Dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas go on strike

https://apnews.com/article/port-strike-ila-dockworkers-begins-e5468e760f46a64e4322d1702beb1f72

by mikeocool • 2 years ago

150 280 2 years ago

jsiepkes• 2 years ago

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.

MBlume• 2 years ago

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.

Nathanba• 2 years ago

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.

Vegenoid• 2 years ago

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".

archagon3• 2 years ago

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

fleabagmange• 2 years ago

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.

hysan• 2 years ago

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.

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

dopamean4• 2 years ago

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.

sanswork• 2 years ago

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.

dustincoates• 2 years ago

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.)

dools5• 2 years ago

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.

treyd2• 2 years ago

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

archagon3• 2 years ago

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

consteval14• 2 years ago

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!

jmyeet3• 2 years ago

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.

DiscourseFan2• 2 years ago

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

kiba• 2 years ago

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?

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

RHSeeger2• 2 years ago

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.

snapplebobapple5• 2 years ago

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.

roughly3• 2 years ago

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.

fny2• 2 years ago

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.

throwaway484767• 2 years ago

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.

ellen364• 2 years ago

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.

mattmanser• 2 years ago

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.

jampekka2• 2 years ago

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

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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?

rightbyte• 2 years ago

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.

abenga• 2 years ago

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

datadrivenangel• 2 years ago

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.

bsder2• 2 years ago

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.

throwaway484767• 2 years ago

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

throwaway484767• 2 years ago

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.

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

roenxi2• 2 years ago

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.

devjab• 2 years ago

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.

wskinner4• 2 years ago

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.

black_knight3• 2 years ago

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.

madaxe_again• 2 years ago

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.

triyambakam• 2 years ago

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.

Uehreka7• 2 years ago

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.

trhway• 2 years ago

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.

charliea05• 2 years ago

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.

kbknight2• 2 years ago

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.

corimaith2• 2 years ago

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.

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

throwawaybbq12• 2 years ago

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.

youcanalwayszzz• 2 years ago

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.

navane3• 2 years ago

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.

exolymph• 2 years ago

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

navane3• 2 years ago

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.

ambientenv• 2 years ago

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/

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

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

ElevenLathe• 2 years ago

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.

CleaveIt2Beaver• 2 years ago

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.

hyperG• 2 years ago

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!"

nataliste4• 2 years ago

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...

EasyMark3• 2 years ago

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.

dopamean4• 2 years ago

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.

BugsJustFindMe• 2 years ago

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.

ghayes• 2 years ago

“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.

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

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...

cyberax• 2 years ago

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...

t-32• 2 years ago

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.

jmyeet3• 2 years ago

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...

gruez4• 2 years ago

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"?

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

dools5• 2 years ago

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.

Zarathustra302• 2 years ago

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

dools5• 2 years ago

Instead of giving people makework

Who suggested that?

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

Why would we do that?

snapcaster2• 2 years ago

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

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

DiscourseFan2• 2 years ago

"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.

modeless3• 2 years ago

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?

ruined2• 2 years ago

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

jnsaff22• 2 years ago

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

modeless3• 2 years ago

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.

thephyber7• 2 years ago

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.

shiroiushi4• 2 years ago

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.

blackeyeblitzar2• 2 years ago

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.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

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

EasyMark3• 2 years ago

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.

modeless3• 2 years ago

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

thephyber7• 2 years ago

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.

serial_dev• 2 years ago

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.

thephyber7• 2 years ago

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.

AYBABTME2• 2 years ago

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.

StanislavPetrov3• 2 years ago

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.

thephyber7• 2 years ago

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.

shiroiushi4• 2 years ago

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.

thephyber7• 2 years ago

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.

shiroiushi4• 2 years ago

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).

archgoon• 2 years ago

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

npongratz• 2 years ago

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?

allworknoplay• 2 years ago

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.

fzeroracer• 2 years ago

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.

dialup_sounds2• 2 years ago

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

thephyber7• 2 years ago

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.

lifeisstillgood2• 2 years ago

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

gruez4• 2 years ago

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

lifeisstillgood2• 2 years ago

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

makomk2• 2 years ago

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.

zooq_ai• 2 years ago

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

blackeyeblitzar2• 2 years ago

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.

moshegramovsky• 2 years ago

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.

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

AmVess• 2 years ago

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.

archagon3• 2 years ago

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

VerminOctopus1• 2 years ago

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

t-32• 2 years ago

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.

johnnyanmac21• 2 years ago

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.

dang• 2 years ago

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)

rasz• 2 years ago

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

alkonaut2• 2 years ago

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".

aziaziazi2• 2 years ago

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.

alkonaut2• 2 years ago

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.

Yeul2• 2 years ago

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.

infecto• 2 years ago

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.

speeder• 2 years ago

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.

anonfornoreason• 2 years ago

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".

Dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas go on strike

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