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.
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.