US East and Gulf coast ports face shutdown as union announces intent to strike
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But as with most economics, it doesn't really matter what you think is fair, or who has the best justification. These are simply economic forces testing each other, and whichever is strongest will prevail.
People in the US are so accustomed to working class people being universally disempowered that we find it perverse and "upside down" that some workers could actually have the economic force to make demands and have them met. Meanwhile employers routinely make arbitrary demands and have them met. It doesn't even occur to anyone to argue about them, because it's recognized that employers simply have the power to demand whatever they want from their employees, and that this is natural and reasonable.
That's because they are political.
> But as with most economics, it doesn't really matter what you think is fair, or who has the best justification. These are simply economic forces testing each other, and whichever is strongest will prevail.
That's not different than other political issues (“politics” and “economics” are different lenses for viewing the same disputes over the distribution of social power) and “strength” here is absolutely inclusive of political strength in the narrow sense, since government has a substantial potential role in both the immediate resolution of the dispute and in setting the playing field on which the repeated series of disputes takes place.
I guess the mob making demands on business is simply economic forces testing each-other, by one accounting. But it feels a tad incomplete.
They also dont get much love from the public. The known ties with organized crime might have something to do with it and the general impression (right or wrong) that they are never happy despite having very good conditions/salaries.
Better: encourage automation, but require re-training alongside job guarantees and better pay and benefits. Do we really think making our ports more efficient won’t yield dividends in increased volumes?
[1] https://apnews.com/article/longshoremen-strike-ports-pay-con...
The port workers are negotiating based on what is best for their careers, not what would be optimum for society broadly.
Almost everyone does this with their own career - we push for more favorable wages, conditions etc simply because we want them and we believe our value to our employer justifies them.
Rarely does anyone else complain about this. The difference is that union workers do it at scale, and are therefore often more effective than the rest of us. So it seems like they're getting an unfair deal, but there's nothing unfair about it - they're just better negotiators.
Sure. That works until someone has a monopoly. If this union is allowed to block automation, it shouldn’t have a monopoly on our ports.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/26/port-worker-...
If you want a payment for doing nothing of value, that's something government handles, not a private employer.
There's SO MUCH demand for labor right now, let's not have people do jobs that computers can do.
I'm personally in much agreement with you and am not sympathetic to unions generally speaking. It's one thing if a company needs you and you band together to get better pay, it's another to blackmail whole industries and even countries to keep paying you for something nobody needs you to do.
In the entire history of the world automation has never caused employment reduction, only a shift.
Yes. Your Econ 101 class may have taught you jobs will shift. Econ 101 does not give you the case study of a 45 year old worker who finds themselves having to restart their career.
So yes, across many years a shift in employment happens.
To the guy who lost his job and now has to figure out what to do, he risks being unable to find a career anywhere near where he was at.
Ideally we would have retraining programs that would meaningfully train and place people into new jobs, but efforts are largely performative.
Also, what's your alternative plan? Just freeze all jobs at current level of technology, because we can never make any changes?
Most ports in the world are automated - they are literally doing pointless busy work!
And employers know that, and (other than contracting work) they'll usually hire with the expectation of rapid training, and it's not an issue.
That hasn't been my experience. Most hiring managers I've had interviews with are in a hurry and want people with experience now. Good luck getting the job if you have to do a code screen against people with years of experience with that language.
Assuming that because someone may arrive home with some debris and grease does not mean the work is directly transferable.
Similar when expanding. Fill the new positions with automation.
I agree with you, but I think Amazon has shown how much it values warehouse workers.
There is a reason it’s faster, simpler and cheaper to ship stuff via air versus ports in cases where it seems to not make sense. (I recently dealt with this in olive oil and glassware.) The idea that we can run inefficient ports so someone can manually pilot a crane without any cost is ridiculous.
I’m not sure jobs should be the priority over progress.
You believe you have seen no benefits from industrialisation, electrification and digitisation?
There has been an unprecedented acceleration of the concentration of wealth to the billionaire class, and that’s fundamentally unsustainable. History has shown the end result is either a decrease in inequality naturally, through government intervention, or violence.
I prefer naturally (a strike and negotiation), I’d accept government intervention, but I fear a lot of people will take your jaded view of “why should they get more money when we can replace them with automation” and we’re going to eventually end up with violence when enough people can’t afford the basic necessities.
My worry would be that by making possibly excessive demands that would further benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of the nation, they may accelerate the demise of their positions altogether. I'm not altogether against this (because I do think would benefit the rest of the nation in the medium term) but like you I also worry about the increased chance of societal collapse if inequality keeps increasing. I'd probably prefer the safer choice of two decently paid new jobs for new workers than one soon-to-be-phased out job at a higher rate. I'm asking so I can understand better the opposite preference.
The union is demanding “a total ban on the automation of cranes, gates and moving containers in the loading and unloading of freight” [1].
That said! They are negotiating. This is their opening ask. If they stick to it, fuck them. But maybe they can permit modernisation alongside a pay raise.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/longshoremen-strike-ports-pay-con...
Workers have a right to strike. But there should be room, at the same port, for trying a more-efficient approach.
The management of this unionised workforce shouldn’t have a choice. But this union’s members shouldn’t have dictatorial power over our Eastern seaboard’s port infrastructure.
(Also, I have the right to demand a personal battleship. Not everything one has the right to do is reasonable.)
I'll gladly steelman the opposite idea. If you're running a McDonalds and you fire half your employees to replace them with burger-flipping robots, you damn well better expect the cashier to quit or go on strike. People aren't that stupid - they can see the Looney-Tunes ACME anvil suspended over their heads, they know when they have to negotiate themselves off the red painted 'X'.
Similarly, I think introducing automation to a historically-human career like longshoring is absolutely an all-or-nothing shtick. You're either displacing your human workers entirely with unpaid alternatives, or you're dealing with the consequences of a partially human workforce. There is no magic compromise, despite what management wants. You either acquiesce or replace them with robo-scabs.
Far, far, fewer longshoreman are accomplishing magnitudes more work than longshoremen a few generations ago.
Once enough automation is introduced, the owners really have no incentive to pay a fair share to anybody whose labor they no longer need. So any promises to "share the wealth" that comes from automation ring hollow.
Once business adds additional automation, (a) the business made additional investment in the automation, (b) the remaining jobs tend to be higher-skill, (c) (after recouping cost of automation) the business now has better margins and can afford to pay the remaining employees more, (d) because of (b) and (c), they usually do pay their remaining employees more as a way to retain now even more critical labor.
Businesses rarely automate the hardest / highest-skill parts of the job first. Why would they? There are lower-hanging fruit.
But the pace of automation is slower for high touch work, such as nursing home work, cleaning, cooking, and other jobs that typically pay the least.
Of course, there is a need for very specialized work that could pay more, such R&D in cutting edge computing, medicines, chemistry, etc, but the chances of achieving that level of expertise does not seem realistic for the majority of the population.
CFO/COOs typically aren't investing in the highest-capability automation, because that's the most capital-expensive automation.
It's far cheaper and easier to buy another crane or loader, driven by a person, than a fully autonomous system.
So given the two options, they'll usually pick the former (because it has quicker ROI).
There are some exceptions, if a large proportion of the work is high-skilled, e.g. pharmacy, but with dockworkers we're probably talking about the lowest-skilled jobs being eliminated first.
To be honest, this comment reads like a political campaign statement, and I’d like less of this on Hacker News.
The federal minimum wage is irrelevant. Something like one percent of workers make federal minimum wage. It’s a good political talking point though…
Neither of you have a point. Median wages have lagged productivity growth. But most Americans don’t earn the minimum wage.
It’s better to say that the statistics aren’t changed much by increasing the federal minimum wage as it pertains to the productivity/pay gap. But one should acknowledge that for those making minimum wage it is a disgrace that it hasn’t increased for a long time and that it is far too low. Those people do matter. This isn’t just a discussion about statistics. There is a human element to the issue and morality is part of what one ought to consider when thinking about the issue.
EDIT: I edited my comment while you were responding. The discussion in the present thread is not about the dockworkers. It’s about the pay/productivity gap in the U.S. In that discussion a person said that minimum wage workers were irrelevant and that the minimum wage was just a political talking point.
That’s unfair.
Of course they count. The question is whether port logistics is the best policy tool with which to address their plight.
The striking dockworkers don’t earn minimum wage. If the striking workers win, the minimum wage stays right where it is and has been for ~2mm minimum-wage workers [1]. This isn’t a fight about minimum wage. They count. But they aren’t relevant.
> about the pay/productivity gap in the U.S.
Fair enough. I believe we need a minimum-wage hike. But I don’t see how that’s relevant to a union strike.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...
Longshoreman make well above median wage.
We are pointing out that the salaries are stagnant or getting worse over time (e.g. min wage) in real money terms. We show you that the inflation is same or higher than the annual wage raises, while the GDP is still growing (GDP growth is already adjusted for inflation).
So someone is benefiting from the GDP growth, but this someone is not the W2-worker. But you don't want to admit the facts.
For better or worse, we have opted for a systems where much of the receipts for low income works flow directly from the government. A minimum wage worker qualifies for free healthcare, food subsidies, and greatly subsidized housing if they can navigate the waitlist.
I am asking you again to show me convincing numbers.
This next paper is funny. Notices the decoupling and tries to hand wave it away without explaining why there was no decoupling before the 80s. At any rate note that the graph is from FRED.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...
Reminder of how difficult it is to make real-terms adjustments to economic measures over multiple decades spans when a country's balance of trade with the world in different sectors is also changing!
It also suggests that if you dice it up by sector you might get different amounts of decoupling, which makes logical sense given productivity gains aren't equally spread.
To be honest this comment reads like a statement from someone who can’t dispassionately discuss something. The validity of what I wrote is independent of the motivation for writing it.
Why should we care if the corporation profits more? I am not in the top 10% owning 93% of total US equities, so I do not care. Automation so the wealthy get wealthier doesn’t help anyone but the wealthy, and they need no help. Consumer excess can come from there as well, vs the pockets of people who do actual work.
As a hypothetical example, if there was some new method of transport that bypassed ports entirely at 1/10th the cost, would you support an effort to scuttle it to support longshoreman?
This same issue played out with the introduction of the shipping container; if history had played out differently and we were still manually packing ships I don't think you'd choose that world over what we have today.
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...
Of course it isn’t. To make this construct work in the modern world requires amortising past labour across future automation in a way that almost deifies the first work.
Labor by itself produces no value. Roll a rock up and down a hill and no value is created.
The labor theory of value is Myopic in this respect.
The statement isn't that all labour produces value but that labour is the source of all value. Without labour there's absolutely no way to provide value.
I'd like to know an example of something that produces value without labour, I really cannot come up with one.
A painting by a long-dead artist. That’s what I meant by “amortising past labour across [the] future.” (I phrased it badly originally.)
Also, natural resources. The total value of a chopped-down tree is well in excess of the labour used to chop it down.
Whose labor is responsible for the market value of the wood. Is it the planter, the cutter, or hauler, and in what proportions? All are necessary, none are sufficient. The only way to have a meaningful assessment of "labor value" is in the the prevailing price in a labor market.
Thanks for elucidating it, I understand your point better.
Then again, the source of value came from labour. The long-dead artist had to put on labour not only for that single piece of painting but across a whole body of work for that painting to appraise in value over time, the scarcity drives its value further but it was from labour the value originated and grew from, both the actual work done for that painting as the whole life of the artist to become a valuable object.
> Also, natural resources. The total value of a chopped-down tree is well in excess of the labour used to chop it down.
Without the labour to chop the tree down it doesn't have inherent value, through labour it's transformed and more wealth is created since a natural resource after processing is more useful. It does not detract from my point that without labour there would be no exchangeable value/trade to extract surplus value since the material would not exist, the source of wealth creation is labour.
Humans need to Air to breath. Air is the source of all life. Humans need water to drink. Water is the source of all life. Humans need food to eat. Food is the source of all life.
The reality is that humans need all these things and more to live. None of them are sufficient for life by themselves.
The same is true of labor.
If they don’t find things profitable, then they would just not run said infrastructure, disrupting the lives of many people.
This is why strikes make people nervous.
You too can organize for better pay and working arrangements collectively. Or, you can live and die by the at will arrangement and how lucky you are wrt comp. But don’t be sour when other people make better choices that empower themselves while you don’t.
Forming a union is an antagonistic action against a corporation. You’re literally forming a cartel controlling one of their critical supplies (labor). There better be significant upside to burn that goodwill because all comp changes going forward are going to be shitty tooth and nail negotiations for salary bumps and RSUs will be kept for management only.
People at the big tech companies are looking to make life altering money and that comes through RSU accumulation and appreciation. That means being aligned with shareholders, which is the opposite of a union. The only place you might have success drumming up support for unions are mid to low tier tech companies where people make a low 6 figure salary and next to no equity.
And I answered. The employees are not special in and of themselves. They can be replaced. That's what a scab is. Who cares what the public supports. They are not involved in this. What's the public going to do to show their lack of support?
People supported the strikes from the Writer's Guild and the Actor's Guild. They didn't want AI automation to replace their jobs. This union doesn't want a similar bit of automation to replace theirs.
To me, unions are no longer the thing they were when they were first created. From a non-union person looking in (and based on my one personal experience of going through a union vote), the people in favor of unionizing were unwilling to adapt to new technologies and feared losing their jobs or doing something they didn't want. To them, the union was a way to just say no to change because some jobs will be at stake. Seems like that's what's going on here too.