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Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

Probably also the world's most costly port to operate. Every decade or so the workers organize a slowdown in order to increase their salary and benefits. They are already incredibly overcompensated workers, which is why the jobs are so coveted.

https://www.practicaladultinsights.com/how-do-i-become-a-lon...

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-dockworker-pay-201503...

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> They are already incredibly overcompensated workers

They work incredibly socially necessary jobs and they are able to bargain collectively to increase negotiation power, so they seem to be compensated fairly.

Honestly, they are essentially using regulatory capture. They require that anyone who works there has to be a member of the union and if they don't like what's going on the entire union refuses to work and to allow anyone else to work.

Start your own port then. It's not as if there's a shortage of coastline.

That wouldn't be legal in CA

How about OR or WA, or even Mexico. You could unload onto trains to cross the boarder.

That's what has been happening. California hasn't seen a new port since Port of San Diego in 1962 iirc.

There are very few places along the Pacific Coast of the US that are reasonable as ports.

Puget Sound, the San Francisco Bay, and southern California are pretty much it. Portland is 100 miles from the ocean; only smaller ships can reach it. Astoria and Eureka have terrible connections on the land side.

You could think about starting a new port at, say, Santa Monica or San Clemente. It could be done. You'd have to build a breakwater, a bunch of piers, and you'd have to buy a huge amount of land for facilities.

How much would it cost to buy, say, 10,000 acres and 20 miles of waterfront in Santa Monica? Yeah, that's why nobody has done it.

Expanding San Diego is about the only workable option.

It was mostly sarcasm. I just don't like the argument that it's regulatory capture because it's fallacious to blame capture when you refuse to compete. This also ignores the fact that there is competition between existing ports. Outlawing unions would just be another form of regulatory capture anyways.

There’s plenty of options. Southern CA is actually a longer trip from China than Seattle Washington so basically any west coast port can be expanded. It’s really the infrastructure outside the port that makes Southern California ports appealing.

> They require that anyone who works there has to be a member of the union and if they don't like what's going on the entire union refuses to work and to allow anyone else to work.

Good for them.

> "...essentially using regulatory capture."

no, it's not even remotely close to regulatory capture[0]. it's closer to cornering a (labor) market, which has nothing to do with the complicity of regulators here. california labor laws aren't being explicitly and specifically written to favor the longshoremen's union--that would be regulatory capture.

the main reason labor unions came into being is because companies, as they grew beyond human scale, began exerting highly coercive leverage on labor markets, sometimes via regulatory capture. some unions can sometimes exert political power, but that's not a regulatory capture mechanism, that's just regular politics.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

> california labor laws aren't being explicitly and specifically written to favor the longshoremen's union--that would be regulatory capture

Yes, they are. There should be different unions representing each port. The law won’t allow that, giving the ILWU a monopoly on legal port labor.

that isn't special to the ilwu, or labor in general. labor can organize as they see fit. that's a constitutionally recognized freedom, not a special privilege (aka regulatory capture).

Why doesn’t anyone build a competing port? Is it just too expensive for someone to build? Or are there actual laws prohibiting the creation of another port?

One cannot build a port just anywhere; you need to meet certain conditions in shore configuration, depth of water, you need road and electrical power connections on the land. A port is no longer a safe harbor from storms, they are huge investments with major ecological impact.

Both. Construction of ports is a massive endeavor and requires a suitable geographic location. On the regulatory side, the costal commission would never allow the construction of a new one due to the environmental impacts.

There is really only one more deepwater capable port left that is undeveloped on the west coast of the US. Coos Bay, OR. They are pushing hard to bring in larger ships, but need to dredge the channel to make it deeper and wider for larger ships. That is planned for a few years from now. But this port also only has one rail line, now owned by the port, that connects to Eugene, OR, where the other large railroads are. There is also only 2 lane highways out of town, in the mountain ranges, so really rail is the only way out of the port.

Even if you did, what would prevent all the workers from joining the exact same ILWU union you were fleeing in the first place?

How is it anything but regulatory capture? In a free market, if employees wouldn't do their jobs, they'd all be fired and replaced with ones who would.

> In a free market, if employees wouldn't do their jobs, they'd all be fired and replaced with ones who would.

We live in a market economy with farm and oil subsidies. People can point to the free market all they like as some arbiter of truth, but it ignores the political realities of our world.

'free market' is a ideologically-loaded term. in a fair market, we'd have much less distortion all around, much more competition, and a more equitable split of surplus value to constituents, to the point that labor unions wouldn't need to exist.

In a fully free market, a group of employees is able to come together and bargain with a company. This bargaining can include saying "unless from now on you only hire people from our organization, you'll immediately lose all of your current employees." This is how labor unions that are the only people allowed to work for a given company come to be.

Of course, agreements between two groups of people can still be harmful to society. But in the above situation, you would have to get the government to interfere to make those sorts of exclusivity arrangements illegal if you have an issue with them. It's not surprising that in a free market, sometimes employees realize that if they band together they have enough power to negotiate terms that make them near-impossible to fire.

> In a fully free market, a group of employees is able to come together and bargain with a company. This bargaining can include saying "unless from now on you only hire people from our organization, you'll immediately lose all of your current employees."

I agree with this. The problem is that today, it's illegal for a company to go with the "lose all of your current employees" approach.

> But in the above situation, you would have to get the government to interfere to make those sorts of exclusivity arrangements illegal if you have an issue with them.

I don't want making deals with unions to become illegal. I just don't want companies to be forced to make deals with them. For example, just because 51% of the employees want to be in a union doesn't mean that they should get to force the other 49% to join, or to force the company to only hire union workers going forward.

Yeah, and I'd also applaud the effort to have wages rise more proportionally to overall productivity gains. The big story of the US is that wages are stagnant but productivity has only gone up over that same time. If they have leverage, they should absolutely use it.

Yes and no. Total compensation went up, even discretionary income did too on average, but compared to the rest of the world the "purchasing power" seems to have fallen behind. Especially in certain service sectors (healthcare, education, social services).

The tremendous scandal here is that the median salary of a union longshoremen is $100k? I'm not sure why this is such a huge problem. Other skilled blue collar work pays in the same ballpark.

Salary is not total compensation, as most HN readers are likely aware.

Do they get serious overtime? Or bonuses? Other perks? Are they being paid in RSUs? :D

Yes, they get serious overtime. And guaranteed pensions.

Median comp of $100k in LA for a skilled job isn't "incredibly overcompensated" to operate the busiest container port in the western hemisphere.

Comp != salary, and union jobs tend to have more benefits.

“Overcompensated”? I’m skeptical of unions, but that they tend to increase wages (therefore allowing workers to reap the benefits of productivity improvements) is a GOOD thing. The bad thing is when they reduce efficiency, like go on strike, organize a slowdown, cause friction with management (although this can sometimes be a good thing if what management is doing is counterproductive), or fight automation/technology. I want the wage benefits of unions without the productivity penalty. (This is partly why I’m in favor of minimum wage increases tied to economy-wide productivity and consumer/worker cooperatives.)

prior to containerization, there were 100x more jobs in the port system

Were there? Port volume was much smaller. The reduction in port jobs per ton of goods moved must be somewhat compensated by significantly increased volume.

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