Unionbusters (1986)

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/unionbusters-ila-port-houston/

by yesiamyourdad • 2 years ago

37 53 2 years ago

"Hank Milam was a businessman with $20,000 in equipment and a firm faith in the rules of the game. He took on the union that had ruled the Houston docks for fifty years and beat it on its own turf."

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240322140257/https://www.texas...

keybored3• 2 years ago

I love unions in American fictional media. The Wire seasons two is centered around the dockworkers who take bribes and are arguing about how corrupt they should be (I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far). Ozark features a union on the periphery which is introduced by a man carjacking a truck and kneecaping the driver with a shotgun. Can’t wait to see what’s up next.

readams• 2 years ago

It's not just fictional media. https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-vcrs/infiltrated-l....

readyman• 2 years ago

Yeah, just ask the DOJ!?!?!? Is this supposed to be a joke? Unions in the US have been corrupt ever since the Taft Hartley act kneecapped them, but it's absurd to take the DOJ's word for any of this.

mezeek• 2 years ago

You skipped right over Sopranos

triceratops• 2 years ago

I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far

Heresy!

bryik• 2 years ago

Don't forget the classic film On the Waterfront. Considered one of the greatest movies ever made and adapted from "Crime on the Waterfront," a 24-article series by the New York Sun's Malcolm Johnson that received the second prize ever awarded for Local Reporting, in 1949.

In a vocation where loss of limb (and even life) was not uncommon, prospective workers — in a field disproportionately comprised of working-class African-Americans and whites of Italian and Irish descent who did not benefit from the upward mobility of the G.I. Bill — were forced to offer kickbacks to syndicate representatives at the daily "shape-up," in which prospective workers were forced to compete against each other to secure work irrespective of union membership. At any time, workers could be virtually blacklisted from subsequent employment for arbitrary purposes in the union's "blue books," their jobs often requisitioned by members of the syndicate who were completing prison sentences.

https://www.pulitzer.org/article/underworld-syndicate-malcol...

jen20• 2 years ago

Thanks for the reminder - I’ve been meaning to watch this for a decade now!

ahepp• 2 years ago

There's some interesting background the movie as well, with Elia Kazan's testimony to anti-communist tribunals in the US.

Plus it has an incredible score.

kadoban2• 2 years ago

I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far

That season has really grown on me over time and rewatches. It has a lot of great character work on Omar, Avon, Stringer, McNulty, Prezbo, Freeman, etc.; Ziggy, Nick, Sobotka is peak tragedy with a lot of fun along the way.

You may be right that it's not as exciting as other seasons, but I personally would call it boring and it sets up and deepens _so_ much of what comes after.

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

Well, the kicker about how boring the season is so they kept redirecting to the drug gangs rather than the purported focus of the season

dylan6045• 2 years ago

I love that season. The most boring season to me is the 5th season where they jumped the shark and the stupid journo. I really like the "Greek" and his crew, especially Vandos. His line about "why can't they just kick the ball with their feet" cracks me up with his confusion over basketball.

But why do you seem to have this thing that union members are above committing crimes like those depicted you've called out? We know that unions are heavily influenced by organized crime. Why do you think that even if the union isn't controlled by OC, why would you think individual members wouldn't be susceptible to working side hustles?

keybored3• 2 years ago

I don’t think that unions or union members are above that. I think it’s funny that they are consistently portrayed that way in the media.

changoplatanero• 2 years ago

I'm definitely in favor of breaking up the dockworkers/longshormans unions. I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.

missedthecue• 2 years ago

You mean to tell me having the world's least efficient ports (worse than even Tanzania), is a bad thing?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-ports-key-us-sup...

jordanb3• 2 years ago

This isn't due to the dockworkers. This is due to everything after the cargo is offloaded. LA and Longbeach are a disaster because the rail network is incredibly mismanaged.

Union Pacific has decided that they will only run unit trains out of the inland empire to a few destinations north and east.

In order to get cargo from LA and Longbeach to those inland terminals thousands of truck movements have to occur across LA's congested freeway network every day. And if the container's not going to one of the preselected locations (Chicago, St Louis, DFW, a few others) it has to go the whole way by truck.

Recall the "solution" to the blockage during the pandemic was to stack containers even higher. This is because the problem wasn't with offloading the containers, it was the trucking (drayage) getting them out of the port and to either the railheads ("intermodal ports") in the inland empire, or to their destination.

harimau777• 2 years ago

If we don't want a small group of people to hold the economy hostage to enrich themselves, then we should be looking at corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

I am always shocked by the mental model that despises labor power but is okay with the bug in our socioeconomic system where ultra wealthy people and corporations are allowed to wield such unelected power. Humans are strange.

Nifty39292• 2 years ago

Don't forget the Jones Act (1920), which was originally designed to protect domestic shipping, which it immediately killed, and which now serves to protect domestic trucking.

So if you want to transport something from Northern California to Southern, you MUST truck it, even if you could afford to wait a few weeks. It's incredibly bad for the environment, and much less efficient.

jordanb3• 2 years ago

The American merchant marine was bigger than it ever was in the decades following the passage of that act. 1940s was the era of the liberty ships!

The Jones act was passed in 1920 because the merchant marine had been withering away in the decades leading up to WWI. WWI was an "oh shit" moment for the US when it realized that if it had been more directly involved in the shooting war it wouldn't have any ships to fight in it.

Arguably it worked as intended because the American flag fleet was large and modern by 1942 when the US found itself in a shooting war across two oceans.

dylan6045• 2 years ago

Is there something preventing shipping by rail rather than truck?

GJim• 2 years ago

I'm definitely in favor of breaking up the *capitalists*. I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.

See what I did there?

The hostility to unions on this forum comes near exclusively from American posters, who coincidentally, have very poor workers rights compared to anywhere in the UK/EU/EEA.

Unions provide a balance of power to employers. The made our work places safer, gave us holidays and fair pay.

CPLX• 2 years ago

We are writing these comments on a discussion site created to serve the interests of a prominent private equity firm.

Perhaps we should realize how relevant that fact is to what we read here.

feedforward• 2 years ago

I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.

So you're against capitalism

48864w6ui• 2 years ago

I love how Reagan openly busted US unions with one hand while secretly funding Polish unions with the other.

jhbadger• 2 years ago

And before he was California's governor (and later POTUS), he was head of SAG-AFTRA (the actors' union) and even led them on strike in 1960 to protest how movie actors weren't getting any money when old movies were shown on TV (similar to how in the recent strike the issue was about actors not getting money from streaming). His views on unions were pretty hypocritical to say the least.

jordanb3• 2 years ago

He was head of SAG it hadn't yet merged with AFTRA. As leader of SAG he helped break the CSU strike and served as a friendly witness for the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.

euroderf• 2 years ago

Please ignore the calculating cynic behind the curtain.

aerostable_slug2• 2 years ago

If you imagine trade unions are innately destructive to their host, then that's perfectly consistent.

Of course, I imagine even Reagan saw a bit more nuance to things.

wilg• 2 years ago

It seems very likely that in 1986 this headline was a Ghostbusters joke?

ProllyInfamous• 2 years ago

Background: I completed my union IBEW apprenticeship in Texas.

Comment on article: I read books more than I work (often!), and this article was wayyyyyyy tooooooo longgggggggggg. The point of effective communication is to be just concise enough to still retain your readership (I stopped reading a little less than half way).

Comment on unions: I am currently supporting UAW's current push to unionize Chattanooga's Volkswagon Plant; my posit to neighbors is "if unions actually rewarded blue collar employees worse, why would the corporate executives be rallying so hard with propaganda against organized labor?!"

Nifty39292• 2 years ago

"if unions actually rewarded blue collar employees worse, why would the corporate executives be rallying so hard with propaganda against organized labor?!"

Because the world isn't a war between workers and employers. It's not a zero-sum game. Businesses create value by turning less-valuable inputs from society (fundamentally, labor) into more-valuable outputs to society (cars, haircuts, etc). It's a positive-sum game. Unions add a lot of friction to this process, causing everybody to be worse off overall. Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society. Unions work against that goal.

Some of the best, highest-paying companies aren't unionized, even within a specific industry, unless legally required. Unions succeed by suppressing change, which works well enough in government and stodgy old industries which often amount to arms of the government anyway: education, healthcare, automotive, transportation, etc.

Businesses fight against unions because they don't want the light to go out.

MrJohz• 2 years ago

You've got a couple of statements here that belie assumptions that aren't very accurate.

Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society.

This is untrue. The reason markets work at all is arguably that it's untrue. Business leaders care about generating rewards for themselves. Markets are a mechanism that ensure that it is profitable to create more outputs to society.

This is a really important concept. Amazon doesn't exist because Jeff Bezos is a selfless individual who cares deeply about making sure every American has free next-day shipping. It exists because Jeff Bezos wants to make money, and the market demonstrates that selling products with free next-day shipping is a desire that other people have, and therefore it will be profitable for him to fulfil that need. Markets are about assigning value to desires, and using that value to ensure that goods and services are traded efficiently and flexibly across the whole market without someone needing to coordinate things from the top.

This is (mostly) a good thing - efficient distribution of services across a market is why we like markets and tend to use them a lot across our economy. But we need to be honest about how and why they with, and it's not because business leaders are trying to be selfless to society.

On the other hand,

Unions work against that goal.

This is also untrue. From a market perspective, unions are a collective bargaining tool used by workers selling their work. In the same way that it's easier for a handful of truck drivers to collect together and form a business, rather than each independently set their own price for their labour, so is it often easier and more efficient for a group of workers to collect together to form a union.

But like with any market, while people can haggle over the best price, the item must be sold at some point in order for all parties to get their rewards. If you've got a melon that you want to sell for $100, but no-one will buy it at that price, then all you'll have at the end of the day is a mouldy melon. Similarly, workers in a union want to sell their labour, because if they don't and the business collapses, they're all out of a job.

In that regard, a union is a tool used by people selling their labour in the market in order to achieve the best price for them (in this regard, they are just like the business owners from before, where the market uses their personal desires to generate value across the whole market).

In fairness, this is a very simple model, and so it doesn't tell the whole story. Markets have failure modes such as monopolies where the simple analysis of market efficiency tends to break down. On the other hand, if a worker cannot sell their labour, then they cannot eat and cannot access housing, which in practice puts a lot more power in the hands of the person buying labour then the person selling it. It's important to remember that the market model is just one tool that we have for managing resources, and in practice most successful countries use a mix of markets and government intervention to provide efficient access to goods and services across the economy while also preventing common failure modes. Rules to protect workers and unions are part of that mix.

But, despite its simplicity, the market model still helps explain the interactions between businesses and workers better than the naive approach that says that unions are bad and want businesses to die, and business owners are good and want to freely distribute value to the economy. I hope this comment demonstrates that a bit.

unclebucknasty4• 2 years ago

Because the world isn't a war between workers and employers. It's not a zero-sum game.
Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society.

How do you square these ideas with record profits and record executive compensation, juxtaposed with decades of wage stagnation and the dramatically expanding wealth gap? That gap now has 1% of the population owning over 30.6% of the wealth.

In the context of this discussion, it doesn't matter if the game is positive-sum, if the overwhelming rewards from the created value accrue to a tiny percentage.

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

i can summarize the article in numbers.

total steel in the ship: 4,600ton.

union buster guy charged $46,000 and would pay their guys $12/h. labor would amount to half contact costs.

union would pay $17/h plus $6.50 for union managed benefits (medical, retirement). unsure total cost to client.

on both workers, insurances must be paid. but that's only ever mentioned to raise the union labor cost (from $23 to $32)

on the end union delivered the job at a loss for $37,600. workers got the full 23.5/h.

union buster workers wasted a day off work and transportation for no pay.

dylan6045• 2 years ago

The Texas Monthly is not known for short concise prose. The pint of some effective communication is to be concise, some is to provide as much detail as possible. More and more I see comments like this that assume that everyone wants a bullet point list as the entire article like they can only handle tweet length content. Some people enjoy the longer prose providing the hows/whens/wheres/whys of how the points were arrived upon.

Unionbusters (1986)

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