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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

There might be some other reasonably fair salary that exists between minimum wage and $300k/year.

This is not exactly the same as a union bus driver.. I think its fair to say, that this is not a supply-and-demand wage negotiation, rather it is high-stakes negotiation between guilds, over decades. The aisles of the ports are intensely profitable, but operate under heavy pressures.

"Fair" is whatever they can negotiate. Who are you or I to say what's "fair" for someone else haggling over prices?

Fairness can only be achieved in a competitive environment without unnecessary and contrived leverage. It's really hard to find something fair when unions elect politicians who write laws for unions that allow strangling negotiations that give unions more money to elect politicians who write laws for unions... and on and on.

What happens with that high leverage, low competition environment is you end up with the richest country on earth having huge supply chain bottlenecks and rated as having some of the worst ports in the world.

> Fairness can only be achieved in a competitive environment without unnecessary and contrived leverage. It's really hard to find something fair when unions elect politicians who write laws for unions that allow strangling negotiations that give unions more money to elect politicians who write laws for unions... and on and on.

Corporations do exactly this, so sounds very fair actually.

Right, as long as the market is free, fair is whatever they can negotiate. If they artificially restrict labor competition or anything like that, then it isn't really fair anymore, like any monopoly.

Unlike a container port which just anyone can start?

When companies exploit their market power it's good business yet when workers do the same thing it's not really fair any more?

When any groups of self interest, companies or otherwise, exploit their market power, it is simply "exploiting their market power" and not good business. A labor union that negotiates sweet deals yet locks out other people from working is abusing their power, like a company could.

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