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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

> "...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

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> 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).

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.

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?

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