Dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas go on strike | Hacker News Reader

Dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas go on strike

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150 pointsmikeocool305 comments

I'm about as pro union as anyone I know. I'm not blind to the problems with unions but I do think that generally the benefits outweigh the costs. This situation has me pretty torn however. I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation. This just seems unreasonable and anti progress. I understand that automation costs jobs and a union's primary responsibility is to protect the jobs of its members but what are we really supposed to do here? Continue with antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people?

I get that that's unfortunate and perhaps a very serious problem for people working in that industry but what choice do we really have? I'm reminded of something a teacher said to me in high school about how one day many of my classmates and I would have jobs that didn't exist when he was a kid. Isn't that how this works? As time goes on some jobs go away and new jobs come about and there is some pain in the interim? I'm all for figuring out some way to ease that pain for the people in the transitional period but I don't know who's really responsible for that.

If you read the book the box they did the same when standard containers came in. The docks were forced to pay for like 5x the number of workers required because of Union agreements.

I'm reading that right now, and it's incredible the amount of rent seeking that went on. It was a system that wasn't great for anyone except those who got the bribes from people looking to work.

(I also had a good laugh when they described "shape up," or the process of choosing workers from those who assembled for the day. It was horribly corrupt. And, of course, the term is now used as a software planning process.)

Yeah recently Rail Workers in Sydney struck and one of the things they objected to was driverless trains. It just makes them look like fucking idiots.

There's a ton of safety issues that can arise with driverless freight trains.

If you think those issues are bad, just wait til you hear about the safety issues that have happened with non-driverless freight trains

Can you quantify both sets for us so we can make an objective comparison?

From what I’ve seen the danger comes primarily from the operating companies refusing to provide an adequate number of workers for the trains so the ones that are present are stretched too thin. So the issue isn’t driverless vs not, it’s adequate staffing.

These are metropolitan trains.

If they get to keep their jobs, then why would they give a shit whether they look like “fucking idiots” or not?

Yeah those stupid dumb dumbs, trying to keep their jobs. Don't they know that the cost saving will go right into someone's third yacht? These driverless trains are very important!

And maybe, if we all bend over hard enough, ticket prices might even go down a cent or two! Those silly people who want to eat, they don't see the big picture like me!

> I'm not blind to the problems with unions

What problems are you referring to, specifically?

> I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation

So there are two ways automation could affect a workplace.

The first way is that it replaces and displaces workers. With layoffs comes downward pressure on the wages for existing workers who, for fear of losing their jobs, now do more labor for the same or less money.

The second way is that automation makes your job easier, ideally so it's safer, less physically strenuous and you have to work fewer hours.

In the coming decades, this is a problem we're going to increasingly face as the more menial jobs increasingly get automated. That automation is going to get more and more sophisticated. What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs?

That could either be fantastic or dystopian.

no, the workers will start to wonder why a small group of people who do barely any work are sucking up all the profit.

Currently we have 0.1% of people sucking the majority of the profit. 20% would be a vast improvement.

But, to your point, the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are wars and revolution. What happened 200+ years ago in France can happen again. And it will if we don't start being just a little bit fairer in the distirbution of profits.

It almost did, too. The New Deal answered the question of labor unions and every day folk.

The alternative was not and would not be pretty.

The New Deal also set up time bombs in the economy. Government spending as a percentage of GDP is ever-increasing. Early 1900s this was at about 3-5%, nowadays it's 40-60%. On top of that it gave us the pension and healthcare time bombs due to birthrates decreases.

Whether we like it or not, but eventually this spending is going to grow high enough that it can't grow anymore.

None of that was New Deal and the ssi pensions were funded, all this happened well before the move to fiat.

you're hand waving over two world wars, the discovery of nuclear weapons, microwaves, and transistors the invention of automobiles, financialization of the economy, massive concentrations of wealth in a tiny percentage of ultra-wealthy people and corporation in America.

There is no need to jerk your knee so sharply at the mere mention of a historic fact.

Exactly how is the economy going to function if 20% of people can't afford anything if they have no way to trade for goods and services?

About like the global economy does now.

the secret ingredient is crime

The coporate idea is to focus on luxury services and not care about the lower (or future middle) class. So stuff keeps getting expensive. Government will eventually step in because less worker -> less taxes collected -> less funding for everything, but who knows how long that will take?

But I agree with the "secret ingredient" as another has put it. Crime will skyrocket if the only way to survive is to take. underground markets will help make ends meets (that the government won't get taxes off of, hence the above). And there will be riots, very violent riots, and a lot more of them. A cornered rat strikes back, and millions of cornered rats becomes a miniature civil war.

Look at how corporates plan to deal with climate change - they don’t. The largest institutions in the world do not believe it’s their problem, they do not plan ‘how do i make sure that the system I depend on does not violently collapse’

> What problems are you referring to, specifically?

at the end of the day, unions are still ran by people. So it can be corrupted from the inside or out. They could raise dues on a whim and spend it recklessly instead of saving up for a strike or for other resources needed to advertise.

And union means that non-union (aka new workers to the industry like graduates or people making a switch to a new career) have another layer of beauracracy to go through. Beauracracy with their own whims. Elevator workers pay very well thanks to union, but it also basically means you wont be getting into that industry without knowing someone. So, double the nepotism needed.

Then the last ambivalent argument is that unions can indeed hold back technological progress. It's a hard issue to talk about because that's the exact thing opponents will argue when unions strike, but in some industries the workers have the biggest incentive not to use the most efficient means of work. Especially for businesses that can have slow times or simply run out of work to do. Basically your first point.

the second way is ideal, but we've seen over the decades that efficiency ever rewards the workers. We're something like over twice as efficient as workers 50 years ago, but our buying power has gotten worse, and we work more hours. Companies has shown we can't trust them to achieve that Jetson Utopia of doing an hour of work a day at efficiencies of entire 20th century factories as an individual. Our reward is just to manage 100 factories instead.

> it can be corrupted from the inside or out

Same for companies and gouvernements and were better with them and their drawbacks than nothing.

> in some industries the workers have the biggest incentive not to use the most efficient means of work.

… especially on an hourly wage.

There's other options. For example, the automation could open up other job opportunities. And it could get rid of the job completely. This is a problem we've faced for hundreds of years (if not longer).

> What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs?

We wind up having other things for them to do, the exact same as we always have, when we've faced this exact problem in the past.

The concern here seems to be longshoreman is one of the highest paid blue collar jobs; there is close to zero percent chance the middle age and older guys get anything like this again. It's quite dissimilar to something like a unskilled farmhand getting fired and then moving slightly up to maintaining farm implements or something.

Sucks for them, but they can't complain when they were happy to charge the poor and lesser working class through the nose to unload their goods. They can't both have their capitalism and eat it.

You really have to look at this stuff from first principles and first principles are pretty clear. Unions by definition are exercising market power to withhold labor and force a higher than market price on said labor. Thus, they are causing dead weight loss to society and making everyone worse off in the base case. Then one has to ask themselves in which situations could a union pushing up labor prices make things better? There's basically only one situation and that is where there is a labor monopsony and the company holding the monopsony is pushing labor prices down below market clearing rates (because pushing prices higher gets us closer to the market clearing rate in theory, lowering dead weight loss from labor). Is this a monopsony? Yes, it kind of is, but when one looks at the contracts being offered it's really hard to say labour prices are being pushed below market clearing rates. If anything they have been and continue to pay a premium, so this is not a situation where a union is a good idea for society.

> Unions by definition are exercising market power to withhold labor and force a higher than market price on said labor. Thus, they are causing dead weight loss to society and making everyone worse off in the base case.

Well, everyone except the people who work for money.

> Then one has to ask themselves in which situations could a union pushing up labor prices make things better?

In the situation where people get paid that higher labor price, those people are better off.

yes, but everyone else is worse off by a greater amount because that higher price causes other reactions and repricings in the supply chain. There are some really nice graphs in first year economics that explain this. That we are in a potential situation where there is market power being exercised by the employer is basically the only reason we have to even consider that a union could make things better off is because the person with the monopsony doesn't benefit from decreasing output as the union pushes wages higher if the end result is at or below the efficient price for labor.

> There are some really nice graphs in first year economics that explain this.

Yes, and they’re bullshit, as are the ones that suggest firms price competitively, that markets tend towards competition and not consolidation, that government spending is inherently bad, and all the other Chicago-school Reagan-revolution bullshit that’s left this country with third-world infrastructure, income inequality that would embarrass a Rockefeller, and no industrial base to speak of.

Economy is a prime example of a field where a bit of knowledge is worse than no knowledge, and nothing is more deranged than someone who has completed Econ 101, and thinking they now understand the world.

The basic reason this happens is that people's wages are only worth what they can buy, and in order for them to be able to buy those things they need to be produced and shipped. Sure, you could argue that this doesn't actually matter in practice because the corporations will always have enough excess profit to just pay people higher wages and employ more people to do less when the unions demand it, and that they'll have to do so rather than increasing prices, and that these cuts in profits will somehow always come out of the pockets of unsympathetic billionaires rather than ordinary workers' pension funds. That requires a lot more about the world to work out just right compared to the economics 101 version though.

>There are some really nice graphs in first year economics that explain this.

One of the first things I learned when I started to seriously study economics is that economists never let objective reality interfere with their theories or charts.

This is a really out of touch answer akin to how globalists and economists argued for off-shoring because “competitve advantage.” The reality is far more nuanced. For example, one could argue wage growth stagnated in the US and instead we had tremendous growth in developing countries. For many Americans, globalization was a tax that further exacerbated income inequality. Congratulations: this is Pareto optimal! Some company’s bottom line is improving, some shareholder is profiting, and wages stagnant—so society is “better off as a whole” definitionally… but is it really?

The same can be said about unions and market power. Sure deadweight loss exists. Someone will absorb the cost, but it’s not necessarily “the people”.

Companies cannot pass costs onto consumers as easily as economists claim, so often profits take the brunt of the deadweight loss. Think of it this way: if companies could just pass on the cost, why go through the expense of fighting the union when they could do just that?

Mind you, I’m talking about unions in general: it’s nuanced. I honestly don’t know enough about the specific demands here to have an opinion, but I encourage everyone to listen to an interview with the longshoremen.

>Someone is going to absorb the cost, and at times, corporations cannot pass that cost onto consumers, so shareholders take the brunt of the deadweight loss.

Why can't they pass it on? It's not like consumers would have other options, because you know, globalization just got killed.

Because more often than economists realize consumers can and will reject a higher price. There’s A LOT of substitutes for most things outside of commodities.

Try selling products on Amazon, and you’ll experience this. There’s a clearing price for your product, your costs be damned. If you try to “pass it on” some other product—-probably in a different category—-will out compete you, so you must forgo profit to stay competitive.

It’s a little different when the price goes up across the board (COVID inflation), because everyone experiences the same increase and everyone passes along the cost.

As a concrete example, I sell a card game on Amazon. If I shift the price up and down, I can see supply and demand in action: there’s an optimal price for my product where I maximize units sold. If I try to raise my price customers will go buy another card game. If we all raise our prices, customers will switch to some other toy. If all toy prices go up too far, people will send their kids to the park.

My point is that unions are a nuanced topic. I disagree with the terms of this strike, but if you listen to the longshoremen you can hear their anxiety.

There’s some middle ground we need to find, and throwing supply and demand curves around in absolutist terms won’t do that.

> Because sometimes consumers can and will reject a higher price

Often times this is because they don't have enough money because some jackoff keeps cutting their wages.

I think the ports will just pass along the cost. Whatever bargain the union strikes will be uniform across all of the ports and so they won't be able to undercut one another.

>It’s a little different when the price goes up across the board (COVID inflation), because everyone experiences the same increase and everyone passes along the cost.

What do you think will happen if globalization was killed? Given how interlinked economies are right now and how much US imports, widespread price rises like you described is almost inevitable.

This is a really out of touch answer because it goes off for a paragraph on an unrelated economics topic that also makes the writer similarly uncomfortable to the reality that unions are often bad before finally bringing it back around to relevance in the last sentence, which misses the point. Of course someone is going to have the cost somewhere. That it can be shareholders in the situation where there is monopsony without causing other pricing ripple effects is entirely the point of why a union may be doing good in that situation. In pretty much every other situation that could apply to the specific dock workers situation from the article, a union is doing zero good to actively doing harm via price manipulation on labor costs.

>Of course someone is going to have the cost somewhere.

unions also exist because employees are almost always where the cost goes if corporations have a choice. lower wages, less hours, or straight up cutting staff while forcing remaining staff to work harder under duress.

you can cynically call unions "blame shifting", but everyone is simply playing their best cards, since loyalty is not longer a center ideal for a modern company.

Of course everyone is playing their best cards. The question is which cards are good and which cards are bad for society and the union card is clearly bad because it is exercising market power (by withholding all labor) to artificially push labor prices higher. You guys act like corporate abuses are bad and labor abuses are virtuous when you should be against both because both are the same damn thing: Market power abuse.

Well if we consider the government as "managers of society", they require an educated populace stimulating the economy that they collect taxes from. They have to balance it with company taxes, but at the extreme of all automation, "society" suffers in this lens.

Previous means of automation managed to create jobs and boost productivity to unseen levels, but I think we're approaching the physical version of "speed of light" on how productive we can get in manufacturing by vertically optimizing. So automation will soon start to remove jobs instead of add them.

>You guys act like corporate abuses are bad and labor abuses are virtuous

In a general concept, yes. Because corporate abuses always benefit the people who need the money the least for survival. That's a pretty hard notion to shake.

Likewise, you can consider civil disobedience (which strikes are) "bad", but we only get there due to the former happening for too long. When it's easier to collectively walk out than to petition your representatives to give society a living wage, that's says a lot about "society"

In a consumer economy such as the US such inefficiencies are a economic benefit because gains of labor tend to increase the velocity of money in ways gains from capital do not.

That's not really true on any reasonable timeframe because most of the gains actually go to the consumer as competition turns inefficiencies into price decreases on goods and services. I mean it's what some really far out in left field economists want to be true and they certainly goal seek macro data and publish papers on what they want to be true but it just isn't true except in the sense I already talked about where gains to capital were being juiced by market power pushing labor prices below the efficient market clearing rate (which does happen more than we would like to admit, it's just unlikely to be happening here).

On an individual level the marginal value of money exists. The economy is made up of people.

I'm not convinced the first principals are so clear. Economics research in the last 30 years has often examined market distortion due to incomplete information (especially information asymmetry) in the marketplace. Given the tendency to hide salary data, labour markets have very incomplete information. It's like having a stockmarket where the stock prices are secret.

We all know there's a massive accumulation of capital in the hand of a tiny few.

That indisputable, right? You don't disagree with that statement?

Unless you're one of those billionaires, attacking one of the few mechanisms for correcting that imbalance seems counter-productive to sanely discussing this.

A mechanism that programmes are bizarrely hostile to, even though their work is one of the nost exploited.

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Warren Buffett

Banning slavery caused dead-weight loss. Market clearing price for commodified labor is minimal sustinence.

Slavery is horrifically evil. Ending it freed 4 million people from daily robbery, abuse, and a life of subsistence poverty.

Banning slavery eliminated massive dead weight loss. Slavery used violence to force labor from people below the clearing price - it compelled them to work for free.

All liberals should oppose slavery. We should want free people, free markets, and a generous social safety net for all.

Social safety net causes deadweight loss.

To be clear: I'm not for minimizing deadweight loss because free markets are horrible for humans. Free markets don't care about human suffering.

Regulated markets can be OK, but then you shouldn't talk about free markets or deadweight losses.

>force a higher than market price on said labor. Thus, they are causing dead weight loss to society and making everyone worse off in the base case.

This seems to make an optimistic implication that "market price" is 1) reasonable and 2) realistic. Of course a business wants skilled labor to be paid peanuts to do 168 hours of highly profitable labor a week. But there's multiple layers of barriers here that stop that reality.

For the former, the rising cost of living everywhere is why strikes are starting to happen more frequently now. If you cannot pay your expenses while giving half your waking hours to a job, you either ask for more money or leave. that CoL may or may not be that Companie's fault, but what was reasonable in 2019 is not reasonable in 2024. Yet compensation has fallen far under inflation, let alone what is "reasonable" to survive now.

unions have flaws, but they are made to make sure workers are "reasonably" compensated and treated well. That's how they make things better.

>when one looks at the contracts being offered it's really hard to say labour prices are being pushed below market clearing rate

What are these contracts, and are they reasonable by 2024 standards?

> making everyone worse off in the base case.

Everyone else. That is the point. But only in a theoretical sense.

The corporations might benefit from stability in the workforce and the owners might benefit from the workers being able to have the faintest possibility to keep the manager class in check.

Are high profits by corporations a dead weight loss for the rest of us?

in the early 1900s this is exactly the argument used by wealthy business owners who didn't want to invest in safety equipment or take care of the workers who died or were crippled.

It's not wrong, it just assumes that business owners are behaving well.

> I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation. This just seems unreasonable and anti progress.

Maybe, but automation can also be used to run the remaining workers ragged. See the current issues with high frequency train scheduling and the attendant accidents due to fatigue.

Precision railroading exists because the government enforces a monpoloy on labor in the rail sector.

Which monopoly on labor? Railroad workers aren't required to be union the United States.

The rail labor act which forbids striking.

You make people work, they've already said they're going to slow down so you paying them for 25% of the work. And they still win in the end.

The reason strike has happened because the dock companies themselves profit off of a strike. They charge extra fees money for storage etc.

We're talking about whether automation is worth striking over for safety reasons and you just pointed out that the railroad situation is because the workers can't strike.

So ... sure? Apparently, we're in agreement.

I don't necessarily like unions but I struggle to come up with something better. Unions are the worst form of labor organizing except for all the others.

>but I struggle to come up with something better

Regulation to properly make sure wages scale to be a living wage, and a proper safety net for those who lose jobs, including retraining support. Or even just capping executive pay based on the lowest wages of the labor they pay.

But I live in fairy tales. Unions are indeed the best of the worst.

Most of the negotiated terms in union contracts aren't pay which makes me think mandating pay isn't a silver bullet.

There's also the case of public sector where unions are needed because the government making the regulations is also the employer so there's a conflict of interest going on.

> just capping executive pay based on the lowest wages of the labor they pay.

I really don’t see a problem with this, executives are employees too. Make their incentives align

Lowest paid employees get outsourced.

We already see it in most companies - they buy in cleaning services rather than employing the cleaners for example.

Furthermore, CEO responsibility will not be scaled if their pay is capped. People keep citing the "CEOs earn X times more than they used to", but they conveniently leave out the this only applies to a tiny fraction of companies and that these companies have scaled up by a very large amount. Walmart has 2.1 million employees. No company 50 years ago had anywhere near that many employees. The comparisons don't really hold up, which is why they don't use metrics about all companies.

CEO work/responsibility doesn't really scale up with company size, though. Sure, they're "responsible" for more people; but it's really the people that work for them that are responsible, and the people that work for them. Scaling up the size of a company generally adds more layers; it doesn't add more work for any individual at a layer.

Admittedly, that doesn't really hold true for the initial "small company to large company" growth, but that's not really what we're talking about; and _that_ hasn't really changed at all in a long time.

Is the risk for a ceo of a billion dollar company 10 times that of a 100m dollar company? Or 10 times lesss than a 10b company?

Are they personally accountable?

Yeah, that's the biggest and most obvious loophole that came to mind with the idea. The ideal view is "well that's another probably million dollar company and they are subject to the same rules", but it feels like a game of Matryoshka. How many layers of outsourcing to we get to before the next doll is unsustainable?

I think at the very least a company should be taxed for contracting a service they are able to pay for in-house. But there's a lot of factors to consider.

You're 15 years late. https://youtu.be/rYaZ57Bn4pQ

I dunno, that seems like a pretty easy challenge to overcome. Workers should be trying to invest in capital too. We've had centuries of experience now, we know that capital tends to win vs labour and the answer to that is that everyone should be trying to sign up as a capitalist.

If the workers had banded together and put their efforts into creating a path to become part-owners of the businesses they worked in (and taken on some of the risk involved in that) they'd have made real progress over the last however long. Instead they put their efforts into fighting for wage raises and have basically achieved nothing except, as showcased today, big demonstrations about how they are making everyone worse off.

There are countless models of how workers could be better off that the unions have not explored. They're horrible institutions that strategically lock workers in to being the losing side of a conflict that didn't need to be fought in the first place.

> If the workers had banded together and put their efforts into creating a path to become part-owners of the businesses they worked in (and taken on some of the risk involved in that) they'd have made real progress over the last however long. Instead they put their efforts into fighting for wage raises and have basically achieved nothing...

Unless that part-ownership comes with actual control over the workplace it's a worse deal than the wage increases (which you can just re-invest in a more diverse portfolio anyways, if all you're after is the type of financial gains typically seen through investment). Stockholder-employees are in double jeopardy, since they can lose both savings and income if the company takes a tumble. This is even more perilous for the typical wage worker, who is way closer to the bone than your typical big capital investor. To make this level of risk worth it you need (a lot) more than 1-share=1-vote, which is usually how part-ownership works in the US, otherwise you're going to get clowned by the 51% as soon as the chips are down. Here's an example of what happens to workers in the US who've pursued this model: https://labornotes.org/2009/05/employee-stock-ownership-not-...

I would point to Germany as a place where this is done way better, but importantly there are regulations in place that force management to cede a big chunk of tangible power to labor unions (and even non-union workers): https://blog.dol.gov/2024/09/18/labor-management-cooperation....

Co-ownership is definitely viable IMO, but it needs to paired with legitimate co-management to succeed, otherwise workers are just taking on way more risk than they can reasonably survive, and without any assurances that someone is actually looking out for their interests when times get lean.

We don’t have to automate things before the alternative systems are in place to suppprt the millions of people who will need re-schooling. Especially not while the benefits of the automation goes solely to investors and owners. There is also the part where some automation is vulnerable to infrastructure attacks. I don’t know if this apply to dockworkers in particular, but there are some areas we probably shouldn’t be automating.

This is probably where I should point out that I’m Danish, and, left leaning. Which means I’m more “eat the rich” than what most of you will encounter. Somewhat ironically I also worked with digitalisation in the public sector for about a decade, but that’s another story. Anyway, an example of things I really don’t think we should automate is public pool control. We did PoC on that because some bean counter decided we could save something like 5 hours a month if we automated it rather than have one of the janitors (which isn’t the correct work for these people but I simply can’t find the right English word) wouldn’t have to check once a week. The disadvantage of this was that you could remotely alter the chemicals in the pools. These days I work in the green energy industry where you could seriously disrupt a lot of plants and storage by entering through weakly protected inverters by gaining accesses to wholly unnecessary automation. Unnecessary because you already have a lot of greenfield engineers on site or nearby.

Now, I don’t know if dock work is vital infrastructure, but if it is, then automation might be an unnecessary risk.

> the benefits of the automation goes solely to investors and owners

Totally false. The benefits go to anyone who buys or sells goods that pass through the ports.

Only if the automation is cheaper and more efficient and that improvement/saving gets passed on to the (un)loading fees and then to the companies doing the transport and then to the marketplace middlemen and then then to the buyers/sellers.

It is, and it does. US ports are far less efficient than the more automated ports in Asia and Europe.

It's not clear the automation change in isolation would improve the situation. They can get automated badly and be even less efficient.

Ah but that's because Rotterdam competes with Antwerp and Hamburg for example.

How many terminals are there on the West coast of the US that can handle the biggest vessels?

Two, and they both make heavy use of automation. (The port of LA and the neighboring port of Long Beach).

In my opinion, port costs never go down with automation. If anything, they go up when automation is deployed (this essentially means unmanned reach stackers, more cranes and eventually new TOS (Terminal Operating System) to compensate investment. This is interesting document (PDF) with port performance index for 2023. Page 11. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0990603241145396...

The port costs might not go down now, but they also might increase as much as they would otherwise in the future.

>anyone who buys or sells goods

so, not the workers or the larger populace. Just more business that is continuing to make life more expensive.

These are all subjective, so this is neither true nor false.

Everyone buys stuff.

Yes, and buying stuff got worse over the years, not better. The consumer is not benefiting from this to begin with (as if thars an argument to not pay your labor).

It'd be nice right? Too bad the maritime shipping industry is an oligopoly.

> Totally false. The benefits go to anyone who buys or sells goods that pass through the ports.

Mostly true. Only if there is huge competitive pressure will the prices be forced to go down. Otherwise, those owners simply make more profit now and keep prices the same.

With ports, you don't have much competitive pressure because a competitor can't just another mega-port next to the existing one, there is no such space available.

If that is true, then what stops port operators from raising prices from their present level and pocketing the free money? In reality, demand curves slope down and the surplus from efficiency improvements is split between buyers and sellers. And with the lower costs that result from efficiency improvements, ports will be able to move more goods per unit of time. Even with the unrealistic assumption that the surplus is entirely captured by the port operators, buyers and sellers of goods will benefit from the increased volume.

> If that is true, then what stops port operators from raising prices from their present level and pocketing the free money?

They do raise prices, gradually.

But raising prices is harder because users complain in many ways. Keeping prices the same while reducing your costs (thus improving profits) is much easier, nobody notices.

Is this the trickle down argument again? Are there still people around honestly believing it? Even Wikipedia says there's zero proof, but nice to peek at the last century fads once in a while.

Unlikely because the "trickle down" argument doesn't exist as a positive policy. It is where the opponents of a policy argue that it won't work because the value will accrue to the wealthy.

In this case the original argument was that capital investments at the port will create value to the port users. It is likely correct - if the port invests in robots then it is extremely reasonable to expect that users of the port will get cheaper and better service. The port owners might make more money or they might get squeezed by economics, that part is much harder to work out.

> extremely reasonable to expect that users of the port will get cheaper and better service.

Better, sure, cheaper? Almost certainly not.

Only if the dock owners reduce the price of unloading goods, but why would they when they could just pocket the savings from firing everyone? It's not like there is much competition.

You're operating under the assumption the cost savings are passed onto consumers. I see no reason why this would be the case - the cost savings would do much better as expansion of capital, and consumers are already happy with the current price.

It is such a paradox in our society that a shortage of work is a problem! Should we then not relax? After automating a job, the burden of work should lessen on the society as a whole. We should all be resting on laurel leaves, surrounded by our magnificent technology.

But you didn't help create it. People with money did. So you must keep working 40 hours a week while they collect ever increasing sums of money with their capital proceeds.

It's capitalism, not laborism, or humanism. Those with the capital are who the system serves.

As a human, I think I would like some more humanism in my society.

Apparently that’s controversial

>while they collect ever increasing sums of money with their capital proceeds.

But in the process of doing so the rest of us benefit from all of the goods and services this capital use created. The economy is not about money, it's about stuff. I would much rather Ozempic exist and make somebody rich rather than it not exist, because there are millions of people that benefit from its existence.

That would be fine if the workers owned the means, but they don't. Capitalism effectively requires labor-saving devices to cause maximum social harm. As always, it privatizes the gains and socializes the losses.

Indeed. Sounds like we have found the root of the problem. Let us then turn our minds to solving it. I’m sure we can think of something!

We tried looking into different solutions, turns out it didn't work quite so well as we predicted!

Only capitalism has driven the single greatest increase in living standards in history, something that should be tamed, yes, but not extinguished outright. There is a reason why even the most ardent communist states have now reverted to capitalism in order to grow and prosper.

I would point out that we were the most successful and had the highest standard of living when unions were strongest. When tax laws and financial regulation made it unprofitable to try to hoard wealth to the degree of 19th or 21st century robber barons.

Look what capitalism has done for tech. The general public now distrusts and is frustrated by silicon valley. Privacy and rights to repair have encouraged rent-seeking and fabrication of get-rich-quick schemes at the expense of natural resources and public health. User experiences and software quality trend downward. The primary purpose of new technology like AI is transparently to enrich the owners rather than to provide real benefits or services, and the first thing they all did was purge their ethics committees. Oh, yes, capitalism is doing great things for computers. Just look at the great advancements in the fields of wealth extraction, resource consumption, energy expenditure, and legislative capture.

But don't worry, it's not their fault because "corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits," a phrase which is sure to be writ on the tombstone of the founding ideals of this country.

Work always increases. Consider the work from hunter gatherer days to the work present now. There are always new things to build and create, which is why new work always exists. Whether it will be done by humans versus machines is another story.

Generously assuming you're not being obtuse, the person you're replying to clearly meant "work" as "stuff people have to do", rather than "stuff that needs to be done".

Even with that definition, yes, work still always increases. People have to do things today that 10,000 years ago they never would have had to do. It is a long way until we can automate away every facet of work that needs to be done by humans, which is also what I was alluding to in my earlier comment.

The relative value does not increase at the same rate, however. And that's a big issue.

Getting people food to eat is very important. Getting people slightly better software, not so much.

The further we push up and up the less importance the jobs become. Knowledge work is great, but it's necessarily less valuable from a humanity perspective than laborious work.

Of course this flaw isn't solved in a capitalist system, so we just ignore it. We just lie and pay knowledge workers more, because their work takes more human effort/investment, even if the product is less valuable. So we have a mismatch, where money value does not match real world value, and it's only getting worse. It's a bubble - eventually it will have to pop.

> The relative value does not increase at the same rate, however. And that's a big issue.

Where is the proof of this? How can you say that this is true?

> The further we push up and up the less importance the jobs become. Knowledge work is great, but it's necessarily less valuable from a humanity perspective than laborious work.

I reject this conclusion wholeheartedly. After food production and other such ventures, there really is only knowledge work. That you dismiss it so easily does not mean that it is not important. Indeed, the "slightly better software" of today can impact billions, billions who were not alive during the agricultural age. Even by that metric, yes, what we create today impacts many multitudes greater than us. We pay knowledge workers more because of this fact, which is matched in a capitalist system, which, need I remind you, is the single greatest contributor to the increasing of living standards in the world, something that is unmatched by any other system. You may have issues with it, but the facts are as they are.

"Knowledge work" is a spectrum that goes higher and higher. There's low level knowledge work, maybe a secretary, all the way up to scientists.

> capitalist system, which, need I remind you, is the single greatest contributor to the increasing of living standards in the world

I reject this conclusion. The single greatest contributor is technology, which advances with or without capitalism. We can tell because the USSR had increasing standards of living too, because they too had technological advancements. In some areas, more advanced than the west.

It's merely a coincidence that capitalism was the vessel. Any somewhat reasonable economic system will do. Certainly, the areas today with the highest quality of life are qusai-socialist - and the capitalist nations, like the US, are left to the bottom of the barrel of the developed world. In spite of her massive wealth.

The simple reality is that inventions become less and less valuable as time goes on. The problems become smaller and smaller, less and less important, because we necessarily solved the biggest ones first.

A new medicine is remarkable yes, but nothing in the face of aseptic technique. A new phone is neat sure, but nothing in the face of the original global network, the telephony network.

Jumping from A to B is much greater than D to F and so on, because innovations build on the previous. It's a pyramid of humanity. If you take out the lowest levels though, it crumbles.

Without sanitation, food service, agriculture, you cannot have innovation. Ultimately everyone like you or I could die and that would be a blip. If every agriculturalist dies, then humanity is no more. To me, that is indicative of value - value in terms of service to humanity.

This problem will grow with time because not everyone can be knowledge workers. Not everyone can get a college degree just to be paid 20 bucks an hour. Our jobs are going to higher and higher levels of abstraction, but they're leaving people behind.

We've solved it as much as we can. We educate everyone now; we provide college assistance too. Suddenly most people can read and write, and we took it 1,000 steps further than that. But people as a whole are limited.

When the average person can no longer work the average job, the economy will collapse in on itself. Sure, we can automate and then provide new jobs. We don't know what to do if people cannot work those new jobs. Everything is based on people, like you and me, buying. If we cannot buy, if the average laborer cannot buy, nothing else matters. And it comes down like a house of cards.

> The single greatest contributor is technology, which advances with or without capitalism. We can tell because the USSR had increasing standards of living too, because they too had technological advancements. In some areas, more advanced than the west.

Sorry, no. I know of many people who have suffered due to not having enough to eat under the communist regimes of the USSR and Maoist China, while places like West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the US were thriving as usual. If you do not have personal experiences with these areas or the people in them, please do not act as if you do, because the statistics and personal experiences tell a different story. It is not simply technology but the distribution of technology, something that should've been done in a communist society, ironically.

> The simple reality is that inventions become less and less valuable as time goes on.

Again, I am simply unsure of where you came to this conclusion. Solving something like cancer is simply much more monumental than anything that came before. Knowledge work is obviously instrumental to understanding how such a disease works and spreads.

> When the average person can no longer work the average job, the economy will collapse in on itself

What a strange comment. It's as if you assume that the average person has some set of knowledge (and a corresponding upper threshold of knowledge that cannot be surpassed) whereas the opposite is true; we teach 8th graders advanced calculus concepts where it took Newton decades to understand. If anything, the limit (if it indeed exists within our normal belief of the future) is quite high.

> If you do not have personal experiences with these areas or the people in them

I do, and of course there was suffering. I think you're taking me for a commie, that's not the case.

> Solving something like cancer is simply much more monumental than anything that came before

Um... no. No it's not.

It just seems that way now because we solved so much. If you go back 500 years and ask them what they need solved, they wouldn't say cancer.

This is actually evidence of my point. As time goes on, our problems become smaller, so thing appear bigger. Cancer appears now as HUGE deal, but historically people dealt with things like infant mortality - where HALF of all infants died. Could you even imagine that in the context of modern life?

We fixed that with aseptic technique and vit K. Now, because we did that, we have the opportunity to focus on problems like cancer, which wasn't even something we cared enough to look at in the past.

It's to the point where we're so far removed from fundamental flaws of humanity, they are literally unthinkable, unimaginable. You cannot even conceptualize them. Our own understanding of death has changed since we've eliminated so much death.

> What a strange comment. It's as if you assume that the average person has some set of knowledge

Incorrect, and if you noticed my paragraph above this, I don't know how you concluded that.

It's not a matter of knowledge, knowledge is infinite. It's a matter of aptitude or potential, and that is not infinite. We can teach everyone everything, but it won't stick, because not everyone can learn everything.

> If anything, the limit ... is quite high.

I disgaree, we're already reaching the limit with our current knowledge and technology.

In the past two decades, kids were forced essentially to go to college. However, some could not do it, and now they are subject to a life of menial jobs with poverty pay. This is in contrast to the prior generation, where high school grads could get decent jobs.

It's to a point where college grads, with bachelor's degrees, are now making 20 dollars an hour out of college (depends on the degree). Better than high school grads making 12, but not by much.

Masters will be the next bachelors in the next 10 years, probably sooner. The end result is large chunks of people being assigned to poverty. The newer advice for them is to simply turn to trades - I'm sure you've heard this. The idea being trading off your physical health for being able to perform a job that both pays okay and fits their level of aptitude.

This should be obvious to you. Truthfully, I don't know how you don't see it. Maybe it's just because I'm Gen Z so I got slapped in the face with this since birth. But every single day it was pounded into our heads we NEED to go to college or we will fail at life.

This WAS NOT the case of the prior generations. I am extremely lucky to have the ability to perform okay in college. If I was born, say, 20 years later it's likely I would not have the ability. If someone like my mother, bless her heart, was born today she would not make even a quarter what she makes now.

But, I know many people who did not or could not go to college. Some went anyway and got 'easy' degrees. Despite being educated, they are now making close to nothing. Some are now getting masters, because that's the only way to make money. And some didn't go and are now flipping burgers because that's all that's out there.

> historically people dealt with things like infant mortality - where HALF of all infants died. Could you even imagine that in the context of modern life?

Sure, that's all well and good, but the amount of suffering caused by that versus cancer is not comparable.

> kids were forced essentially to go to college. However, some could not do it, and now they are subject to a life of menial jobs with poverty pay. This is in contrast to the prior generation, where high school grads could get decent jobs.

You should read Capital in the 21st Century. The conclusion is that the postwar period was a unique point of time where the US was not affected by destruction but could use the proceeds of the Marshall Plan to have cheap education and wealthy citizenry, something that has not been replicated prior or since. In reality, this was short lived and now we are living in an era where we must toil to survive, as we used to. That our close ancestors did not have to do so is not a conclusion about them, but about a conclusion about the wider socioeconomic climate. So many people take the post war period of their parents and grandparents are gospel. Those times were never to persist in reality.

> I disgaree, we're already reaching the limit with our current knowledge and technology.

In you current jobs? Sure, perhaps, but not in actuality of knowledge about the world and universe.

> Maybe it's just because I'm Gen Z so I got slapped in the face with this since birth. But every single day it was pounded into our heads we NEED to go to college or we will fail at life.

Ah, there is the rub. I take heart in your toil but again, you are not special. No human has been in the history of mankind. There have always been trials and tribulations to consider. If you disagree with me, so be it, but the truth does not change, just as it has not changed with me.

> Some went anyway and got 'easy' degrees. Despite being educated, they are now making close to nothing. Some are now getting masters, because that's the only way to make money. And some didn't go and are now flipping burgers because that's all that's out there.

I mean, yes, this has been repeated ad nauseum. The joke about underwater basketweaving has apparently been active since the '50s [0]. You are blaming the wrong people for this, and to be honest, I am not sure who you should blame, because as Piketty says, it is an emergent problem in the field.

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

> Sure, that's all well and good, but the amount of suffering caused by that versus cancer is not comparable.

You're correct - the amount of death we deal with now is so much less it's not even comparable. I'm not comparing an abstract here like "suffering" - although, if I wanted to, it would be easy to argue that has also gone down.

It's truly undebatable that less people die now.

> it is an emergent problem in the field

Correct, it's a simple consequence of our economic systems that we haven't solved. It's a fundamental flaw. In order to survive, you must work. What happens to those who cannot work? We have put bandaid after bandaid, but the fundamental problem remains.

I get the feeling you don't see this as a real problem because nobody is causing it directly. But it is real. It's real right now, and it's been getting progressively worse and nobody knows what to do.

If 10% of people cannot earn a college degree, what happens to them? This isn't a hypothetical. As time goes on, those people are reserved to a life of poverty. 50 years ago, they would be just fine, there was plenty of labor jobs that paid well.

Now peer 50 years into the future. 30% cannot get a master's degree or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And so 30% live in poverty? And now 100 years into the future. 70% cannot earn a phd or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And...? Our economy? They cannot buy. What happens then?

> There have always been trials and tribulations to consider

You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!

If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?

Sure, we can look at something like automatic phone directories replacing secretaries and say "well they can skill up and get a different job". What happens when AI replaces the entire bottom half of knowledge jobs? Can those people "skill up"? They barely passed school to be an accountant and now that job is automated, they're already at their limit. Or, at least, some of them are.

What if YOUR own job is automated? What will YOU do? What if the only way to progress is to be a top 10% engineer? Well, are you? If not, will you ever be? It's possible the answer is no, and you're just fucked. There's no other way to put it, a large amount of people are just fucked. Until the majority is fucked, and then the system implodes on itself because the bold assumptions it made can no longer be fulfilled.

No work, no capitalism, no economy, no humanity. We've gotten very lucky that initial assumption has held true. I don't believe it will hold true forever.

> You're correct - the amount of death we deal with now is so much less it's not even comparable. I'm not comparing an abstract here like "suffering" - although, if I wanted to, it would be easy to argue that has also gone down.

I am comparing suffering, not death. Death is not necessarily suffering.

> You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!

> If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?

You are still thinking that the amount of "knowledge" or "skill" that a human can hold is fixed, which is simply wrong. If you still believe that, then there really is nothing I can say that would disabuse you of this notion, in spite of the evidence to the contrary that the millennia of progress by, yes, humans, have led to more humans educated than ever. Why must there be a limit to the "jobs left that humans can do?" Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came.

I can tell by this conversation that you're very young, that you seem to see things in terms of black and white, yes and no, and I promise you, I have seen the same way years ago, but it is simply not reality. There are more shades of gray in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

> You are still thinking that the amount of "knowledge" or "skill" that a human can hold is fixed, which is simply wrong

I don't think it is, or maybe we're thinking of this differently.

The quantity of knowledge is not fixed, it's infinite. The kind of knowledge IS fixed - this is your potential. I can learn to read, and to write, and to engineer. But I can't learn how to make a quantum computer, I simply don't have that potential.

But that's me. It varies from person to person, along a bell curve in my mind.

> Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came

Because the average potential is relatively high, and we already got the low hanging fruit out of the way.

For the vast, vast majority of human history, the average person could not read or write - they didn't need to. Eventually they did, but IMO the average human definitely has the potential to read and write, and I was proven right by that.

Some humans did not. We may consider them disabled. And yes, they were fucked and are fucked. I mentioned bandaids earlier, we provide help to these people. But the underlying problem exists, those that cannot read or write pretty much can't work any job, so they're fucked. 100 years ago they could be fine.

When other advancements came, we pushed human jobs up the bell curve of potential, and it was fine because there was SO much potential left.

But do you, honestly, think the average person can be an astrophysicist? If you answer no, as I would, then clearly there is a tipping point. We're not there yet, the average person does not need to be an astrophysicist. But they do need to graduate college, and some percentage of people can't, and they're simply fucked in our current society.

> But do you, honestly, think the average person can be an astrophysicist?

Of course. The difference is the level of education. Otherwise, do you really believe that those, all across the world, become astrophysicists? Everyone has the capacity to change, grow, and become more than they once were.

I just disagree. I think for me personally, even given an infinite amount of time and money there's many problems I could never solve because my brain is not capable. So, to me, there is an upper limit, which is all I'm really arguing. Where, exactly, the limit is, is a different question.

I know this applies to other people too because I've personally met people who can't read and never will. I've met people who couldn't graduate high school, and not from a lack of trying, and everyone in between. Based on that, and my own limits, I'm concluding there are limits to how "smart" someone can get and it varies. For me personally, I felt as though if I continued my education higher I would really be pushing it.

> Based on that, and my own limits, I'm concluding there are limits to how "smart" someone can get and it varies.

Perhaps you should speak for yourself then. It is not useful to extrapolate your experiences onto everyone else as it's comparable to someone with an IQ of 50 thinking everyone else is the same, not realizing that others might be much more intelligent than them. I simply do not agree that we have reached anywhere near the limit of human potential yet, as evidences by thousands of years of adaptation of work in the face of new technology that hunter gatherers could not have dreamed of, yet we are anatomically identical to them. To think that only today are we reaching the limits is a prime example of recency bias; it was famously said that in the early 1900s that everything that could've been invented had already been.

> Perhaps you should speak for yourself then

I feel I don't need to speak for myself when I say something so obvious as "not everyone can be an astrophysicist"

Rather, perhaps you should think more reasonably of yourself? I admire the confidence to believe you can truly do anything, but I'm definitely more confident in saying, no, you can't.

My point is not that everyone can become a astrophysicist, it is that there isn't some terminal point in the near future where people simply can't or won't work anymore, or that you'll eventually need a masters degree to even find a job, which you seem to be saying. I simply cannot believe that to be the case when people have been working just fine for thousands of years, and if it is the case that most employers ask for masters degrees, eventually they won't find enough people to work and they'll change the requirements, the problem fixes itself, and it's not like there aren't plenty of people doing jobs even today that don't require degrees, they're not doomed to poverty as you say. It just sounds like what people fearmonger about AI taking everyone's jobs. And again, extrapolating your experiences onto everyone else is not useful, as you're making it seem like everyone is doomed and will be poor. I am honestly not sure why you're continuing this chain of thought so I don't think I'll respond further, it's not a productive argument anymore.

I really, truly, don't understand how you don't see this. Because it's already been the trend and I've already explained multiple times why it hasn't been a problem yet.

For the vast, vast, VAST majority of human history you could live simply by performing labor. This is no longer the case in modern societies.

Only KNOWLEDGE jobs now provide, IMO, an adequate income.

We have ALREADY left a lot of people behind. People who cannot read, or write, are completely fucked.

We are LUCKY that most people are able to read and write. As time goes on and this trend continues and we continue to cut off the bottom X% of jobs, what happens to those people?

Imagine a hypothetical secretary. This is all she is capable of doing, and she barely passed high school, and not from a lack of trying. Her job is then automated.

What does she do? This isn't a hypothetical question - spell it out for me. There are no jobs below her. What does she do?

To expand further, assuming some automate X removes the bottom Y percent of jobs, the lowest hanging of fruit, that means the jobs left MUST BE > Y. If someone can only do up to Y, then they cannot work a job. As Y approaches infinity, nobody on planet Earth will be able to work.

You're able to work right now because you happen to be smart enough to perform the average jobs available. When some automation, AI or not, doesn't matter, eliminates the bottom 90% of knowledge jobs, only the top 10% will be left. You will not be able to work one of those jobs, because you aren't working one right now and I'm assuming you've already pushed your brain to its limits. If you haven't, you're leaving money on the table, and you should be a rocket scientist.

The college degree requirements are for white collar jobs that have yet to be automated. The increasing competition is due to the internet drastically increasing applicants beyond the supply. Hence companies find it easy to discriminate.

It has nothing to do with automation here, it's actually everyone's fault here in starting a race to the bottom. Personally I'd rather do a lottery after basic competence but that's more of a regulation issue.

If SWE were to fully automated, I'd be busy running my own startup to implement all the ideas in my head. I think many also would. As a result, there would a boom of startups and an increase of job demand for lawyers, IBs or accountants. That's the thing with automation, as it improves the cost of running a business should decrease proportionally that everyone could eventually transition to the capitalist class themselves. Those who aren't would be working lucrative jobs.

> everyone could eventually transition to the capitalist class themselves

This doesn't work, we go right back to "economy imploding"

The capital class only exists because it can harvest the resources of the non-capital class. If everyone is in the capital class, that means there's no extraction, nobody is buying. House of cards falls down.

We can make it work, don't get me wrong. But not in our current economic system, we would need something novel. And that's really my entire point here.

Edit: My reading comprehension skills are failing me, apparently.

Hence why I said it were a monumental of a task.

It cant though. Inflation keeps the treadmill rolling.

They went on strike in 1971 over automation.

The outcome was that the ports were forced to accelerate containerisation and automation in order to cover the labour shortage, and many jobs were then lost.

Honestly, if they think the outcome will be different this time, I’d love to understand their rationale.

Unfortunately there is no time for this theory to be correct. Everyday the Ports are backed up because of strikes, it takes a week afterwards to clear it. So if you can fully automize the ports in 2 weeks your theory might be true. If it takes longer than 2 weeks to fully automize, Your looking at backup of the cargo until next year. I don't know the time it will take to install such automated systems but I assume it will take much longer than 2-3 weeks, probably years.

> I’m Danish, and, left leaning. Which means I’m more “eat the rich” than what most of you will encounter.

LOL. Yeah right. Come back with your "eat the rich" attitude after actually living in an impoverished country. You'll still want to, but you might actually know how.

> Isn't that how this works? As time goes on some jobs go away and new jobs come about and there is some pain in the interim?

I don’t think this is quite as guaranteed as people think.

When we mechanized farming the manufacturing sector had already existed for decades, it was clear what kinds of jobs the ex-farm-workers would move into. When we automated/offshored manufacturing, it seemed plausible that those ex-manufacturing-workers could move into service sector jobs (though that didn’t work out as well in practice, many people took a large cut to their household income).

Nowadays we don’t have a sector hungry to absorb the laborers whose manufacturing and service jobs are being automated away. A lot of people act like the market will come up with jobs we can’t conceive of today, but that’s not how this has worked in the past. Even when there’s a sector with tons of existing job opportunities, the transition isn’t guaranteed to work. We don’t really have a precedent for what happens if we automate away a sector (or two) and don’t have an extra sectors-worth of job opportunities to replace it.

>the transition isn’t guaranteed to work

we have disability and unemployment insurance. Why not have automated-away-job-insurance with addition of government money to pay for retraining programs. Everybody would be better off - society gets efficiency of automation, and the workers gets new skills and new jobs. My understanding is that there is shortage of various blue collar jobs in particular in construction, green energy, etc. And in general, i think society would be better off sponsoring in major part, if not in full, any retraining a worker wants to take, like with some minimal conditions, say 2-4 years in new job before eligible for retraining. We do see how constant upskilling (even just staying up-to-date with new frameworks) is valuable for everybody in tech, employees as well as employers.

The people in these threads arguing that unions are a drain on society are not going to go for UBI-esque schemes, and currently UBI itself isn’t politically popular enough in general to happen. It’s not enough to have an idea of how things could work—you need something we can feasibly pull off in the current political landscape, otherwise it’s just wishful thinking.

I in general view unions as a net negative, but think UBI is a great ideal to strive towards. IMO they arent remotely the same thing? One protects a narrow set of jobs and salary at seemingly any cost, the other is about wealth (re)distribution.

I’m glad you’re in favor of UBI, but the number of people in the “dislikes unions, likes UBI” camp is extremely tiny (though likely massively over represented on HN).

It’s true that if UBI was really on the table, this conversation could go in much more interesting directions. Unfortunately right now it’s nowhere near politically viable (at least in America, where these strikes are happening) which makes it a non-solution to the immediate problems facing workers.

Count me as another who views these demands by the union as counterproductive, while supporting UBI at the same time. I submit that we're under-represented on HN, canceling out the opinion that we're over-represented

I think your guess about the overlap between UBI supporters and supporters of these union demands is way off base, and is serving to distract from the substance of the matter.

The unions should be advocating for fair pay for employed union members, but not for unlimited jobs forever. If anything, the union has money and can provide a salary to laid-off employees.

Alternatively, maybe unions should be advocating for UBI and advocating for their members to do the same, and to vote for the politicians more likely to support UBI.

The US still has a big manufacturing sector and it has an unemployment rate of 3.5%. It could definitely absorb a small number of displaced workers.

I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.

Think bigger - we are about to automate driving. That’s like 20 Million of people. Where do they go?

Look at top 10 jobs by employment, all of them are 100+ years old. Name a job that was created in the last 50 years - real jobs that employ at least 1 million people, not ‘leveraged crypto-equity portfolio manager’

Home health and personal care aide is the largest employment category in the US. As other sectors become more efficient, you can direct more people into healthcare, entertainment, etc.

> Name a job that was created in the last 50 years - real jobs that employ at least 1 million people

C dates back to the early 70s, and computers weren't really ubiquitous until the 90s or so. So does computer programming in general make your cutoff?

Or does it date back to Babbage in the 1800s?

Programming is one of the only truly new job fields in the last century. But despite growing up right alongside the automation/offshoring of manufacturing, it wasn’t able to absorb the labor coming from that sector. Labor is not a fungible thing that can easily move from one column to another, that’s a big part of the problem with any sudden massive change in the nature of labor.

plenty in digital arts, most in game dev or film making, some in music performance.

The fields you just listed are extremely cutthroat highly desired high-skill jobs that are currently being threatened by automation. We also don’t have jobs for the people being forced out of those fields, it’s not like there’s room in there to absorb millions of laid off laborers.

> digital arts

Art is still art, whether you paint with oil or on an iPad. Doesn’t quite count.

> The US still has a big manufacturing sector and it has an unemployment rate of 3.5%. It could definitely absorb a small number of displaced workers.

If you think the skills acquired as a dockworker translate directly to being able to get a job in manufacturing, you don't know anything about either one.

That there are jobs available is only one part of the problem. Where are the jobs relative to the people about to be unemployed? How many people are we about to, under the threat of starvation, tell to move possibly across the country for work? How many communities will be destroyed? How many people will be utterly severed from any and all social support systems that they now have?

For that matter, how many of those jobs are themselves stable? Or will they need to repeat this traumatic process in another ten years after another industry "disruption" leads to yet more automation?

This whole system was supposed to be for people, right? Because it sure seems to me that the human factors in all these discussions get shockingly lost quite quickly and we revert to treating people like rack nodes that can be moved to a different part of our server farm at a moment's notice, should the need for compute be higher over there than it is here, and there are no side effects to that, nothing lost in the transition. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you're the type of person who's comfortable moving cross country to chase a higher salary or a dream job, more power to you. I certainly was. Now ask yourself if you would be so enthusiastic if it wasn't your decision and was, in fact, imposed on you by the actions of your employer. I wonder if automation would make so much tremendous sense to you if you yourself were the one on the chopping block, who's livelihood and life was about to be upended so widgets could be made 80 cents cheaper each.

I don't have a problem with automation on principle: I think any labor saving tech is unambiguously a good thing. I am however thoroughly tired of self-appointed, unelected leaders of private industry laying waste to the communities that built the companies they run so cavalierly, simply because they can now make their products either with the hands of more exploitable people overseas, or with robots.

The reason you can move across the nation for a good wage is in part that jobs were shit canned when they become economically or technologically disadvantaged to more efficient alternatives. Your high wage was made possible due to firing lots of people.

We should thank our lucky stars if a robot takes all their job. That's progress.

Er no, not really (past results != future results).. This high pay has worked out because there are jobs to move people to because demand has so far been expanding. If we are sick of the new output then your job will be filled by someone willing to take minimum wage.

Apparently the nature of markets is offensive when the description of them doesn't go along with pavlovian expectations?

I've met a lot of people who couldn't find the job they wanted in the place they wanted anymore and joined Tech along the US coast, for the predominant wages which are a factor of supply and demand.

>If you think the skills acquired as a dockworker translate directly to being able to get a job in manufacturing, you don't know anything about either one.

This is exactly what he meant by "you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills." You don't start at the same rank when you change careers. You start at the bottom.

> I don’t think this is quite as guaranteed as people think.

It is, actually. People have infinite wants. Productivity increases lead to lower prices in the sector where the productivity increases happened.

Lower prices lead people to spend the difference on something else ("private taxi for my burrito" is the meme example.)

Spending the money on something else creates the other jobs.

This is why we have 150 years of unemployment and labor force participation data, and the peaks and valleys have zero correlation with internal-combustion, electrification, or IT.

Now....are those other jobs ones represented by a 100 year old union that is used to having the entire US economy in stranglehold?

No, probably not. The overall economy gets vastly wealthier.

But, if you are a 50 year old longshoreman, that's small comfort.

If you lose your $90k/yr job at the factory and end up with a $24k/yr job flipping burgers, you won’t show up in the unemployment or labor participation stats, but your quality of life has massively decreased. That’s a problem, especially when it happens on a large scale.

It doesn’t matter if the overall economy gets wealthier if the median laborer is suffering.

> People have infinite wants.

idk, citation needed.

Plenty of people I've met had pretty finite wants. A lot of people really are very happy with their small apartment in the city, going to work, doing misc recreation, and then drinking a bit. They don't need a Rolls-Royce or a couple of yachts.

A big problem with the argument that everybody wins from trading is that sure a pair of countries can go from 5 apples and 5 pears combined to 10 apples and 10 pears combined but what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears? People don't work as much.

Perhaps a 50 year old longshoreman can be retrained to install solar panels or w/e. But I suspect much more they'll find an early retirement or a greeter job somewhere and the up and coming 18 yr old will install solar panels and the labor stats will show a decrease in longshoreman and an increase in installers even if the population isn't transferring between them.

> Plenty of people I've met had pretty finite wants.

It was hyperbole, I'm sure there is a limit, but most people are nowhere near it. Your hypothetical content person with a small apartment isn't prepared to sacrifice for more money to buy a fancier car, sure yeah.

But, don't they sound exactly like the sort of person who saw that they could hire a taxi for their burrito at a reasonable price said "Sign me up?"

> what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears? People don't work as much.

I think what happens when there's only demand for 8 apples and 8 pears is people stop dreaming about finally getting enough to eat and start dreaming about having a car. And when they have the car, they dream about having 2, so mom and dad can both go somewhere. And then, they dream about having karate lessons for their kids. And once their kids are in karate and soccer and dance and track (this is where I'm at right now), the kids want to add horse-riding lessons to the mix.

Edit: I think your broader point really was that an individual, especially mid and late career can really get screwed by it. And yeah, I agree. Let's help them with the extra taxes we collect from modernizing our infrastructure.

> But, don't they sound exactly like the sort of person who saw that they could hire a taxi for their burrito at a reasonable price said "Sign me up?"

Are you talking about fact that people order take out? That’s not exactly a new or innovative phenomenon and I’m not sure what it has to do with this conversation.

Overall it sounds like you underestimate the magnitude of the issue. There are millions of Americans who have trouble making rent/mortgage while paying for groceries and healthcare costs. The current solutions aren’t working, we can’t just pour neoliberalism on this situation and expect it to solve itself.

I think the point is that human demand isn't the limiting factor. Americans having trouble making rent, paying for groceries, and healthcare indicates that they need more - not that neoliberalism is a solution to anything.

The economy dosen't exist to provide jobs, it exists to fulfill consumers' needs. You need to remember that the idea of 40 hour-week middle class job fulfilling one's livelihood was only ever an social abstraction that emerged in the last hundred years or so.

On the long run, increased efficiency in economies is what allows massive surplus vlaue to be created, making alot of luxuries once fit for kings now available for the masses. And so living standards improve and everyone benefits. If one is capable of automating an entire sector away, it also stands to reason that the massive surplus value created would make it trivial to restribute gains to those affected. And so forth for automation.

Maybe you think the corporations and rich will not do even that, that they would rather (somehow bypassing the government) keep all the profits, but profits are only realised so long as there are customers capable of affording such goods. And richer median customers produce much larger profits.

Maybe economies started out to fulfill customers needs, but now they exist to generate profits. It's a very different incentive.

> You need to remember that the idea of 40 hour-week middle class job fulfilling one's livelihood was only ever an social abstraction that emerged in the last hundred years or so.

The idea and implementation started in the 1500s. It wasn't wide spread (Spain and America and not for every industry). Working in a mine was only 7 hours not 8. It was sometimes even applied to the Native Americans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

>but what are we really supposed to do here? Continue with antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people?

that's why context is important. For Generative AI I'm not against the technology. I'm against the outright theft of content and abuse of current and future contracts for talent. Generative AI as it is still relies on the human element to be useful at all, and companies steal instead of following the 3C's. Even though I bet they'd still be profitable with the latter way. It's just greed and utter disregard for labor.

The story here wasn't clear on what was being automated here and how, though. It sounds like some sort of mechanical automation, so there's less ground to stand on. Especialyl since physical automata isn't exactly cheap to maintain to begin with (and of course, current iterations still require human assistance. If only for liability's sake).

regardless I don't really pity big industries these days. If jobs are going to be automated then you may as well get a few licks in before the inevitable.

In the limit, this is like arguing against the use of wheels. Automation improves labor productivity. Economies that have not invested in capital, have seen labor productivity and incomes stagnant. This is a current debate going on in Canada (especially as compared to the productivity and income gains in the last decade). Canada does have strong Unions, so I wonder if this is related.

Another thing that seems troubling is how a small group of people can hold a majority of the country by the bXlls. Given how this is an election year, I can see this turning into huge fiasco. The rest of the economy is collateral damage.

President needs to send in the national guard to maintain flow, because this is a domestic national security issue. I'm surprised he hasn't done it yet.

We've had stagnant incomes for the last 50 years. The fruits of automation are not shared with the workers.

The small minority that keeps a country by the balls is not the unions but the owning class. The 2008 crash that put the whole world in a decade recession is collateral damage.

In the US? I don't think what you are saying is supported by real data. My understanding is that US works did see an improvement in incomes in the last decade but Canadian workers did not.

What makes life better for everyone is competition. Canada's stagnation can be be summed up in a single phrase - lack of competition. Generally, the US has been a free-for-all when it comes to competition and hence its populace enjoys some of the best living standards.

I'll also relate my experience traveling the subway in Asia vs. Manhattan. Asian transit seems like space-age compared to what we have in the West. I think UBI won't save us as the income must come from somewhere. Hiking taxes kills incentives. The better way is to have more freedom/efficiencies in my humble opinion.

North America is very car-focused. Transit in Europe is also much better, although your experience will vary from country to country.

Even with all that oil money gushing through Alberta, it still takes 9.5 hours to drive from Medicine Hat to Grand Prairie - which is the same distance as Barcelona to Seville, a train journey of 5.5 hours including the changing of trains in Madrid.

It has not been stagnant for 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1uDSE

It has been: https://www.statista.com/statistics/185369/median-hourly-ear...

I guess we're at a stalemate now?

(You don't need to censor yourself like that on HN. You can say "balls." Heck, you can say "testicles"!)

This is also the market at work. Just as the automaters want to make money by eliminating jobs, the unions want to make money by having jobs. Big capital creates leverage through monopoly, unions create leverage the same way; a union is a labor monopoly.

The word, "progress" carries a lot of weight here. How do you define it?

I have been working my way through this paper, [1], and it has plenty of good food for thought around this.

[1] - https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/

I take issue with the timing. 34 days until the election? Feels designed to help a certain candidate rather than themselves.

The demand for no automation at all is clearly an initial bargaining position. What the union (hopefully) really wants is some kind of phase-in of most of this tech that allows current members to keep their jobs and retire with dignity before they are replaced by robots. IMO dignity like this is the absolute minimum we owe to ourselves as workers and citizens.

If the port operators were smart, they would have done this already and avoided the massive strike that will cost them billions of dollars, by using a small portion of that savings to keep their workers happy and on the job.

This is the nuance I wish more people (and especially the articles reporting this info) brought to the table. Not necessarily something everyone would consider at first blush, but very important contextually in contrast to the "why tf would they never want automation ever?" reaction.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is an entirely throw away bargaining chip.

"Ok, Ok, we will give up on the anti-automation demands but we aren't budging on the wage increase demands!"

This is just "I'm not racist, but..." applied to labor.[1]

You're not pro-union. You're anti-union plus rhetoric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist%2C_but...

It isn’t unless you’re an extremist. It’s one thing to shut down an industry for a few weeks while you bargain and that has alternatives and society can absorb a few weeks, it’s another one to shut off all ports and hope to set off a national recession because it gives you bargaining power. There are limits to everything.

This can be easily avoided by meeting the Union's demands.

A free labor market means laborers are free to go. If this means you have no ports, then you are not competitive on the labor market.

Corporations have gotten extremely comfortable with existing in an extremely skewed labor market. One where they do not have to pay because they don't have to be competitive - workers have zero mobility, zero visibility, and need to eat.

If the corporations cannot meet the Unions demands and that results in failure to buy or sell, that is the free market at play. They can simply pay more. Clearly, the demand for this labor is extremely high and the supply is what it is. That means pay up.

The unions demands may have been met if they didn't ask for ridiculous things like a complete ban on automation.

It's not ridiculous, it's a market force. Again, if the demand for such laborers is high enough then they will do it.

The best way to negotiate is to ask for nothing, and in turn receive everything from your enlightened, benevolent (and dare I say, handsome!) master.

Considering a series of robots can do their jobs and they have essentially held the supply chain hostage to get top % salaries, yes they should be grateful for every morsel they extract from the US populace.

I grew up in a union household. My father was a member of an airline pilots union and my mother was a member of (23 years) and president of (17 years) the teachers union in our town. Unions kept my parent's gainfully employed for decades.

As for "I'm not racist but..." I don't need a wiki link. I'm black and well aware of that kind of idiocy. This is not that. Nice try though.

>I grew up in a union household. My father was a member of an airline pilots union and my mother was a member of (23 years) and president of (17 years) the teachers union in our town. Unions kept my parent's gainfully employed for decades.

"I'm not racist, I have black friends" applied to labor.

The only reason unions exist is to protect the jobs of the union at the expense of the whole economy through collective bargaining and striking when leverage exists. If it's not doing that, it's not a union, it's a professional club.

When you say:

>I understand that automation costs jobs and a union's primary responsibility is to protect the jobs of its members but what are we really supposed to do here? Continue with antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people?

If you're pro-union, the answer is yes, categorically. You don't get to decide whether their demands are reasonable or not. It's their union and their industry. You support them if they decide to strike.

If you don't, well, that's your right, but it puts you outside the camp of labor and being pro-union.

Being pro-union between strikes is like being a pacifist between wars. Cheap, unprincipled, and contemptible.

I see the disconnect here for you. You believe that if you ever disagree with a union on a particular position that means you’re anti union. Which is obviously a stupid thing to think.

No, I believe if you claim to be pro-union except when a union is striking because it allows "[...] antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people" then guess what? You're as pro-union as the likes of Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, which is to say not at all. If you don't believe in the right to strike even when it hurts or even paralyzes the economy, then you don't believe in it at all.

> If you don't believe in the right to strike even when it hurts or even paralyzes the economy, then you don't believe in it at all.

I absolutely believe in a right to strike and made no comment suggesting that I don't believe in the idea generally or in this instance specifically. I just said that I disagreed with the idea that all automation should be banned. You keep trying to imagine that I said something that I didn't. It's a little funny tbh.

FWIW, I hope they get the pay increase that they are asking for _and_ I hope they can compromise on the automation thing. I'm not informed enough on what that compromise might look like but everyone knows a compromise can be made. That's why they're negotiating.

I understand that you support the right to strike in principle, and I’m not suggesting you’ve denied that. The point I’m making is about what being pro-union truly entails when it comes to the specifics of their demands, particularly in contentious situations like this one around automation.

When you say you disagree with banning automation, you’re not just disagreeing with one policy detail—you’re questioning the union’s core function, which is to protect jobs even when the broader economic context pushes for technological progress. Unions draw a hard line on these issues because, from their perspective, any concession on something like automation opens the door to undermining workers' rights and security long-term, which if given must have something of equal worth exchanged. Supporting unions means recognizing that sometimes their stance will be uncompromising when it comes to preserving jobs, even if it is economically inconvenient or outdated.

As for compromise, yes, negotiation is part of the process, and unions do make concessions. But at the same time, there’s a reason why they take strong positions initially—to ensure they have leverage and to protect their members' jobs to the fullest extent possible. Suggesting that there must be a compromise on automation puts you in a position of advocating for a middle ground that the union may see as fundamentally compromising its mission.

So, while you say you support the right to strike and hope for the pay increase, your stance on automation implies a conditional form of support that’s more aligned with the mainstream neoliberal economic view than with labor’s mission. That’s the core of the issue here—not whether you support striking in general, but whether you fully back the union’s approach when it’s at odds with broader economic concerns. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, it’s worth reflecting on where your support for unions actually begins and ends.

> what are we really supposed to do here?

The obvious, simple, everyone-wins solution is for the ports to offer to continue to pay every worker who gets replaced by automation for some negotiated period of time where they don't have to show up to work and can instead focus entirely on re-skilling or starting their own business or whatever else they want without needing to worry about winding up on the street or going hungry or losing healthcare. The initial double cost for the business is an investment in long term savings. Literally everyone wins in this scenario. Anyone who can't stomach the idea of paying someone to stay home despite the fact that literally everyone would win can enjoy the strike, I guess.

> a union's primary responsibility is to protect the jobs of its members

This is a common but wrong misunderstanding. The union exists to protect the members, not the jobs. It so happens that losing your job in this country generally means you also lose food, shelter, and medicine. Negotiate to protect the members in good faith and they'll have no need to fight automation.

> I'm all for figuring out some way to ease that pain for the people in the transitional period but I don't know who's really responsible for that.

If I had my way, the federal government would mandate my policy as a legal requirement when automating away domestic jobs. In the absence of that, if an employer wants to avoid a strike, it's in everyone's best interest to do it my way anyway. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, my way literally everyone wins.

According to what I've been reading online the most insane requeriment they have is the "touch" fees, that seemly are the culprit for USA need of 1.2 trillion law to fix roads.

In other countries after the load arrives on the port, it is distributed to smaller ports, and then to trucks and trains.

In USA seemly every time the load ends on a crane, a "touch" fee must be paid because of the union. As result they just take the containers and crane them straight into trucks, and then the trucks drive around with the full containers, ruining the roads. Because for the port owners, this is cheaper, they pay less "touch" fees, and it is the taxpayer that foot the bill for the ruined roads, not them.

3 notes:

> Robots don’t pay taxes

The point of automation isn’t to have 0 longshoremen / dock workers. It’s to increase throughput. Some mega ports in Europe and China are great examples of what a modern, efficient port could look like. The entire country benefits from not having each port union strategically prevent high throughput.

2 - According to a news podcast, the longshoremen at West Coast ports have stated they will refuse to unload ships which are diverted from striking East Coast ports. While this is beneficial for union solidarity and for union leverage, it will cause lots of pain for everyone else in the country/economy.

3 - The timing is interesting. Usually strikes happen only as negotiations break down after existing contracts expire, but this is clearly going to affect the election.

People care more about their immediate social circle, so to achieve any kind of success, unions will need to hold out even if someone doesn’t get their avocados or TV.

I tend to see it as ruling class propaganda in action, when a fellow poor or middle class person expresses their wish to improve their situation or else they won’t work, the shaming and blaming start immediately.

I’m not sure how to interpret this:

> I tend to see it as ruling class propaganda in action, when a fellow poor or middle class person expresses their wish to improve their situation or else they won’t work, the shaming and blaming start immediately.

I’m fine with supporting unions and their collective bargaining to the extent it benefits groups larger than just the union. If the negotiations benefit the port, the country/economy, or improve the experience of many consumers downstream of the port, I’ll support their efforts.

However, I see the longshoremen claiming to want 0 automation. I see them trying to negotiate a contract now to get some profit sharing from a once-in-a-century event which led to some of the ports/shipping companies charging massive premiums (those premiums are gone now, BTW). I’m not inclined to support a union if the opening bids for negotiations do not appear to help anyone outside of the union. I look at the massive US spending bills which were designed to improve US infrastructure but we can’t get modern ports because one group of self-interested people figured out how to use massive leverage at a specific time.

And I do care who wins the next election. I don’t expect a union to ignore some of their best leverage just because there is a significant election a month away, but I just might hold it against those union members if I perceive it tilts the election away from my preferred candidate.

Longshoremen aren't little guys sticking it to the big man. They're goons keeping US logistics in the 1950s to protect their hereditary mafia like jobs. They're an archetypal example of unions gone wrong, and gangsters seizing control of unions.

>The point of automation isn’t to have 0 longshoremen / dock workers.

Many would argue otherwise. In reality, the result ends up being a massive reduction in the number of longshoremen / dock workers as they are replaced with robots.

>The entire country benefits from not having each port union strategically prevent high throughput.

Except the longshoremen, the dock workers, their families, the businesses around the docks and the communities where the (now unemployed) dock workers and their families live. The only people who think that these workers will simply move on to bigger and better things are those willfully ignoring the last 30 years of US history and the devastating effects that GATT, NAFTA and globalism in general have had on the working class.

There will be those who will point to charts drawn by the pointy heads at the FED and in university classrooms showing that the "US economy" has grown greatly since the 1990s, completely oblivious to the fact that objective reality proves that those charts aren't worth the paper they are written on. Take a drive through Gary, Indiana or Flint, Michigan or a thousand other towns throughout the country that were supporting thriving, middle-class communities and are now burnt-out, depopulated husks. Tell the destitute people who live there (at least the few who are left) that in fact, NAFTA was great for the economy, and show them your chart.

> Many would argue otherwise. In reality, the result ends up being a massive reduction in the number of longshoremen / dock workers as they are replaced with robots.

I’ll bite. How long does it take to automate all of the ports on the US East Coast? Most likely 10-30 years, in which time all of the current union members will be retired.

Unions care too much about the small possibility of losing some jobs quicker than expected and not enough about the entire country becoming uncompetitive because they are the only people who can unlock high productivity between countries.

>How long does it take to automate all of the ports on the US East Coast?

How long did it take to completely destroy the working class of the United States with NAFTA and globalization?

>Most likely 10-30 years, in which time all of the current union members will be retired.

I'm sure that will come as a surprise to thousands of current union members. Try telling a room full of union workers, many in their late 20s and early 30s, who spent 5+ years as apprentices making low wages and working the least desirable positions in order to earn their union book that their jobs will be eliminated in 10 years by automation and see how that goes down.

>Unions care too much about the small possibility of losing some jobs quicker than expected and not enough about the entire country becoming uncompetitive because they are the only people who can unlock high productivity between countries.

Who says we need high productivity between countries? Globalism is not something that has been beneficial to working people in the United States. It has been the complete opposite. Why should unions care if wealthy business owners can make a few billion more by eliminating their jobs? People just aren't buying the fallacy that the extra billions being accrued by the international business elite will somehow "trickle down" to the rest of us anymore.

The working class had been degrading since Nixon opened China and then Raegan deregulated large swaths of the economy in the 70s. Even if NAFTA may have accelerated things slightly, it didn’t really materially impact the trajectory since China has had a bigger impact on the working class than Mexico. It turns out that capital will always try to find the cheapest workers. And before globalizations, people would complain about low-priced immigrants coming and taking jobs.

As for globalism, if anything you’re complaining that there isn’t enough globalism in terms of a global regulation on what business owners and countries can and can’t do. Because otherwise you’re just getting outcompeted and trying to silo off your country leads to a long death.

> Who says we need high productivity between countries?

A long history of countries taking the piss when another more advanced one comes around with wildly superior industrial technology and capacity.

>Except the longshoremen, the dock workers, their families, the businesses around the docks and the communities where the (now unemployed) dock workers and their families live.

Exactly. This is why container ships should be banned, as well as any containerized shipping. We need to go back to using stevedores to load and unload all cargo on ships by hand, even though this results in a large fraction of it getting broken or damaged and takes far, far longer to complete. This will employ far more people in shipping.

After that, we need to ban transportation of cargo by tractor-trailer, and require cargo to only be transported by horse and carriage, and also paddlewheel riverboat. This will revive the industries around these things that employed countless people.

> Take a drive through Gary, Indiana or Flint, Michigan or a thousand other towns throughout the country that were supporting thriving, middle-class communities and are now burnt-out, depopulated husks.

It is Revisionism to blame the fall of Flint/Detroit on NAFTA.

{The South / union benefits, Saudi Arabia / the Oil Crisis, The Civil Rights Act / The Southern Strategy} destroyed Detroit, not NAFTA. Detroit’s population peaked in the late 1960s, but NAFTA/WTO didn’t start until late 1990s.

The 1960s was an amazing time to be an auto worker in that area, but those companies became uncompetitive when oil got expensive and union labor became a liability in a time when the entire US auto industry needed to compete with tiny Japan and Europe exports moving up the value chain. Also, auto companies figured out it was far cheaper to move to the old slave states than to keep paying defined benefits plans to Rust Belt workers.

Self-inflicted wound by unions. They get too focused on self-interested negotiations and can’t see when innovation is ready to disrupt the current market leaders.

>Self-inflicted wound by unions. They get too focused on self-interested negotiations and can’t see when innovation is ready to disrupt the current market leaders.

Dock work isn't a free market. It's pretty much mandated by whoever the government allows to work in that sector. That's why they can technically mandate this as an illegal strike.

This is self-infliced wounds from benefiting from decades of efficienty while buying power torpedoes. As we see, this isn't some one off anamoly this year.

>The timing is interesting. Usually strikes happen only as negotiations break down after existing contracts expire, but this is clearly going to affect the election.

Yep, it looks like it'll help Trump get elected, and he'll probably do exactly the same thing with these union workers that Reagan did when the air traffic controllers went on strike (he fired them all).

Trump is notoriously transactional. If the unions continue to play ball, he might apply leverage in their favor.

> Yep, it looks like it'll help Trump get elected, and he'll probably do exactly the same thing with these union workers that Reagan did when the air traffic controllers went on strike (he fired them all).

Reagan fired federal employees. Are the striking dockworkers employees of the US federal government?

No, and they don't have to be. Trump can just call in the military to force them to go back to work at gunpoint. You really think Trump worries about following the rule of law?

There is no "point" of automation here beyond deploying capital to produce returns.

That this is the sticking point for the companies is inherently validating of the workers' concerns -- if the companies intended to solely increase throughput, they could guarantee the jobs.

It's total nonsense to say there's a "point" of using a tool except that for which it's actually used.

And no, the timing isn't interesting -- it's during negotiations where an agreement hasn't been reached.

> The point of automation isn’t to have 0 longshoremen / dock workers. It’s to increase throughput. Some mega ports in Europe and China are great examples of what a modern, efficient port could look like. The entire country benefits from not having each port union strategically prevent high throughput.

No, not quite. The point of automation isn't to increase throughput, it's to lower costs. People often conflate the two, but when you look at many other examples of automation (such as things like self-checkout) they are actually really inefficient compared to just having a human do the job. But they (arguably) cost less than hiring a human, so we end up having a worse overall system while the company brings in more profit. It's the same for customer service, moderation etc.

This isn't to say all automation is this way, but I feel like people fail to look at the actual downstream effects of automation and just repeat an axiom.

They aren't repeating an axiom, they're literally talking about port automation. We already know port automation increases throughput and efficiency.

And they are talking about the economic effects of automation. You can't ignore the ecnomic and environmental effects for the technical.

Automation increases throughput in the same way you no longer have to wait for the gas station attendant to pump your gas. Large stations with 16+ pumps don’t need to hire several attendants.

Automation can lower costs. No tall building needs to hire a dedicated elevator driver these days. If a job is make-work, then I’m fine with it being automated away.

No child wakes up and dreams of being a barcode scanning drone for a living. We need some people to work transactions at retail shops, but I’m completely capable of using self-checkout and just as fast as professional checkers.

Maybe apply your axion heterodox thinking to your own ideas before you ask others to undo it with theirs.

Please stop seeing this as some “unions are hurting us all” lens - this is bigger.

The biggest and most important global economic act was during Covid worldwide governments printed trillions with a T of dollars, euros and yens which ended up in the pockets of those with wealth.

And the end result is that there is trillions more money hanging around trying to buy the same amount of goods / real estate / labour. That’s inflation and it has been mega high - I mean since 2018 UK CPI has been nearly 40% - and I have basically had a 40% pay cut

So has everyone.

And unions are doing the right thing - giving their members a fair share of the increased amount of dollars

Finally MMT suggests of course what governments should do is tax back the increased trillions but without that point of view there is just a lot of pain in the system

Edit: clarity

>And the end result is that there is trillions more money hanging around trying to buy the same amount of goods / real estate / labour. That’s inflation and it has been mega high - I mean since 2018 UK CPI has been nearly 40% - and I have basically had a 40% pay cut

>So has everyone.

I can't speak to your specific situation, but on average "everyone" did not get a "40% pay cut". If anything, real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages are slightly up since pre-pandemic levels.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’m sorry - without looking at the Feds graphs, are you saying that most workers, he’ll most HNers have had a pay rise of over 30% in the past five years ?

If more than 1 in 10 of HNers on this thread have had annual pay rises of 5% each year every year since 2019 Inwill eat my hat

Yes. The statistics show (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q) that median wages are up 28% since Q1 2019. Note that this is less true of the typical HN crowd, since managerial and professional wages are only up 20% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254631400Q).

1. I think this is one of the cases where median isn't as helpful as the full 5 numbers. if the median is good but Q1 is barely above living wage, that's 25% of the country struggling.

2. You own math doesn't check out here. the progression here went from ~900 to ~1100. 22 is a much far cry from 30 than 28. you also seem to have underreported the professional wages (28% compared to 20%)

When you include RSU growth, yea probably

But tech workers are a pretty minority and higher paid end of the workforce, and the wage gains in the last 5 years were mostly in the bottom 40%.

(Which is the exact opposite of what's been happening in prior decade(s))

Yes, and no. I went from $28/hr in 2019, to $140k in 2022, to $50/hr with no benefits in 2024. It's been a bumpy road for me.

But I get what you're saying. Even in tech a 30% raise is hard unless you're new (and likely underpaid). 30% for the average worker overall in 5 years is basically unheard of.

That money has already gone out to people though. The reason that people's pay has bought less than before is that a large chunk of the economy was shut down and those goods and services were not produced. This means that there is simply no way for people to be able to purchase as much as they did before because it's just not there to buy in the first place. Shutting down the ports makes this worse by preventing US-based factories from getting the inputs to operate and non-US-based factories shipping their products to Americans. This is effectively making the whole country poorer in real terms as leverage to try and get a bigger share of what's left.

> The union wants a complete ban on automation.

I understand that in a negotiation you always "over ask" so you have room to compromise and you have bargaining chips. But this just sounds absurd.

The strike emphasizes the importance of automation. We should be prioritizing the investments that will allow us to fire as many of them as possible as soon as possible.

Yeah... it's a pretty strong signal to send to the company owners. It's a direct threat to the company's ability to compete and therefore survive in exchange for maximum personal benefits. I guess it's probably mutual and the company squeezed them for maximum profit too but man.. This is not a fight that can be won unless the entire world stagnates at the current technological level forever.

The solution is to resolve the conflict, if the workers reaped the profits of the company, so that automation benefits them instead of being a threat.

The union has made it clear that they're not willing to entertain such discussions. They don't want any robot to perform any work which a human being has historically done. (https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2024/longshore...)

>The union has made it clear that they're not willing to entertain such discussions.

That's not the same discussion. I am sure they are more than willing to turn docks into worker co-ops, then automate so it's a benefit to them not a threat. But I am sure the shareholders and dock owners wouldn't want that.

Right. I was discussing positions the union has actually taken and what their advocates have actually said. If you're looking to discuss wild hypotheticals about what you think they might support in some scenario that doesn't exist, more power to you, but I don't find such conversations productive.

I find it productive. And I find it maddening that negotiations haven't seemingly entertained the idea of talks like "yes automation will come but we'll make sure you can pay your bills and transition". That would be the first topic in eastern countries.

The west treating labor as a dog eat dog world is what lead to this in the first place.

This leaves me scratching my head:

> Daggett contends, though, that higher-paid longshoremen work up to 100 hours a week, most of it overtime, and sacrifice much of their family time in doing so.

> “We do not believe that robotics should take over a human being’s job,” he said. “Especially a human being that’s historically performed that job.”

You might be looking at the 100 hours thinking that’s grueling work. Meanwhile workers could be looking at that thinking it’s their AWS auto scaling for their family income.

I have a friend doing electrical line work. He’s gone back and forth between IC work and management. ICs trend to get paid better, because of strong overtime compensation rules and there’s a queue of overtime work. Those overtime weeks sound rough though. 12+ hour work days working with heavy machinery and 10 Kv power lines.

Hence they're striking before it's possible to try to get the agreement right? I see what you mean on signaling but this seems like the correct play for them

It's no wonder people fight the automation - there is no support to help them upskill or retrain. Although they are fighting a force that nobody has successfully stopped, it makes sense why they would do this when the response to "we don't want automation because it threatens our livelihoods" is "get that automation in place ASAP so we can get these people out of here".

Accordingly, it’s a great idea to strike before this becomes a viable option.

For context, the USMX countered with 50% over 6 years which still sounds high to my ears, having only received 5, 5, and 3% in the years prior.

On top of this, the starting wage for an ILA member is 81k per year and it really starts to seem out of touch for the average American to witness.

While I actually do have personal friends working as ILA members from my years living in a coastal port city, I’m having a hard time getting straight answers from his circle on social media. Just the usual political head talking points about “deserving a fair wage” and “corporate greed,” which, on paper seem reasonable but in the face of the numbers seem, again, out of touch.

At a personal level I’m in an Appalachian town still grappling with storm aftermath spending the morning with trying to research if this will cause any material shortages that I need to attempt to acquire already scarce goods for - or if it will just be a penalty for imports. I see bananas are likely going be scarce but oh well, I can eat an apple instead.

> For context, the USMX countered with 50% over 6 years which still sounds high to my ears, having only received 5, 5, and 3% in the years prior.

This is fully dependent on historical numbers. What I’ve learned about following the Boeing strike is that Boeing’s offers also looked very high. However, news came out that the workers had received almost no raises for far longer and that the offer doesn’t even bring the workers to match COL adjustments during those prior years. I would tread very carefully with reading the news around unions because media outlets will latch onto these big numbers because it catches audience’s eyes. Good reporting and adding context is work that modern media outlets will not do.

>countered with 50% over 6 years which still sounds high to my ears, having only received 5, 5, and 3% in the years prior.

Sounds good to the ear, then you do the math and it turns into 2% raises every year. Probably not even keeping up with inflation for the 2020's. And Assuming they don't try to lay off a lot of that union somehow in those 6 years.

But I get what you're saying about crabs in a bucket. This would all be low balls for tech, but dreams for many other workers.

Anyone who is sympathetic to the cause of a "Just Transition" to a more automated, more technical, lower carbon economy, would do well to familiarise themselves with the federal job guarantee proposal: https://www.jobguarantee.org/

We should eliminate all involuntary unemployment, not just that caused by changes in technology or demography.

Instead of giving people makework, we could move towards divorcing "livelihood" from "employment".

> Instead of giving people makework

Who suggested that?

> we could move towards divorcing "livelihood" from "employment".

Why would we do that?

Why would this be a good idea? I don't mean in the narrow sense of our current society etc. etc. but in general should't people have to contribute to society to get resources from society? this seems so anti social

If worker productivity keeps increasing, we may reach a point where it exceeds total labor required. If we keep livelyhood tied to employment, the only two options would be busywork or mass starvation.

As Bill Mitchell once told me (in person) "Sure when all work is removed by automation, assuming we share the gains of productivity equally, a Job Guarantee automatically becomes a UBI".

I don't mind. But that discussion doesn't even seem to really be fancied as of now.

Rather have more of that before talking about justifying the end of an entire labor sector.

Automation creates value. It gets more work done with less. The response to that should be having an argument about how that value is shared in society. You can't stop progress like that, it's a ridiculous stance. Unions should demand retraining instead of replacement, good conditions for those who are made redundant and so on. Not "stopping the automation".

I think you got lost between « how the value is shared » and « retraining ». Where does the shared value did go ?

I ask because sharing is the only way for a society to improve robustness and stability.

I think employment security is one such measure. If employers have to retrain rather than replace, that would help. Some of the value from effectivization is then turned into training. And striking for better job security would make a lot more sense than striking in protest of automation.

In this case, a lot of the value will be shared to society via lower prices of the products passing through the port. Another of course would be higher corporate taxes.

>In this case, a lot of the value will be shared to society via lower prices of the products passing through the port.

they say this everytime, and I feel 99% of the time they just pocket the profits instead of lowering the prices. Unless a new disruptor comes up then suddenly they feel generous.

> “The ILA is fighting for respect, appreciation and fairness in a world in which corporations are dead set on replacing hard-working people with automation,” the statement said. “Robots do not pay taxes and they do not spend money in their communities.”

A tale as old as Ned Ludd. I am interested to see how we reconcile the benefits of automation without leaving workers behind. Hopefully there are more cases similar to the creation of Microsoft Excel, where the automation tools largely helped the field grow.

This is a problem we will see over and over in the future. We can’t just create more bullshit jobs to give people busywork to do. We should have already been in the 10-15 hour work weeks era from previous automation and industrialization, but we’ve filled the time with nonsense and now both people in a home have to work.

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

I have always seen dockworkers unions as some of the most corrupt and do not position themselves well.

I am guessing they have position but this was the exact reasons docks like the Oakland dock died. Resistance to the technological innovation of cargo containers.

I am surprised that they didn't delay this given the timing right before the election. Doesn't this seem like it could affect the outcome, if it actually hurts the economy and results in shortages?

the union will use the election to demand intervention, the company will use the election to demand suppression.

Thats a feature not a bug in the plan. The union is effecting maximum leverage here.

Really? Seems to me that economic disruption under Biden would hurt Harris. Obviously the union wants Harris over Trump. They could very well tip the election against themselves.

The only leverage the election gives them is against Biden, but they're not negotiating with Biden.

Plot twist: Biden/Harris are no longer favorites of the union workers like Democrats were decades ago.

Trump doesn’t seem to support unions (except that astroturfed “union” rally in Sept 2023), but union workers seem like they are equally likely to support Trump for his other policies.

There is a very interesting podcast episode[0] (no transcript unfortunately) about this where they discuss this strike and find that this is a no win situation for Biden/democrats.

They also talk about the automation demands .. which in this strike context involves stuff like automatically scanning container tags .. stuff which people are rather bad and error prone at.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2024-09-27/will-there-b...

It will likely have some marginal effect.

2 things to think about:

1 - Union workers care about their job and their employment contract which lasts a few years, not which party wins the next presidency. People look out for themselves before they look out for a vague organization like a political party.

2 - Democrats have lost lots of Union votes in the past few decades. In 1992, Clinton polled +30 among that demographic, but in 2024, Kamala is polling only +9 (source: CNN’s Harry Enton reported a few days ago). Union voters are not likely to be all that concerned about who wins.

They're in for a rude awakening to how important the presidential election is when their actions get Trump elected and he just fires them all like Reagan did, or calls in the national guard.

The timing is on purpose. Biden has the legal authority to block strikes by dock workers since it is a critical infrastructure. He has said he won’t use that power in this instance, and my guess is that’s because he wants to ensure the votes of union workers by letting the longshoremen hold the country hostage to the tune of billions a day.

There have been a few dock strikes since his term started, and I don’t think he has ever used this power.

I suspect that it was intentional. They have a pro-union president in who wants his party to win, so they took the gamble that he will apply pressure to the companies that are fighting the demands of the union. What could backfire though is the dems lose and they get a president who wants to eliminate all unions and move as much profit to the 0.1% as possible, a sort of pumped, trickle-up, economic plan.

The president isn't the boss of the ports. What "pressure" can he apply?

The president can use Taft Hartley if he likes.

There is a common trend that the more inelastic demand is for a particular good or service, the more devastating the profit motive is. Insulin, housing, electricity (eg [1]), health care in general and, yes, essential workers in logistics. We saw this in the 2022 railroad worker dispute and we're seeing it now with ports.

So a myth that perpetuates around this sort of thing is that unions will bankrupt a company while the owners are the only ones taking a risk. None of this is true. Take, for example, the Big Three automakers and the 2008 GFC where the UAW took pay cuts and voluntarily gave up benefits (like the cost of living adjustment) in order to keep the automakers solvent, benefits I might add that they didn't get back until last year after striking. Did executive compensation go down? At all?

People are their own worst enemies here. Many will be against the maritime union getting their demands yet when collective action benefits everyone, boht union and non-union workers [2].

So my default position is that I pretty much side with the union in 100% of these disputes (except for police unions, of course). So should you. And it shouldn't matter if you work a s-called blue collar job, work in an office or work for yourself.

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@mrglobaltoo/video/741602417022556905...

[2]: https://www.workrisenetwork.org/working-knowledge/unions-rai...

>So my default position is that I pretty much side with the union in 100% of these disputes (except for police unions, of course). So should you. And it shouldn't matter if you work a s-called blue collar job, work in an office or work for yourself.

So what's your take on this case in particular? Unions wanting to shut down automation entirely seems pretty bad. Why should we side with the union aside from some vague sense of "collective action benefits everyone"?

unions want to shut down automation because there's never been talks about how to make sure the replaced labor moves on properly after they are fired. I wouldn't vy for automation without some very specific stipulations on retraining at the minimum. Companies long since broke that social contract, so extremes need to be countered with extremes.

Half of these striking workers make $250k a year or more. They want a 77% increase over 6 years on top of that.

They also want a ban on automation, which simply means they will have a perpetual lock on being able to hold our economy hostage.

Fully or nearly fully automated ports are the future, and that future is happening in China and EU right now.

Obscene demands such as theirs will simply hasten the demise of those jobs they are seeking to protect.

I doubt the ports will survive without labor if they wish to wait for full automation.

Is this accurate? I thought wages were between 20 and 40 hourly.

It should be ~40/hr for East Coast, but will easily hit six figures for senior positions or with plenty of OT. The numbers OP is citing are probably about right for West Coast dockworkers from the numbers I've seen. IIUC, part of the reason for the striking is due to that disparity between east and west.

You're both right. Base salary is around 20-40. Overtime work can put it well into the 6 figures, though.

So I wonder if the wages will also help relieve their hours. people making 200k must be doing 70 hours on average.

I generally support unions. If a union cares about workers and makes sure they get a fair wage, I'm all for it. Nurse unions? Love you. UAW? Ditto.

However, pretty much all maritime unions are just corrupt racketeers that need to be disbanded. For example, their union membership is closed, there is a literal lottery conducted when they have openings for apprenticeship. However, the members can give their position to their children upon retiring.

This is not a labor organization. This is a literal mafia.

Edit: and even with that, I don't really have issues if the union represents people who love their work and give it their all. But the US union ports are all at the bottom of the The Container Port Performance Index. And it's not even close when compared to the ultra-capitalist no-social-safety-net hellscape of... Europe?

https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0990603241145396...

> a union cares about workers and makes sure they get a fair wage, I'm all for it ... UAW

Uh, have you ever been a member or known a member? I haven't met many members who have positive feelings about the UAW leadership who are always blocking strikes and pushing sellout deals.

Unions are monopolies and I don’t see how the current system makes sense. Workers should be able to organize and choose to strike, but others should be able to work and compete with unions without joining them. Oh and break up the biggest corporations so there is more competition for them too. And then let it all just work itself out.

A union is a business formed by workers who collectively negotiate an exclusive contract to provide labor to another business. In this case, both the union and the port take advantage of certain strategic advantages granted to them by geography.

The port has an advantage because it's in a fixed location with favorable features like a good harbor and nearby rail lines. The union has an advantage because the port needs workers who live close. It's perfectly natural to form these types of agreements - the port is a business trying to captures the market for people shipping goods to the area, and the union is a business trying to provide the labor required to do so.

When you say that others should be able to work and compete with unions without joining them, that's a moral position, not a legal position. (And, to be clear, it's not a bad position at all!) The legal position is that the contract will be exclusive, and both parties are agreeing to it.

Labor unions exist because people don't get what they deserve. They get what they negotiate.

>And then let it all just work itself out.

Monopolies are the endgoal of "work itself out". Conway's Game of Life demonstrates this elegantly (and there's so many visualizations of it to fit your fancy).

>Workers should be able to organize and choose to strike, but others should be able to work and compete with unions without joining them.

due to the prisoner's dilemma this never really works out. You really need almost everyone behind a union to make it work.

This is how future looks like https://www.wired.com/story/rotterdam-port-ships-automation/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NULoelb7PzA

tldr: robotic electric tractors, batteries swapped automatically, robotic cranes

union also protested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_2ZlT_PePQ

Recent and related:

US East and Gulf coast ports face shutdown as union announces intent to strike - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693001 - Sept 2024 (99 comments)

Dockworkers abusing their monopoly powers and raising prices is price gouging?

Interesting the number of strikes in my euro socialist country can be counted on one hand every year. You'd have to go back a very long time indeed for a harbour strike.

Quite the dichotomy we have in tech. "Eh, that's progress" in one conversation, and "I can't believe they would vote against their own interests".

"History always repeats itself. First time as tragedy, second time as farce."

Unions were hollowed out by neoliberalism, so much so that we forgot, entirely, why we let it happen. Of course, when the dream world of ultra-low interest rate venture capitalism began to collapse after '07, in its wake old ways of handling economic sluggishness rose: break the giant corporations, which are by nature uncompetitive, with union organizing.

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