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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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. 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.

>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.

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