 = $137,051
  P90 = $173,958
  P95 = $201,611

https://ibb.co/qk2dfd9

Health And Retirement: (not sure if this is a separate yearly contribution by the city) https://ibb.co/c19Qcff

Interesting. Sounds a lot like Season 2 of The Wire.

Meanwhile across town parents are indicted for trying to get their kids into USC and people are dying on the ER floor.

In all that I never realized the good life was a union job.

"Trying to get their kids into USC" is very kind description for a program of bribery and systematic lying on college applications.

> .. workers there are known for working doubles while ..

this is classic slander .. you just grouped every worker into some obviously reckless and illegal BS. Whatever is said after this will play to the emotions and prejuidice of the reader -- anti-factual AND anti-empathy at the same time

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